“It’s lard,” she told us triumphantly. “I went over to the counter and said to the guy, ‘I just really liked the slice here; do you think I could take a look at where you guys make it?’ And he took me back behind the counter, and there were just tubs and tubs of lard.”
My famous friend Phoebe—Cool Mom and Cunning Detective. Who knew?
At this point you may be wondering whether eating so much pizza in one day compromised our ability to judge slices objectively, but I’d like to reassure you that it didn’t. First of all, we didn’t each get our own slice at every place. At most spots, Caroline and I split one slice while Phoebe and Greta split another. Second, as with all Harvesting Missions, it was just as much about enjoying one another’s company as it was about eating pizza, so we took our time; we idled at tables to talk, we walked slowly between places. Eating at six or seven pizzerias took up the bulk of an afternoon, and when you factor in the slice-sharing, there was no risk of mouth fatigue or lapses in judgment.
Still, after Fat Sal’s, each of us was maybe beginning to reconsider our love for pizza. But we continued, because we had to—and let me tell you, I’m so glad we did. The next place we went to, Gino’s, on Eighty-Third Street between First and Second Avenues, served the best slice I had eaten in months. In years, maybe! The place was a dream come true. It was a little fancier looking than I was used to, but it wasn’t off-putting.
There is a picture of my maternal grandfather and his brother standing on Astoria Boulevard in Queens sometime in the late twenties or early thirties that’s been hanging in my parents’ house for as long as I can remember. It’s a great picture—for me, an iconic image of American Masculinity. When I moved out I made a print of it to hang in my new apartment. It’s been with me in every place I’ve ever lived. My grandfather is standing on the right, taller and slimmer than his brother, wearing a nice-looking overcoat, a nice hat, and some well-worn but shined shoes. He looks to be in his mid-twenties. He’s handsome, if gaunt. He looks serious. His right hand is in his coat pocket; his left is casually holding a cigarette. To his right is his brother, shorter and broader, with thick, dark eyebrows and an equally stern expression. He’s coatless, wearing a double-breasted pinstriped suit and his own nice hat and well-worn shoes. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands are poised to strike a match.
In that picture my grandfather looks like a movie star; his brother looks like a mob boss or a boxer. They exude a certain rough sophistication and look nothing like the old men I barely remember, stooped from years of manual labor, who died during my early childhood. Neither of the men in the picture had a high school education; both of them would spend the rest of their lives working with their hands. They weren’t the rich, influential men I perceive them to be when I look at the picture; they were a couple of working class jerks from Queens. In that photo, they portray a timeless sense of style, a personal aesthetic that defies class status.
Gino’s looks like that picture. It’s definitely a little ritzier than Pizza Palace, for instance, but it doesn’t put on airs. It doesn’t purport to be better than me. Which is sort of what Phoebe is like, come to think of it. I mean, in one sense, she lives in this mythic world that countless adults and children daydream about being part of. She’s a movie star. And her husband is also a movie star. They probably hang out with other movie-star couples and do movie-star things together. But sitting around in a pizza place with her, you wouldn’t know it.
Really, though, none of this old-world charm would matter for a fucking second if Gino’s didn’t make fantastic pizza. This slice was damn near perfect—excellent ratios, delicious ingredients, skillfully cooked to a slight char but without burning the mouth upon first bite. The cheese was plentiful but not overwhelming, and the sauce was delicately seasoned. Both were laid atop an exceptional foundation of bread that crunched just right with each bite.
Gino’s was a milestone moment for Slice Harvester. I had eaten all the pizza Uptown and on the Upper West Side, and although a few places charmed me and a few slices impressed me, I hadn’t been blown away until I took my first bite of the slice at Gino’s. It felt like an affirmation, as if everything I was doing was worthwhile. If I were to run into Jamie on the street tomorrow, I could give him my awesome new zine and tell him about this great slice I’d found on the Upper East Side, of all fucking places.
The morning after the show
CHAPTER 4
La Crosta
Initially I was a little skeptical when I saw the phrase “Gourmet Pizzeria” on the awning of La Crosta Restaurant, but it was quickly clear that it was an empty platitude. There was a certain banality about this pizzeria, and a destitute resignation in its employees, that made me think of Samuel Beckett.
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 4, “Forty-Second to Fifty-Ninth Streets,” visited on February 8, 2010
At the beginning of February 2010 I had just turned twenty-seven and begun my Saturn Returns. This is astrology stuff, and I believe in it because I’m one of those New Age kooks, okay? Fuck you. Basically, Saturn is your father planet, and when you turn twenty-seven it shows up and is like, What have you done with your life, you loser? And if you’re healthy and comfortable in your own skin (aka if you keep it really real), then things are good, but if you’re in denial about stuff or not totally psyched about yourself (aka you’re a poser), then times are rough and tough like leather and you’re put through constant trials in order to overcome your character flaws and become a better person. Mostly you wanna just be like, Whatever, Dad! but actually you can’t do that to Saturn because he will end you.
Saturn tricked me into thinking I had my shit together, because some totally awesome things happened in my first few weeks as a twenty-seven-year-old. The debut issue of Slice Harvester Quarterly came out, and I made enough money from zine sales to pay my rent that month. Admittedly, my rent was $450, but c’mon! Since I was thirteen I had dreamed of one day at least sort of supporting myself from punk stuff, but I never thought it would actually happen. I had a release party at the cool used bookstore that my friends had opened where I read really well and charmed everybody. In some ways, life was pretty grand.
That year seemed to be, at least in my circle, the moment right before it became socially acceptable to acknowledge that you trolled the web for dates. Today, everyone I know who isn’t in a relationship has an online dating profile and talks about it. But back then it felt like a big, shameful secret. Usually I was safe in my solitude, awkwardly scouring the internet for love—punks are notoriously averse to adopting new forms of technology—but occasionally I would accidentally happen upon the profile of someone I knew socially.
One night I was at a show in a friend’s living room, quite drunk, and realized that a woman at the show was someone whose dating profile I had seen. An important aspect of these sites is that they show you who has been looking at your profile, and people whose profiles you’ve seen are notified as well, so I knew she knew, and I knew she knew I knew she knew, too. At some point she cornered me in one of the bedrooms where a bunch of folks were hanging out doing drugs.
“So you’re on OkCupid, too, huh?”
I shoved my hands into my pockets and looked at my feet while I spoke. “Yeah, uh, I guess. And you obviously are, too . . .” I trailed off.
“Yeah, duh. What are you, embarrassed about it? Who cares? It’s not like I’m looking to fall in love on that thing. That would be embarrassing.” She looked me dead in the face. “I mean, you’re not looking to fall in love, right?”
“Yeah, no, of course not! Hah, love! Fuck that shit . . . Damn, is that Shit City Kids starting? I really wanted to see them. I’m gonna head into the living room.”
And then I proceeded to never make eye contact with her again for at least a year.
Because I was hoping to meet someone to fall in love with, and I knew that the desire to fall in love with someone was pitiful, juvenile, NOT PUNK. Not that punk has a rulebook, though things would
probably have been easier for me if we had something like Talmudic or Sharia law. Instead, punk’s stringent rules are all unspoken, implied. Part of being jumped into the gang is slowly figuring out the rules and learning to adhere to them without ever putting voice to them or acknowledging their existence.
These rules change from year to year and scene to scene (in New York, for instance, or at least the New York of my youth, it was totally unacceptable to like sports—but go to Milwaukee and all the punks watch baseball. Hell, some of them even play baseball! Totally weird), but in the mid to late 2000s in the Brooklyn punk scene I was part of, monogamy and love were passé, outmoded leftovers from Victorian times. At least that’s how it felt to me, because I am an idiot and see everything as strictly binary rather than as a nuanced gradation.
There were a lot of prominent voices in my community who wanted to love differently than the ways endorsed by our Sick Fucking Society. They said, “Monogamy is not the only thing in the world. There are other ways to be healthy and fulfilled, and we’d like the freedom to explore them without anyone’s unsolicited and pernicious moralizing.” Conceptually, this is totally sensible. However, listening to these conversations, all I really heard was “Monogamy is stupid and for squares, and if that’s what you want to do, you are a stupid square yuppie poser and you were never punk and you never will be!”
So I tried really hard to live all freewheeling and fancy free, but the truth is, not only did I never feel comfortable with promiscuity, I was also bad at it. In order to succeed at practicing healthy nonmonogamy, you need good communication skills and a driving desire to share yourself with multiple partners. I possessed neither of those things. I began to approach romantic trysts with a sense of dread—as if they were an obligation, a chore. I was doing my duty to help forge a beautiful new world where everyone could pursue their true desires without fear of reprisal, but in doing so I had to shut down the voice inside myself telling me that the thing I actually wanted was a boring, stable, committed monogamous relationship, because that was just my bourgeois socialization talking, right? RIGHT?!
Then I met Christina.
Sometime in January, a few days after I went Slice Harvesting with Phoebe and Greta, my witch friend in Philly e-mailed me and told me I should fall in love with her best friend, Christina, who lived in New York. She told me we had very compatible astrological charts and sent me a picture of Christina sitting in front of a giant pizza, grinning. I thought she was absolutely beautiful, and I told the Good Witch of Philly as much over Gchat.
PizzaLuvr420: she’s gorgeous! tell me more about her.
PhillyWitch69: she’s an Aries, Virgo rising, moon in Scorpio. she hates most men. she’s perfect for you.
And then the Good Witch gave me Christina’s e-mail, and I e-mailed her and she e-mailed me back. When she gave me her phone number she said, “Call me if you wanna talk. And if you’re ever in a bad mood and need to take it out on someone, call this number and ask for Manoff,” and she gave me another number with no real explanation. I never did call him. I assumed incorrectly that she must be a dominatrix and this dude was one of her johns, and part of their thing was that she had her potential suitors humiliate him over the phone. I’ve had a handful of friends who were sex workers, so I certainly didn’t judge. Maybe I even thought it was cool.
When I later asked her for some clarification about who this Manoff guy was, she explained that she was a hostess at a hamburger restaurant in Union Square and that Manoff was a consistently rude dick and bad tipper to her delivery guys, so she wanted payback on their behalf and figured that if I called him and gave him shit, it wouldn’t get traced back to her job, and the delivery guys wouldn’t get in trouble. Basically, she was saying, “Colin, I am your dream girl.”
We both wanted to hang out, and one night we agreed she would come over at 12:30 when she got out of burger work. That night I paced my apartment and chugged an entire six-pack of tall cans to calm my nerves before Christina arrived.
At this point, my drinking was completely out of hand. I had come off a three-month dry spell and was hitting the booze twice as hard to make up for lost time. I was no longer drinking during the day (at least, not every day), which was obviously a plus and led me to believe that I was “in control,” but I would drink so much every night. This Dry Season–Rainy Season dichotomy had become cyclical in my life, like a weather pattern.
I had begun experimenting with sobriety a month after Jamie died. When he was still alive, the relentless drug use and partying among my circle of friends felt like a rejection of the Capitalist Death Cult and an acceptance of the impermanence of life. We lived in a fucked-up world that wasn’t getting any better, and so we might as well squeeze every drop of life we could out of every second we got. Today is here, right now, and tomorrow is probably gonna suck, so let’s get fucked-up.
It’s like this: imagine Robocop laid a giant pizza in front of you and said, “If you eat this pizza, you’ll be sick, but if you don’t eat this pizza, you’ll be sad.” What would you do? In case it’s unclear, in this analogy Robocop is global capitalism/“the man,” you are me, and the pizza is partying. I had decided when I was pretty young that I’d rather be sick then sad.
After Jamie was gone, the partying didn’t feel life-affirming anymore; it felt like a death trip, as if we were all lining up to be next. My own alcoholism was becoming more and more entrenched in my life, and thus, ironically, more invisible to me. I knew my drinking was problematic, so I dealt with it by taking “time off,” which solved a number of superficial problems. Any periods of sobriety or clean living I had were predicated on the promise of a return to my savage lifestyle. First off, I wasn’t taking breaks in order to maintain my physical health or sanity—I was taking breaks because I knew my relationship with booze was unsustainable, and I needed distance from that relationship in order to create sustainability: abstinence today for a drink tomorrow. Second, these occasional breaks created the illusion of agency in a situation that was no longer under my control. And so a pattern had emerged: get off booze for a week, a month, whatever; return to drinking with a newfound appreciation for clarity and moderation; then quickly fall back into drinking too much and blacking out every night because it was just so much easier than being alone with myself.
The point is, by the time I met Christina I was still getting ADAP (As Drunk As Possible) AAT (At All Times) in order to blot out any self-awareness that might interfere with me enjoying life or “experiencing the moment” or whatever. And that’s what I did while I was freaking out with nervousness before she came over. I drank ninety-six ounces of Budweiser in a little under two hours and then slammed an entire pot of coffee to “get my head straight.”
She rang my buzzer promptly at 12:30. When she came inside she was more beautiful than I ever could have imagined from the pictures I’d seen—shaved head, dark eyes, dressed like a total freak. We sat down at my table by the window to talk and smoke (she smoked!), and I offered up a mostly full bottle of chilled dessert wine I’d stolen from a catering company I worked for intermittently. I poured us each a glass, and we began to talk. I was still nervous and ended up drinking most of the wine.
Christina was twenty-three years old. She had been in the city for five years. She had gone to FIT to study fashion illustration but was stuck in the noncommittal food-service job cycle. She was beautiful and confident and seemed really cool. I stammered nervously about Slice Harvester, about traveling, being punk. I felt like an asshole.
Christina hadn’t even come over until after midnight, so it was three or three thirty when our hangout felt like it was wrapping up. I didn’t want her taking the bus home alone at such a late hour, so I invited her to stay over. I solemnly swear that I had nothing but the most noble intentions. Not to say that wanting to bone is ignoble, and not that I wasn’t interested in the idea of some sort of eventual coupling; it just felt like it was too soon. Regardless, as we made our way into my room, I got really nervous
that I was somehow gonna blow it because I was so drunk. She has since told me that she thought I was a complete weirdo whom she never wanted to see again, and had decided that she would just lie awake in bed until five thirty when the buses resumed regular, consistent service.
My mattress was on the floor of my tiny bedroom, underneath a loft bed my friend Paulie had recently been living on during a brief respite from his tramping through the Americas. The loft was now stacked with milk crates full of books, cassette tapes, old show fliers—sentimental detritus. My diminutive room was like a little rat’s nest, stuffed with junk and trinkets I had dragged in from the street and which I would shove aside to clear space for sleeping. My one window looked out on the air shaft in the center of my ancient tenement building (constructed in 1865!), and the light from a full moon filtered in through the filthy, curtainless windows.
We sat on the edge of the mattress and talked for a while, about what I don’t remember. At a certain point, when it felt right, I leaned in closer and asked, “Can I kiss you?”
Christina recoiled and stared straight at me, hands on her hips. “Who do you think I am? I just met you. Jesus. You ruined it.”
I was so distraught I had to lie down. “I know I ruined it, but what did I ruin?” I asked, agonized.
She leveled a devastating gaze at me. “I don’t know what you ruined, either, but I know you ruined it,” she said, maybe with a hint of a smile, and she laid down on the bed with her back to me.
There we were, her at the very edge of the mattress, me on my back next to the wall, staring up at the bottom of the loft and wondering how to fix things. We lay like that for what felt like an eternity but was probably only four or five minutes, after which we started talking again. Things returned to normal, or whatever approximates normal when lying in bed with someone you’ve known for only a few hours. She inched in from the edge of the bed and I came over from the wall, both of us moving incrementally, until our bodies were touching. As we talked I stroked her shaved head.
Slice Harvester Page 5