Slice Harvester

by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf

  It was the exact opposite of what was going on at that moment right in front of me: Jamie in the living room, surrounded by people he loved and who loved him, all singing along to his songs. Sitting on that fire escape, I felt like my forty was the only thing keeping me from floating away. Jamie and I always had an affinity for each other, because we both recognized that our bravado and extroversion masked a deeply held sense of dissatisfaction with ourselves. We both felt a similar distance from those around us, and we both found solace in getting wasted and going to shows. I can’t speak for Jamie, but I know I drank myself silly back then because I was trying to blot out my constant inner monologue, as much as I thought it was fun or joyful or some affirmation of coolness and life.

  The song continues:

  walkin’ around so desperate for somethin’

  but we’re the patron saints of doin’ absolutely nothin’

  ’cept runnin’ our bodies into the ground

  I been runnin’ outta hope every night in this stray dog town

  and I don’t wanna end up broke down

  like a van at the side of the road now

  Looking back, there’s a terrifying sense of foreboding in Jamie’s statement that he didn’t want to ever grow old, see his body deteriorate and his life fall apart. He died the night Barack Obama was elected. A few days later I was at a funeral home on Long Island looking into a casket at my friend, buried in his I NY T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and his black canvas sneakers, twenty-five forever.

  November 2009 marked the one-year anniversary of Jamie’s death and two and a half months of Slice Harvesting. Looking back on it, 2009 seems like so much more than a year. It began in the shadow of Jamie’s death and ended with my own creative resurrection. In a sense, everything I did that year (and everything I’ve done since then) was partially motivated by a need to assuage some sense of guilt I had for still being alive. My buddy died, and he used to make such awesome music and art, and here I am, Not Dead, and I’m, like, wandering around the country drinking different regional rotgut whiskeys? The gall.

  By December I had started working on the first issue of Slice Harvester Quarterly, the print form of the Slice Harvester blog, which had always been a goal of mine. I had been publishing zines since my adolescence, and it was something I missed—the late nights drinking coffee and listening to overloved cassettes; accidentally gluing my finger to the inside of my nostril because I picked my nose while assembling masters with rubber cement; the stack of finished copies a tangible result of my labor. It wasn’t until I started putting Slice Harvester Quarterly #1 together that I realized how sorely I’d missed it.

  If you traveled back in time and ran into High School Me and told him that Adult Me would end up writing a popular blog, High School Me would’ve said, “What’s a blog?” and then after you explained it to him he would’ve been elated, but not necessarily surprised. However, if you used that same time machine to travel back and tell Adult Me when he was just starting Slice Harvester that he was about to go eat pizza with the star of some of his favorite childhood movies, he wouldn’t have ever believed you. But you would be right.

  * * *

  1. Ludichrist’s first release, Immaculate Deception, is perhaps my favorite slept-on NYHC album. The relevant lyrical excerpt: Most! People! Are! Dicks! DICKS! DICKS! DICKS! It is my firm belief that if, in the coming epoch, the poetic musings of Tommy Christ are not taught as canon in all high schools and universities, we, as a species, are fucked. FUCKED! FUCKED! FUCKED!

  Gino’s, 345 East Eighty-Third Street

  CHAPTER 3

  Gino’s

  Crispy and charred on the bottom and cheesy on top, with a delicate sauce that you don’t notice is there but would certainly miss if it were gone. Pizzerias like this are what make Slice Harvesting worth it.

  —Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 3, “Upper East Side,” visited on January 8, 2010

  Life was getting a little weird. In January 2010, I had been contacted via e-mail by a young lady named Greta, the high-school-aged daughter of Phoebe Cates—a genuine famous person!—who asked if the two of them could accompany me on some pizza eating. She had gotten my e-mail address through my friend Steve, whom she had gotten to know as a fan of his band No One and the Somebodies. I agreed to take her and her mother Slice Harvesting, for two reasons: eating pizza with a mother and her daughter sounded weird, and so did eating pizza with a movie star, and WHOA, what about doing both at once? Also, I’d eat pizza with anyone who was in Drop Dead Fred.

  I invited my friend Caroline to come with us, because I can get a bit socially anxious sometimes and tend to make situations more difficult than they have to be; having Caroline along would provide the necessary buffer for hanging out with two potentially nonpunk strangers. At least if things got truly weird, she and I would be in it together.

  The day of our celebrity meet-up arrived, and I was nervous. What if there was an unbridgeable gap between these people and me? A teenager and a grown-up! Both identities felt leagues away from where I was in my life. Like, I definitely was not a kid anymore, but I definitely was not a grown-up, either. I was living in that weird middle place—more than a girl, not yet a woman—of protracted adolescence that has maybe always existed but seems to me to be a first-world product of late capitalism in the early aughts, though this theory of mine is not even a little bit fleshed out. WHATEVER. I’m not Theodor Adorno, okay? Get over it.

  When I got off the subway my phone buzzed in my pocket with a text from Greta that had come in while I was underground:

  Chillin in gamestop

  And I became truly scared.

  We met on the corner and went to a pizzeria called Europan Pizza Cafe that I had been postponing because it looked crummy. Not, like, the decrepit or run-down kind of crummy—I like that kind of crummy. I’m talking about the kind of crummy that is too clean and polished to trust; the kind of crummy that has flat-screen TVs mounted in the walls, all playing the same looping video of a fireplace; the kind of crummy where Billy Joel is on the radio. I am hard-line anti-Joel. (There’s some busted-ass trend in which New York punks have a soft spot for Billy Joel, and it needs to end. To paraphrase Abe Biotic: Fuck Billy Joel! Fuck your negative attitude! WE ARE THE PUNKS!)

  When we got inside this terrible-looking place, Phoebs (you should still call her Phoebe) immediately began a conversation with the woman behind the counter as she ordered our slices. As we were eating, she explained, “That woman used to work at my favorite pizza place in the neighborhood. It closed down, and a bunch of their employees came to work here.” Any anxieties I had felt about my celebrity interaction were quelled—Phoebe was clearly fit to Harvest.

  The pizza was surprisingly good—crispy and warm, with nice ratios and ingredients of decent quality. It was nothing amazing, but it was much better than I thought it would be from looking at the yuppie facade. I went through this whack phase in my life where I went on, like, eight hundred internet dates in a span of a few months. It was so stupid and unpleasant, and I am too much of a greasy weirdo for it to work for me. Ninety percent of the time I would meet people and know we weren’t compatible within five minutes, but would finish the dates anyway out of some weird sense of masochism/manners; 7.5 percent of the people seemed cool at first but then turned out to be, like, subtly racist or something, and it was clear that it just wasn’t worth it; and 0.5 percent of the people liked me and I liked them, and we went on another date. The leftover 2 percent were people I didn’t vibe with romantically, socially, or culturally (and I just want to clarify here that when I say “culturally” I don’t mean “people from India,” I mean, like, ravers), but regardless of those differences we had a surprisingly good time together; it was a fun distraction and ended without any awkwardness or pretense. That’s what this slice was like. It’s always a pleasant surprise to have our prejudices put in check, to be reminded not to judge a person by their appearance or a slice by its storefront.

  My social anxiet
y turned out to be unfounded. Phoebe did some heavy momming, which was awesome. She paid for everything, and made sure we all had enough root beer. She simultaneously treated the whole thing as if Caroline and I, twenty-nine and twenty-seven, respectively, were two kids on a playdate with her fifteen-year-old daughter, and also as if we were just four friends out to lunch—a tough line to walk. And I don’t know whether I’m just out of touch with teenagers, but Greta was totally kind and charming and really bright, and it was a pleasure to spend an afternoon chatting with her.

  At our fourth pizzeria—I think we were at the Upper East Side Two Boots, a place with weird pizza that I will always be nostalgic for because of the days when I used to eat for free at their Lower East Side shop—it finally occurred to me and Caroline that it was a little strange that we were hanging out with a teenager in the early afternoon on a weekday.

  Phoebe was getting us a round of root beers, so it was just the three kids at the table when Caroline said, “Greta, what are you doing hanging out with a couple of near-thirty-year-olds at one p.m. on a Wednesday? Don’t you go to school?”

  Greta looked up from her slice and replied, “Nah, I get homeschooled. But it’s bullshit; I don’t do anything.” Her face swelled with adolescent pride. Caroline and I noticed Phoebe strolling up with our drinks, definitely within earshot of Greta’s proclamation.

  “She’s totally lying.” Phoebe said as she sat down at the table and handed out drinks. “She’s doing a photography class, she’s taking Russian literature at CUNY, she does all kinds of stuff. She’s even doing a riot grrrl band for an independent study.” Phoebe was practically beaming as she said the last bit. “Tell them what it’s called, dear.”

  Greta’s face reddened, and she pouted a bit. “Period Farts,” she said reluctantly.

  It was the first time I’d seen her experience an emotion anywhere near embarrassment at something her mother had said. Which was jarring for me, because at fifteen, even being in the same room as either of my parents was cause to feel an acute sense of shame. I was embarrassed that they existed at all. For Caroline and me, this was a glimpse into a form of Cool Parenting that neither one of us had experienced. Not that my parents weren’t kind or supportive or totally awesome—I mean, my dad gave me my first Dead Kennedys record—it’s just that Cool Parenting takes a certain willingness on the part of the child to be parented that I just didn’t have as a youngster because I was a selfish piece of shit.

  In a sense, watching Greta’s and Phoebe’s ease and comfort around each other made me wish that I could go back and tell my teenage self what a dick I was being. I almost don’t want to admit some of this stuff, because it makes me seem like a total ingrate, but like George Bush Jr. said when he was rescuing us from 9/11, “Let’s roll.”

  When my high school punk band played our first show at CBGB, my parents begged me to let them come, and I absolutely refused. And what makes it worse, in retrospect, is that they respected my boundaries. Looking back, it’s heartbreaking. I thought my friends were so lucky because their parents didn’t have the slightest interest in anything we did. My parents infuriated me because they wanted to, like, I don’t know, participate in my life a little, show an active interest in the things that interested me. And I flat-out shut them down every time.

  Don’t get me wrong: I understand where I was coming from. Being a teenager is weird and hard, and the whole point is that you don’t know all the stuff that you know when you’re thirty. That’s why it’s so fun, but also why it sucks. Anyway, I guess my whole point is that my parents rule and I was a dick to them, and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge that in front of everybody.

  Okay, check this one out: Sometime around Thanksgiving when I was fifteen there was this huge show at 7 Willow Street, a cool punk club in Port Chester that I went to sometimes as a teenager. It was a Less Than Jake show, I think. I fought like hell (and lost) to get my dad to drop me off around the corner from this show, because I knew there would be a line outside the club and I didn’t want other kids to see that I had parents. I didn’t bring a jacket, because I knew it would be hot in there—and this was before smoking bans were everywhere, so there was literally no reason to go outside once the show started. As we pulled around the corner in front of the club, my father and I both noticed that a huge line had formed. I was chagrined at the notion of all of these people seeing me get out of his car; he was bothered by something else.

  He said, “Why don’t you let me wait in line and get your ticket for you? It’s cold.”

  And I said, “You don’t know anything. There’s not a ticket—they just stamp your hand.”

  And he said, “Well, then borrow my jacket,” which was one of those weird smooth leather jackets like the one Ross had on Friends.

  I was all, “Ewww, no, I hate you, leave me alone,” and got out of the car.

  Something like fifteen minutes later I was halfway through the line, which was the kind that snakes back and forth through velvet ropes so that a million people can get crammed into a dense yet organized square, and I noticed this jostling toward the back, but didn’t pay it any mind. The commotion seemed to be advancing on me, but I didn’t really care—and then all of a sudden there was my dad, standing in front of me, holding out a sweater he had taken from the trunk of his car.

  “Here, just take this; I don’t care if you lose it. It’s so cold out here. This is ridiculous.”

  I pretended I didn’t know him, and spoke through gritted teeth. “UGH! I hate you. I don’t need a sweater. Go AWAY!”

  And then he looked at me and said, “All right, see ya later, champ,” and he gave me one of those playful little slo-mo punches on the chin like a coach gives a basketball player.

  And I was livid. Livid, I tell you! That was the only time in recorded history that he ever called me “champ,” and the only time he ever did one of those stupid chin punches. The whole show was ruined, because in the breaks between bands, when the different groups of kids would stand in circles and smoke cigarettes and joke around, anytime any of those little circular cells of my peers would erupt into laughter, I’d just imagine all the kids giving mock chin punches and sarcastically calling each other “champ” while pointing back at me and laughing.

  But enough fraught moments from my otherwise idyllic childhood; back to the pizza.

  When Phoebe, Greta, Caroline, and I left Two Boots, we made our way to a pizzeria called Fat Sal’s, a fairly nondescript place, not especially bad or good aesthetically. The slice was so-so—inoffensive, if a bit weird. It had a decent texture and okay ratios, but an odd flavor. Caroline thought it tasted like shrimp ramen. That didn’t especially perturb me, though; it just kind of was what it was, a mediocre piece of pizza. Nothing to think too hard about.

  After finishing our slices, the four of us were sitting around digesting and talking bullshit when I absentmindedly dipped my finger into what seemed to be a puddle of grease. Let me be perfectly clear about my intentions here so you can fully understand what a disgusting slob I am: I was then going to lick the grease off my finger, and repeat that dip’n’lick process until the grease was gone. That’s just me bein’ me, okay? If you got a problem with it, you need to get some better problems, dog.

  But listen: I didn’t get to be a gross slob, because when I dipped my index finger into the grease, instead of grease wetting my fingertip (and whetting my appetite), it simply mushed down, semisolid, and retained an imprint of my finger. It was roughly the texture of congealing candle wax. I pointed at the plate in horror. Each member of our party gasped in turn, like witnesses at the scene of an accident.

  One by one, Caroline, Greta, and Phoebe each dipped a finger into a puddle of grease on their plates and drew it back, aghast. “This is happening inside our bodies,” I said very gravely. “We’re all gonna die.”

  “Wait a minute,” Phoebe chimed in. “It’s the wax paper the slice came on!” And we all breathed a sigh of relief.

  But Caroline w
as skeptical. “I don’t know; I’ve had a lot of pizza on wax paper before, and I’ve never seen anything like this in my life.”

  I noticed a small bit of grease on my paper plate and, with trepidation, reached my hand forward to touch it, hoping it was regular liquid grease. I mushed my finger into it and, sure enough, came away with a dry finger, leaving a dented pile on my plate. “It’s not the wax paper,” I reported.

  I felt confident that we were in the beginnings of a situation like that in the classic horror film The Stuff. After having touched the substance on that plate, it seemed likely to me that an edible and delicious alien species was beginning its parasitic invasion of earth, abetted by greedy corporate bosses who were facilitating its spread because it created a ravenous consumer base. Soon the four of us, and countless others, would all be lining up outside Fat Sal’s every day to get our fix. Eventually we’d turn into straight-up zombies, and shortly thereafter our heads would explode.

  I was imagining (out loud) the brutal fate we were all about to suffer in incredible detail when Phoebe got up abruptly, muttering, “Enough talk. It’s time for answers.”

  She walked over to the register, her back to us, chatting with the pizza man. We were all awed by her cool, calm demeanor, even more so when the pizza man smiled obligingly and invited her behind the counter. I thought I noticed something sinister in his smile and feared she was a goner, but a few moments later she strode back to the table, utterly satisfied with herself.