Eventually she turned around and kissed me, and it felt like the whole world melted. We kissed for a while. It felt like forever and like no time at all. But when we stopped kissing the moonlight had been replaced by the first rays of dawn, and when we looked out the window we realized it was snowing. We lay on our backs with our heads hanging upside down off the mattress and watched the snow fall up, holding hands. We dozed a bit, asleep in each other’s arms, and I felt comfortable and whole. My feelings about her were very Modern Lovers right off the bat: I Wanna Sleep In Your Arms. But also, I could bleed in sympathy with you / On those days, despite the fact that we had just met. I am someone who has spent most of my life feeling out of place in the world and in my own body, but I felt at peace and at ease in Christina’s embrace. When we finally woke up for good, Christina had to go home before work. I walked her to the door but not all the way down to the bus, because I am not a full gentleman and I was too hungover to put clothes on and walk down to the street.
We ended up hanging out again a few days later. Christina was sick, and I made her a giant pot of split pea soup with the ham bone that had been sitting in my freezer since Christmas. It was delicious soup. I served her a bowl with a circle-A drawn in hot sauce on the top, an old habit, and garnished with a few wayward cat hairs, like most meals in my house.
After we ate, I bundled her up and made her a cup of hot tea, and we got into bed together to watch movies, but ended up making out the whole time instead, despite the fact that she was sick. Right off the bat she and I were compatible on some deeply pheromonal level—being near Christina gave me a sense of peace I generally lacked, peace I had sought in other relationships and partners but had been unable to find.
It’s almost embarrassing to describe the role that Slice Harvester played in this process. But for real—writing the blog and publishing the zines had massively improved my sense of self-worth. Looking back, it almost seems foolish. “Oh, yeah, so I did this thing where I reviewed all the pizza in Manhattan, and in conjunction with a really wonderful relationship, it taught me how to love myself.” That sounds so cheesy, but it’s true. It’s also true that Christina played a huge role in my burgeoning adulthood, and yet I did everything I could to keep her at arm’s length and make sure she couldn’t help me at all, because my self-destructive behaviors were so deeply entrenched that they had developed their own defense mechanisms.
Despite all this inner turmoil bubbling so deep within me that it would take months to rise to the surface, Slice Harvesting was going well. A month before I met Christina, around the same time the Good Witch was beginning her elaborate matchmaking process, I went out pizza eating with my friend/colleague/cool older punk dude Erick Lyle, whose belief in the value of the project helped set me on the path to believing in myself. He had just put out Scam issue 51/2, “The Epicenter of Crime: The Hunt’s Donuts Story,” which is possibly my favorite single issue of any zine ever. Erick is a supertalented writer and an encouraging older person, and he was quick to realize that my pizza project was cool even if I was a bit of a self-deprecator. Though he doesn’t necessarily have the most nurturing personality, he tried to bolster my sense of self-worth in the kind manner of a childless adult trying to teach his friend’s kid a lesson in self-esteem.
Erick also brought a lens through which to filter our pizza eating. After we finished our first slice at Italian Village on First Avenue on the Upper East Side, he pulled a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems from his bag. “I figured he may have been in this neighborhood when he wrote these poems, so we can use them to describe the pizza.” This was maybe the best idea I had ever heard.
So without further ado, here is a list of the pizza places I ate at with Erick on January 27, 2010, rated on a scale of Lunch Poems. Make of it what you will.
Italian Village, 1526 First Avenue:
where is the summit where all aims are clear
the pin-point light upon a fear of lust
Don Filippo, 1133 Lexington Avenue:
instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
Pizzcafe Express, 1107 Lexington Avenue:
in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island
they are coming and we holy ones must go
La Mia Pizza, 1488 First Avenue:
yet I do not explain what exactly
makes me so happy today
Ciao Bella Napoli, 1477 York Avenue:
and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.
Figaro Pizza, 1469 Second Avenue:
when the tears of a whole generation are assembled
they will only fill a coffee cup
Erick didn’t know this, but a huge part of why I got into punk and made zines and played music was an attempt to assert myself into a continuum of Cool Weirdos that I believe has existed throughout history. Tuli Kupferberg, Sylvia Rivera, Sun Ra, Hannah Höch—these are the Old Gods I light candles for and leave offerings to (weed for Tuli, pills for Sylvia, tea for Sun Ra, coffee for Hannah). I don’t know much about Frank O’Hara, but I bet he’s a plain slice kinda guy.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
CHAPTER 5
Pizza Villagio
If we aren’t careful, pizza will be stripped of all of its nuance and merit and sucked into the Capitalist Death Culture. . . . But as long as there are still a few old, surly pizza men scowling at their customers and serving up warm, greasy slices, we still have a chance in this war!
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 4, “Forty-Second to Fifty-Ninth Streets,” visited March 11, 2010
One hundred forty-six slices in, I met up with my friend Aaron Cometbus to eat pizza in Midtown. In terms of chosen family, Aaron is like my uncle or cool older cousin—in other words, he’s my still-fallible older male role model. This dynamic is aided by the fact that he is, like, one hundred feet tall and has long limbs and gigantic hands—a true Jewish sentinel—and an oftentimes stern face. He’s handsome, for sure—good cheekbones, great head of hair—but he can look very serious. (I suspect that once upon a time as a teenager in Berkeley he was doing his Billy Idol impression when the wind changed and his face got stuck like that.) His sheer size combined with the gravity of his expression make it easy to feel like a nephew standing next to him.
A. C. has been involved with punk forever. He started writing songs and playing in bands before I was even born. I read his zines and listened to his records in high school and imagined what it would be like when I was grown up and would actually be able to relate to his stories on an experiential rather than imaginary level. It never crossed my mind that one day we would be friends. I’d like to take a minute to appreciate that, because I realize I’m very lucky. Not lucky to be friends with Aaron in particular—I feel lucky to have all my friends. No, I’m talking about the phenomenon of having someone whose work I’ve admired and who I looked up to for years now calling me sometimes just to see how I’m doing. Even though I don’t think about it often, because our friendship would be weird if I did, I know that not everyone is afforded the opportunity to befriend their teenage heroes.
(And I also know that all the punks are super over it and probably take a lot of the awesome aspects of our community for granted, but I am also lucky enough to have this weird pizza-worshipping audience [that includes you, dear reader] of folks who haven’t been punk their whole lives, and that’s who I’m talking to right now. So, FYI, one of the things that’s great about our little community is that there aren’t really “celebrities” as such, and those who pass for the closest approximation thereof are still just people you see around who hang out and go to shows.)
Anyway, a while ago I sent a stack of fanzines to Sam McPheeters, the former singer of Born Against, a relatively popular local hardcore band that has gained increasing notoriety since its dissolution over twenty years a
go. McPheeters had recently published an incredible novel that I read and enjoyed immensely, so I wrote him to tell him as much. Less than a week later, I got a postcard back, thanking me for my kind words and letting me know how excited he was to read my zines. Contrast that with other folks I’ve reached out to who aren’t punks: when I was sixteen, I sent Katherine Dunne, author of Geek Love, a very similar package. I still haven’t heard back from her. Maybe two years ago I sent a big stack of zines to Ed Sanders from the Fugs, who I see, in many ways, as a sort of creative grandfather figure. I wrote him what I thought was an incredibly charming letter, which read:
Dear Ed Sanders,
I am writing to see if you’d like to be friends. It won’t require much! Mostly I’d just like your permission to say “my friend Ed Sanders from the Fugs” rather than just saying “Ed Sanders from the Fugs” when I refer to you, which I do frequently, as I immensely admire your work as a musician, writer, and publisher. Enclosed are a few issues of my zine, which may not even exist if it weren’t for the work you did in paving the way for small publishers with Fuck You Magazine so many years ago. Thank you for that, and for so much more.
Yours,
Colin Atrophy Hagendorf
I included an addressed, stamped postcard to make writing back easier. Over a year later he sent it back, with one of his cool, weird triptychs hand-drawn onto it, but no text. I, of course, took this as a tacit endorsement of my request, and have referred to him as “my friend Ed Sanders” ever since (though I was a little disappointed that my package wasn’t the beginning of an epic intergenerational postal correspondence).
The few people who saw the postcard from Ed Sanders when it came in the mail thought it was so cool he had written to me at all that I felt ungrateful feeling let down. It was only when I sat in that first pizzeria with A. C. that I was finally reassured that my feelings weren’t totally fucked-up.
“I finally heard back from Ed Sanders,” I told Aaron. He perked up. He’s also a huge Fugs fan, so I had told him ages ago when I sent off the original package. “Yeah, it didn’t say anything, but he drew one of those sigils that he draws on it.”
Aaron grimaced and shook his head slightly. “You can’t win ’em all.”
Don’t get me wrong—it’s so rad that Ed Sanders sent me a postcard. He’s getting older and he’s busy, and he probably doesn’t have time to make friends with all of his fans. Although maybe there was something more to decipher in his triptych, and if I had been fluent in ancient hippie ideographs, I could have decoded a long and amicable letter. Who knows?
(Ed: If you’re reading this, the offer is still on the table. If you would like to be my friend, I would be honored.)
But back to Aaron, who, despite his best intentions, is the authorial voice of the closest thing we have to a Hammurabi’s Code in the punk community. For myself and many others who read them as teenagers, his tour diaries and fiction about punk houses laid out a framework for what our adult punk lives might look like. His zines have functioned throughout the years as an almost ethnographic study of various facets of punk. His “Back to the Land” issue, in which he interviewed the children of parents who went “back to the land” in the 1960s, as well as those of his peers who did the same of their own volition, is a straightforward sociological study. In many ways, his zines read as a litany of his friends’ failures and shortcomings, a list of disappointments. I know that’s not something he did intentionally; it takes a pretty self-conscious and uncomfortable reader such as myself to interpret Aaron’s stories of fumbling young adulthood so pessimistically, but that’s how they felt to me: a list of the ways in which life could go wrong, peppered with a few transcendent moments where everything seems to work out.
Did you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.? If not, you should. It’s awesome. It takes place far in the future. As the story goes, sometime around Right Now, there was a big nuclear holocaust. Subsequently, a bunch of survivors got together and started killing all the remaining scientists and destroying their books in order to return to a simpler, more agrarian society and avoid further calamity at the hands of Science Run Amok. (Kind of like Pol Pot, but kind of not at all like Pol Pot.) So this dude Isaac Leibowitz, a Jewish engineer, started saving books and hiding them away. He converted to Catholicism and founded an order of monks dedicated to preserving books and history, but eventually he got killed and a lot of the books got wrecked. The novel predominantly takes place hundreds of years after all this happened, and it’s about the remaining monks in the Order of Leibowitz trying to piece together history from their scant supply of the previous culture’s books. Like I said, it’s really cool.
Now pretend that instead of a physical landscape destroyed by nuclear fallout, there are the suburbs, a cultural landscape rendered barren by capitalism. And instead of there being no books, there are a bunch of books—my mom and dad’s Sartre texts and Dostoevsky novels, as well as newspapers and magazines and textbooks. And instead of an order of monks, there is only me. But then have me reading issues of Cometbus like those monks in the Order of Leibowitz were reading the Only Books Left. That’s basically what it was like when I was a teenager and early twentysomething.
I had this conception of Aaron that was borderline mythic. I mapped together this piecemeal time line of cities that he had lived in, based on stories in his zines and the content of some of his band’s songs, and I had this impression that he was solely responsible for there being thriving punk scenes in all these places. Like, “Oh, well, Aaron lived in Asheville and Chattanooga and Pensacola, and those places are all awesome and have really tight-knit punk communities today, so obviously the only logical thing is that he is some sort of kindly punk Johnny Appleseed who travels around the country turning disparate crews of reject teenagers into totally cohesive and awesome communities of artists.” I’ve always had an overactive imagination. Still do.
The point I’m trying to make is that to me and a few other people in our small, parochial subculture, Aaron is something of a celebrity. And unlike most people who meet celebrities and are totally disenchanted to learn that their favorite singer/actor/athlete is not nearly as cool as he/she appears on the stage/screen/field, I have met Aaron Cometbus and eaten pizza with him, and he’s obviously not as cool as I imagined he would be when I was fifteen, but he’s way cooler than I thought he was when I was twenty—he is merely a man, after all.
Human though he is, the day I ate pizza with Aaron was one of the first moments when I really felt like I had arrived, like this thing I was doing mattered. The sense of personal accomplishment I felt at seeing my project embraced by someone whose work I had admired for years was far greater than that generated by being the subject of a fluff piece in the Daily News or watching the hit counter on my website rise exponentially. To use a nonfamilial metaphor, Aaron might be Jay Z, the older, wiser artist who defined the genre and who takes under his wing a young upstart. Though that would make me Kanye West; an unpleasant outcome, but so be it.
The day Aaron and I met up to go Harvesting was beautiful, and I rode my bike into the city for the first time in ages. When I was younger I worked as a messenger for a minute, and since then I’ve done a lot of delivery work, of food and, uh . . . other stuff. Being forced to ride my bike every day for work had taken some of the childlike glee out of it, but on this particular day it felt great—I was perfectly in tune with traffic, and all the lights seemed to be timed in my favor—an auspicious start.
I had gotten enough sleep and hadn’t drunk that many beers the night before, so I wasn’t hungover, even. I was alert and aware and running the streets. Riding a bike in New York City can be one of those mystical experiences in which you suddenly find yourself inexplicably in tune with the universe—like losing yourself in the music of an amazing band, kissing your sweetheart, or eating the perfect slice. By the time I got to the corner where Aaron was waiting I was exuberant, just bursting with energy. I hadn’t even had coffee yet, but I was
talking a mile a minute as we sat on the curb and smoked. It was disconcerting for Aaron, whom I had dragged out of bed a little earlier than he was accustomed to because I had to finish our pizza mission in time for some plans that night. The timing set us dead in the middle of the lunch rush, when slices are freshest. When a pizza parlor gets really busy, the slices don’t get to sit for very long; they come out of the oven hot and get put right onto the waiting plates of hungry customers. I happen to think it’s easiest to cook a slice well when it’s cooked twice, so a place that can serve a perfect slice without reheating it is really something else.
We would be eating pizza at the top of Midtown—a bland place, somehow worse than the rest of Midtown. To the south, Times Square is a spectacle of consumer capitalism gone off the rails. To the west, Hell’s Kitchen still has some lingering eccentricities from when it was the immigrant slum in which West Side Story took place. To the east is Turtle Bay, dark and ominous, full of diplomatic missions; it looks like the streets in the film Dark City, a classic New York noir. But the area in between it all? There’s nothing there. Tall gray buildings, too generic to feel intimidating; they could be the fabricated backdrop in a movie or in some urban adventure video game.
The pizzerias were mostly boring shitholes that Aaron compared to the cafeterias that populate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s New York, a comparison I readily agreed to, though I had no idea what he was talking about, having only read Singer’s shtetl stories. A few months later I bought a copy of A Friend of Kafka at Aaron’s bookstore, and sure enough, many of the stories pan out in bland Midtown eateries.
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