Slice Harvester

by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf

  By the seventies, many of the Irish, Jewish, and Greek families had left, following the pattern of white flight exhibited in much of the city, and the neighborhood was settled by a wave of newcomers from the Dominican Republic, many of whom remain today. During the eighties, Inwood was hit hard by the crack epidemic and all its accompanying violence and desolation—which brings us to 1986, when John Kambouris bought Pizza Palace from his buddy from the Old Country.

  During the next two decades, John saw the pizzeria he had taken over as one of the few constants in the otherwise unstable urban terrain of Inwood. Many of the Dominican residents who had come to the neighborhood as kids during the 1970s had grown up eating the pizza there, and began to bring in their children to sample the slices. Today there are at least three generations in the neighborhood who have eaten at Johnny’s, as the place is locally known.

  I asked John’s son, Nick, a jovial guy about my age who at the time was studying for his master’s in education but still helping out around the pizza shop on busy days, what he thought of the neighborhood and what had compelled his father to stay when the bulk of the Greek community left for Queens and the Bronx. “Even though the people have changed, the neighborhood is still the same: a stepping-stone for recent immigrants. Neighborhoods like this are important to the city, and our pizza shop ties the community that is currently here to the community that left. It gives people a reason to hold on to their identity. Inwood is a great place to keep your culture and traditions and learn what it means to be American at the same time.”

  This is why I love New York. The dense population and physical proximity to other humans from wildly disparate backgrounds forges bonds that would be hard to create elsewhere. And yet I often run into lifelong New Yorkers who seem to feel the exact opposite way. A couple of days ago, for instance, I was talking to a guy standing in line in front of me at a pizza parlor (another result of the close proximity of New Yorkers: people waiting in line together engage in light small talk, and it isn’t weird), and he mentioned that he had grown up in Richmond Hill.

  I said, “No shit! A bunch of my family lived there decades ago, and I’ve got a couple of friends who grew up there. Seems like an interesting neighborhood. It’s mostly Caribbean and Indian these days, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said wistfully, shaking his head slowly back and forth and looking down at the counter. “It used to be Irish and Italian.” He raised an eyebrow and looked at me as though I obviously understood and agreed with him that it should have stayed that way. What a nob!

  My dad’s family moved from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Rosedale, Queens, when he was still a kid. Rosedale is a suburban neighborhood just north of Kennedy Airport, right on the border of Queens and Long Island. When my dad was little, the neighborhood was mostly Jewish and Italian families like my father’s—immigrant parents trying to inch their children out of the densely populated urban enclaves where they had initially settled, taking one incremental step closer to realizing the suburban American dream of a white picket fence and a sprawling lawn.

  I spent a lot of Jewish holidays in Rosedale as a kid. My grandparents would take me to the park, and then we’d go to the Buttermill, a Jewish bakery that made the best mandel bread I’ve ever had, or to the Woodro delicatessen for knishes, pastrami sandwiches, and black cherry soda. My grandmother died when I was thirteen. When I was nineteen, my grandfather moved to Florida as part of the ongoing Great Jewish Migration. (All New York Jews, when they reach a certain age and if they have the means, move to Florida.)

  But I still go to Rosedale at least once a year to visit my best friend’s mother, Mrs. Watson, who came to New York from Jamaica thirty or forty years ago. As I observed to the Pizza-Line Bozo about Richmond Hill, Rosedale seems predominantly Caribbean these days—mostly Jamaican and Haitian, I think. When I visit with Mrs. Watson, instead of knishes and black cherry soda we eat beef patties and drink sorrel punch, but the feelings of love are the same. The kvetching is the same, though in a different dialect. The sense of pride in being able to own a home in a nice neighborhood is the same.

  I began visiting Mrs. Watson a few years after my grandfather moved out of Queens. Returning to Rosedale, seeing the same landscape populated by different people, always seemed so beautiful to me. That a geographic location could serve the same function for multiple immigrant communities in succession always seemed like a tiny victory in a city full of tragedy. So when people like that shmuck at the pizza shop spew their xenophobic nostalgia, it really galls me. Part of me wanted to shout at the guy, but part of me wanted to talk to him nicely. In my daydreams I tell him, “You do realize, don’t you, that back when that neighborhood was Irish, the Irish were scorned and quietly feared by mainstream white America in the same way you are looking down on your desi neighbors in Richmond Hill? You’ve only been white for, like, a hundred years! Get over yourself! And enjoy the slice. It’s on me.” Of course I didn’t say any of that, because I don’t usually lecture strangers, and I can’t afford to buy their pizza. Or I’m a gutless coward. You decide.

  In his two-part essay Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel Delany—Bronx native, award-winning science fiction writer, preeminent documentarian of cruising culture in New York City, my favorite author—writes that within the now nearly eradicated cruising scene in the porno theaters of Times Square, he saw more “cross-class contact” than in any other type of space in New York City. I would say that the Ideal Pizzeria shares this quality—though perhaps to a lesser extent—and that these characteristics are embodied perfectly by the scene at Pizza Palace on Dyckman Avenue.

  Here we have first, second, and third generations from a handful of different nations preparing and eating food together: young mothers gossiping in Spanish with their strollers parked at the edge of the table; less-affluent Columbia students who can’t afford the rents in Morningside Heights, and so settled in Inwood; seemingly ageless neighborhood junkies who could be a world-worn thirty or a pickled, preserved seventy; young seminary students on their way back from visiting the Cloisters—all have a slice waiting for them. And in the midst of it all is John Kambouris, standing in the back room at his sixty-year-old industrial mixer, making the dough for tomorrow’s pies. In the two hours I sat at Palace Pizza during my last visit, nearly everyone who came in took a moment to wave at John, and he addressed most of them by name.

  And the community spirit emanating from Pizza Palace traverses not only ethnic boundaries but national borders as well. The week I ate my last slice in Manhattan (two and a half years after the day I stepped into Johnny’s), I was written up in a couple of local papers, one of which published a list of my five favorite pizza parlors, Pizza Palace among them. A week later I was doing a vanity google (that’s when you type your own name into Google—don’t try to pretend you haven’t done it and don’t know what I’m talking about) when I found a result written in the Greek alphabet. I sent it to a high school friend who reads Greek, and he informed me that the article was about Pizza Palace making my top five. The local paper from Kambouris’s home island was so proud that one of their own had been awarded such a hefty distinction (one of the five best pizza parlors in all of New York City!) that they had chosen to write a human-interest piece about it.

  In essence, Kambouris’s success as a pizza man didn’t impact only the residents of his neighborhood, who routinely have their bellies warmed by his wonderful food. His influence spreads farther even than the Inwood Diaspora, some of whom stop at “Johnny’s” on Dyckman first thing after landing in New York, before seeing their own families. No, the ripples of John’s labor and dedication to his neighborhood and his craft reached all the way across the Atlantic to the remote Greek island where he was born. Because the thing is, John Kambouris doesn’t just own a warm and inviting establishment—no easy task in itself—but that’s chump stuff compared to John’s other skill: making damn good pizza.

  The night of my first pizza mission with Sweet Tooth, I set up a blog a
nd posted all six reviews immediately. I e-mailed a couple of friends to tell them I had finally sold out for good and joined the internet. That evening I stayed in for the first time in months; I didn’t even drink a single beer. I was exhausted from walking around all day and excited about having begun something so potentially awesome. My ultimate plan was to put everything out as a fanzine, but I was feeling too ecstatic to sit on it. I wanted an immediate response.

  A few days later I had a couple of e-mails from strangers asking me when I would update again. My friend Kimya Dawson, who finally received the widespread acknowledgment and admiration she had long deserved after being featured on the sound track for the movie Juno, had linked to Slice Harvester on her blog, and about five hundred billion people had looked at it. Another friend of mine posted a link on the blog for the yuppie kitchen accoutrements store she worked at, which got picked up by Slice, which is probably the only financed pizza website. And the pizzarazzi swarmed.

  Suddenly the dumb thing I was doing because of my pure love of pizza was being paid attention to by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. Luckily, I have long subscribed to the old Ludichrist adage that “most people are dicks”1 (and I am notoriously oblivious to what’s going on around me), so this sudden spotlight didn’t make me feel self-conscious or concerned.

  I did, however, realize that if I wanted to pursue this thing in a way that would be the most rewarding for everyone involved, it would behoove me not to publish six posts in one night and then maintain silence for the rest of the week. As usual, the things that would be common sense to most people don’t come so easily to me. But I learned this particular lesson quickly and painlessly, so in subsequent weeks I went out to eat pizza one day a week, hit five to seven places, took copious notes, and updated the blog nearly every day.

  Summer proceeded, and my life continued down its banal and abysmal path despite my newfound calling. I got drunk a lot, did my really punk DJ night with Marcia at the really punk bar, got scabies, ate a bunch of pizza (both on and off the clock), and worked my dumb burrito delivery job. My best friend since high school moved to California. Most days I wore my denim vest with no shirt underneath. (I probably looked like a crust-punk Aladdin.) I didn’t shower much and I neglected my cats, but they’re still alive today and so am I, so it’s all water under the bridge, right?

  By autumn I had gotten rid of my scabies, gone on a bunch of awkward OkCupid dates, and not given up on Slice Harvester. At the end of September, a reporter from the Daily News accompanied me on a pizza mission. I had always assumed there would be a passing interest in me once I had finished eating all the pizza, but the fact that a huge New York newspaper was compelled to write about me so early in the project was astounding. I don’t even think it was an especially slow news day, either, because the front page of the edition in which my article appeared (on page 3, no less) had a headline about some foiled terrorist plot in Queens. Admittedly, that was probably one of those foiled terrorist plots in which an FBI snitch goads some suggestible dude into buying fake bombs from another FBI snitch and then arrests him, thereby keeping white America safe from and terrified of brown dudes from the Middle East. Or South Asia. Or Jackson Heights; blah blah blah, even Obama’s America is racist, fuck the police (except for Columbo), you get the drift.

  But I digress. The point is, I’m a deadbeat punk rocker; I am not media savvy and I have next to no business acumen, yet somehow I had blundered my way into this publicity wonderland. I didn’t have to do anything but eat a bunch of pizza and write about it, and suddenly people were interested in what I had to say? Works for me.

  But as my online following grew, so did the tenacity of my critics. A few days after the Daily News article I received multiple comments on my review of Tony’s, the place from my first week of Harvesting where the picturesquely shlubby pizza man in the Guitar Hero hat served me a mediocre slice. They were all anonymous, but they ranged in tone from “I think your [sic] wrong about this place” or “If Tony’s wasn’t for you, it wasn’t for you” to “You don’t know what good pizza is because your [sic] on crack” and “BLOW THIS!! 8==D” Okay guys, you got me—say what you will about the slice at Tony’s, but any pizza place that gets half a dozen people defending it must have something going for it.

  On the tails of my Daily News coverage, I did a bunch of weird radio interviews, including one with this douchey older guy who had me on his Maniac in the Morning commuter-talk show. We arranged via e-mail that they would call me at 5:45 a.m., but I totally didn’t care about the interview and was still up drinking and snorting yak when they rang. Oops! The dude was a total jerk, though, so who cares? At one point he asked me how many pizza places there were in New York City, and I said, “I dunno, three thousand?”

  And the dude, who talked like Lewis Black, said, “Three thousand? Where’d you get that number?”

  So I told him, “I don’t know. I think my friend Phil told me.” Even though that wasn’t true.

  Dude was all, “Your friend Phil? What does he know?”

  “Phil?! Phil doesn’t know anything. Phil’s a scumbag,” I blurted out, because that was true, inasmuch as we were all a bunch of scumbags back then. The host was totally disgusted that I said the word “scumbag” on his dickhead radio show because old people are really bothered by that word, and anyway, it didn’t end well. After that, in every interview I gave—and I gave a ton that month—whenever they would ask me if I had anything more to add, I’d say, “Phil Chapman is a scumbag. Print that. P-H-I-L C-H-A-P-M-A-N.” And they always edited it out. It became a running joke, and I couldn’t wait for it to make it into the book one day. But now that I have the chance, I just want to say that Phil Chapman isn’t actually a scumbag. Phil Chapman is my friend, and he’s a good guy.

  October got off to a good start—I finished eating all the pizza above Central Park, the first good delineator. Had I owned a giant map of Manhattan, I could have blocked out a substantial quadrant at the top. That’s forty-seven different slices of pizza in a little over six weeks. Of those forty-seven, six were great and eight were good, which means 30 percent, or almost a third, of the pizza I ate was above average. Those aren’t such horrible results.

  And the bad pizza, while miserable to masticate, was a joy to write about. Rapturous descriptions of delicious slices get old pretty quick, but thinking about new and more vivid ways to describe the myriad failures enabled me to be really playful with my writing in a way I hadn’t been since my high school fanzine, which had been coming out much less frequently as the years went on. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this lack of a creative outlet probably fed into my spiraling doldrums. In essence, each one of these terrible slices helped to incrementally pull me out of my funk.

  Here are my three favorite insults from that era of Harvesting:

  “The dough was so dry that I felt like a guy in a cowboy movie who’s been stuck in the desert for a week with a mouth full of sand.”

  “The pockmarked texture of the burnt cheese reminded me of James Woods’s grimacing visage as he masturbated his new belly-vagina with a pistol in Videodrome.”

  “The cheese was this weird, solid mass that was thick and congealed. I feel like it could be used by a scrappy and industrious mouse as the sail of a tiny boat he’s constructing to make his way out of the city and find his true love in a children’s movie.”

  It felt like I was doing something with my life, like I might not be doomed to an eternity of working shitty jobs and sitting at the bar every night talking about what I hadn’t done or what I was gonna do. I had opened the door to an eternity of working shitty jobs and then sitting at the bar every night talking about something cool I had actually done!

  Mid-month I threw out the giant couch my old roommate and I had moved to my apartment on four skateboards five years prior and bought a love seat from the Ghost of Christmas Future. For real—I went to this lady’s house and it was, like, so full of junk that we had to move all this furniture to get
the couch through the door. She was waaaaaay east on Twenty-Ninth Street, and I got the feeling the neighborhood had gotten fancy around her while she clung tooth and nail to her rent-stabilized apartment.

  After she buzzed me in and I walked up the eternal staircase, she was at the door, practically a million years old, with a cigarette in her mouth. If she were a slice, she’d be the slab from your favorite pizza shop that you froze to save for later sometime last year that’s still in your freezer, persevering. “You’re probably gonna have to move some shit around,” she rasped. We walked into her apartment, and there were three different TVs and a radio all playing different things at full volume.

  When we finally made our way through the junk, she gestured with her cigarette toward the couch, which was buried under piles of old magazines. “It’s a good fuckin’ couch. I’m sad to see it go, but you seem like a nice kid.” She was right about one thing: it was a great couch. But I couldn’t shake the fact that I had just witnessed my potential future.

  My friend Jamie wrote this song called “Stray Dog Town.” The song opens with one of the most vivid and evocative lyrics any of my friends have ever put to tape:

  One day I’ll be nothing but a sad and lonely old man doing my dishes.

  Toward the middle of the song he screams it a second time. It’s a plaintive wail, full of youthful bravery in the face of impending doom. I remember sitting on the fire escape at Jamie’s house, drinking a Ballantine forty and watching his band play through the living room window. Everyone turned their amps up way too loud back then, so if you wanted to actually hear the music (as opposed to feel the music, I guess, but that sounds too hippie-ish), you had to listen from outside. I can easily recall my view through that window of a room full of friends and Jamie screaming into a microphone that was wrapped in a T-shirt to prevent him from getting shocked. When they played “Stray Dog Town” I turned my gaze to the kitchen window and could practically see Jamie stooped at the sink fifty years down the line, bare chested, his jutting bones casting shadows in the stark light of the naked overhead bulb.