Super Pizza Man

Snap Judgment - Snap Judgment and PRX

In 'Super Pizza Man,' Nick Bostic, a young pizza delivery driver in Lafayette, Indiana, recounts how he transformed from a self-conscious ma

Key takeaways

• Courage often emerges in ordinary people during moments of crisis.

Main topics

• Acts of bravery in everyday life

Notable quotes

"Your house is on fire. You need to get out. Your house is on fire. We need to get out."

Conclusion

Nick Bostic's story reveals how ordinary individuals can rise to extraor

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:02) Snap Studios. When I was a kid, my uncle told me and my cousins that he didn't want to do it. But somehow the CIA, the FBI, they caught wind of a special train, right? Such that his hands, my uncle's hands, had to be registered by the state as lethal weapons. Then he'd give us a demonstration. Chop the air, shout. Speaker 4 (0:38) Ha ha, well, best believe. Us kids were duly impressed. Then one afternoon, we're playing Monopoly. I'm trying to trade Marvin Garden for Boardwalk, and the neighbor lady, Miss Jeffrey, she runs up to my granny's living room, Speaker 3 (0:53) screaming, hey, broken my house! Some Speaker 4 (1:03) criminals done messed up now, because here my uncle is reading the paper. And we look at him excited, get to shouting, whoa! Speaker 5 (1:12) But Speaker 4 (1:13) instead of rushing across the street, My uncle clears his throat, adjusts his glasses. Talking about somebody better call the 911. 911? What about the hands, uncle? Give him the hands. Speaker 3 (1:34) He Speaker 4 (1:35) say he don't Speaker 3 (1:36) want Speaker 4 (1:36) nobody to get hurt. That's when he went from being Uncle Bruce Lee to Uncle Bruce, please. What would you do? What if the only thing standing in the way of a certain disaster is you? Well, today on Snap Judgment, we proudly present Super Pizza Man. My name is Glenn Washington. Speaker 2 (2:03) When Speaker 4 (2:08) you're listening to Snap Judgment. Speaker 4 (2:25) Our first story takes us out to the Hoosier State to Lafayette, Indiana. The 25-year-old Nick Bostic had been on the job at a local pizzeria for only a few weeks. After starting in the back, throwing on the toppings and putting pies through the oven, Nick finally got promoted to deliveries. Snap Judgment. I Speaker 2 (2:48) always had hopes that I could be a delivery driver. I really liked doing it. I got to drive my own personal vehicle, and, you know, when there was tips, it was awesome. A lot of nights, it would bring in, you know, an extra $100. So that was something really nice. I was dating Kara at the time, and then we had just got our first place together at an apartment, and I just found out Kara was pregnant with Bryston, and so I got clean, and I was two months clean. Speaker 2 (3:23) My mom and my dad were always in and out of prison. I made it through, though, but yeah, people would make fun of me about that. They'd make fun of me about my weight. They made fun of me about all kinds of stuff. I'd feel sorry for myself about it. Back then, I was really self-conscious because I always wanted to try to have friends and stuff. I tried so hard. I'd start feeling like I was, you know, like I was meaningless. Speaker 2 (3:53) Worthless. I kept feeding off that pain and that's what ended up spiraling me down. That day when I found out she was pregnant with him, I quit doing drugs. I showed her what I had been doing. She didn't know about it and I threw everything away. Speaker 2 (4:10) That evening, I was hanging out with Kara at the apartment. We'd been there for about a week, and I'd worked a shift earlier that day, and I saw my work clothes on, and we were still setting stuff up, and we ended up getting into an argument, and I stormed off and took a drive and went to the O'Reilly's auto parts store and was sitting there for about 10, 15 minutes in the parking lot, but I finally... calmed down and came to my senses and reasonableness and decided to go back with a more positive, apologetic, understanding attitude. It's around like midnight when I started driving back. So I left O'Reilly's and then on my way back to the apartment. And in the middle of it, I'm driving, I look over to my left, I look away at the street and then I realize, what the heck? Speaker 2 (5:04) I seen like a campfire and I look away, but then I looked back at it again because it hit me wrong. Like, first of all, it's in someone's front yard. It was definitely, it was one of those, did I see what I just thought I saw? It only took like a second for me to process that it was a house fire. I look back over, I'm like, shoot. You know, I say crap in my head and I hit the brakes and then I'm, you know, game on. Speaker 2 (5:37) When I looked back at it that second time, I realized where it's at. It's on a porch, and I don't see nobody around it. And it's, like, starting to touch the balcony they had. It was that tall. I put it in reverse and then turned the car around, did a 180, and I floored it into the driveway and hit the brakes. And I got out, and then I realized, dang, I didn't bring my phone. Speaker 2 (6:03) I look around, and then I see a car coming by, and I start running to it, and they just keep driving by. So I turn around. I knew that was my one and only chance to have gotten any help. Speaker 2 (6:17) Without hesitation, I went from the road to the back of the house around the side of the building. Their little fence gate was completely open, so I was able to get in through there. And then there was a dog on the back porch, and he got up, and luckily I didn't get my butt torn up. He was friendly. And then they had a porch light on. Speaker 2 (6:41) I was banging on their door saying, hey, your house is on fire. And I waited a few seconds and nobody was answering. So I tried opening it up and I peeped my head through the door. And I hollered in there, hey, hello. Hey, is there anybody in here? Your house is on fire. And I wasn't hearing nothing, but I didn't want to just give up hope yet. So that's I decided I continued in through their house. And as I'm going through their house, I wanted to let them know that, hey, I'm entering your house. OK. Out of respect, like, I didn't just barge in, but I was just hoping that I could just get to the point and they hear, your house is on fire, your house is on fire, are you in here? Helped me from getting shot. Speaker 2 (7:28) It looked like a normal house, quiet. It was dark, except it had one light on in the kitchen. When you entered the back door, you walked straight, and then you could see a room in front of you with the wall and the windows that have the fire on the outside of them. And then there was a staircase, but all I was seeing was orange, like the flickering of the flames coming through the curtains of the front of the house, and their curtains were completely closed. As I'm going through their house, I'm continuously, repetitively, over and over saying, hey, your house is on fire. I get to the staircase because I'm not getting no answers through any of the doorways that I'm passing. Then as I get like two or three steps up it, it was enough to be able to see the bedroom door at the end open. And four faces popped up out of it. It was the 18-year-old holding a baby, which was the 2-year-old. And then... There was two younger girls that ended up being like 14 and 15 or something, and they were on both sides of her. They all opened the door, and their heads all were like, their faces were all surprised, almost like a speechless face. You know, their eyes were wide as can be. And I don't blame them because there's like a, it's the middle of the night, they were probably asleep, and I can only imagine, you know, it was a house of all girls, what they were all thinking and how scared they were. whether or not this guy was bluffing or if he's just some weirdo creeping through their house. And I just kept repeating over and over, your house is on fire. You need to get out. Your house is on fire. We need to get out. And, you know, without too much hesitation, they took off with me. Luckily, you know, they came down. So we were running through the house the same way I came back in, and at that point, you could hear the glass starting to crack and shatter, and you can see the smoke starting to come through the wall at the bottom where the baseboard is of the wall in the living room, and it's like a vortex of smoke coming from the floor up that wall to the ceiling, spreading out like an upside-down volcano. Speaker 2 (9:34) I let them pass me and I followed them out. And when we get to the back door, I ask them, is there anybody else in there? And I did that because I knew it was the right thing to do. And, you know, I've seen it in movies and it's just, it's what you do. Like you don't not ask something like that. And they said, yeah, there's a baby in there, a five-year-old. And I didn't think about it. I didn't wait and say, oh crap. I just, I went back in there. I turned back around. I went back in there. When I seen that fire, I wasn't afraid of dying. Now I am afraid of the pain that could come from dying. But I knew... It was a matter of time before that house was going to blow up. And if it blew up, I probably wasn't going to feel it. Now, if it had been raging like it was the second time I went in there, if it had been raging like that when I first pulled up, I don't know if I could have ran in. It would have been straight suicide. You know, I don't know if I could have. dealt with the pain of being submerged in a sea of fire. I don't know if I would be capable of being some Superman that could do something like that. The highest chances for me to survive this is working fast. And so that's what I did. I have to stay focused. I didn't think about nothing. I was just locked in. Speaker 4 (11:19) And snappy turns. Running into a burning building to save four lives is no small task. But is Nick willing again? Speaker 4 (11:50) Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Super Pizza Man episode. When last we left, our pizza delivery guy, Nick, was driving home around midnight when he spotted a home on fire. After waking up the four young ladies in the house and leading them safely outside, Nick has just been informed there is one small child still inside the Speaker 2 (12:12) building. Snap Judgment. Speaker 2 (12:17) As I'm turning and dashing off back into the house, like, oh shit. The first thing I believe I thought about was continuing where I left off. I knew that that first floor was clear. So when I'm going in the second time, it's still pretty much looking like it was just a minute ago or 30 seconds ago. Except instead of cracking windows, now windows are bursting. The flames are starting to tunnel through the windows into the ceiling. Smoke is starting to flood the ceiling. It was that smell of plastics and stuff that's not supposed to be burning. And that's what I'm smelling. It's like the smell of a mobile home being burned. It was not like a campfire. It was nasty. I immediately went