None of the pizza we ate that day was any good, but there was one place that was at least interesting: Buk Balkan Bistro on West Fifty-Fifth Street. The outside of Buk looked recently remodeled, and the inside seemed like it could be any other bar/restaurant in any other whatever neighborhood in Manhattan.
“I guess this place isn’t a pizzeria anymore,” I told Aaron. “Might as well start heading to the next place. It’s like that sometimes; I get a phone book listing for a pizza place, but by the time I get there it’s a new business.”
Aaron was unconvinced and peered in the window. “I don’t know, Colin,” he said. “I think I see a pizza oven in there.” He headed in the door.
Buk turned out to be a fully staffed fancy restaurant—which was jarring after our afternoon spent munching cheese pies in crummy cafeterias. There was a bartender wearing a little waistcoat, a waiter standing at attention, and an older, demure maître d’, who perked up at his host stand as the door opened. He looked us up and down, taking in our filthy shoes, dirty fingernails, and greasy hair, and just barely avoided having an expression of visible disappointment cross his face before turning on his charm.
“Table for two?”
“Do you serve pizza here?” I asked hesitantly, looking around.
“Of course, pizza, right this way,” he said as he led us to a marble counter with a pizza oven behind it.
“We’re just going to split one slice, if that’s okay.” (At this point I would not have blamed him for rolling his eyes, but he remained a perfect gentleman.)
“Absolutely, whatever you like, sir; have a seat.” He pointed us toward a high bar table flanked by two stools. There was a tea light in a small glass votive, a single flower, and those tiny salt and pepper shakers, all arranged artfully atop a white tablecloth. A tablecloth.
A few minutes passed, and he brought us our slice, which was not disgusting but not great, and was definitely not the same kind of pizza I was accustomed to eating. Perhaps this was Balkan pizza? Or maybe some Albanian dude here in New York wrote his cousin in Kosovo and said, “Here in America we have this thing called pizza!” and described the pizza. And then the cousin told her best friend, and the best friend told her uncle, and the uncle told his apprentice, and the apprentice eventually moved to New York and started a pizza place based on this telephone game of what pizza was like before even trying a real New York slice. It was enough like pizza to seem normal at first, but went slightly awry in difficult-to-pinpoint, subtle ways—it was slightly off-color, the texture was alien, the sauce was flavored by spices that I’d never before encountered. The whole experience of eating this slice was disconcerting. This was the Uncanny Valley of pizza. It was also the greasiest slice I have ever eaten in my life, which is an incredible accomplishment.
When we got outside, I asked Aaron why he’d been so sure they would be serving pizza in a Balkan bistro.
“I don’t know if you know this, Colin,” he said with an air of gravitas, “but a lot of pizzerias are actually owned by Albanians who came to New York during the Kosovo War in the nineties.”
(This was something I did actually know, mostly because Aaron had told me every time we’d talked about pizza for the past year. “It’s an interesting story,” he’d say with a wink and a nod. “There’s a book in there somewhere.”)
Every time I visit Aaron at the bookstore or when he’s selling on the street, he’s reading a different dusty, inscrutable tome about some obscure Eastern European war or African conflict. At first I thought it was an affectation. But Aaron seems to have a genuine interest in the forgotten factionalism of sectarian states or tribal conflicts the rest of the West has long closed the book on. I think it partially has to do with the fact that all of his identities are defined in strident opposition to those around him—punks, Jews, Berkeley natives. It is a characteristic of his that I appreciate immensely, especially when it results in my learning about the Albanian infiltration of the pizza industry.
At this point in my Harvesting career I’d eaten at nearly one hundred fifty pizza parlors, with over two hundred left to go. And I hadn’t looked back once. Since that first day’s Harvest with Sweet Tooth, I had been an eating/reviewing machine, filled with new purpose (and an abundance of dairy). Looking back on this ultraproductive period, I’m reminded of being thirteen years old, about to publish my first fanzine.
I had run off three hundred copies at the office supply store. The zine itself was garbage, most of the content cribbed from elsewhere—advertisements I had solicited from tiny bedroom record labels or straight-up cut out of MRR and pasted in; an e-mail forward of “The Fifty Best Pickup Lines” from the burgeoning days of AOL that a friend’s older sister had sent me. With three hundred copies hot off the presses, I then stood outside the supermarket and tried to sell them to everyone going in or out. For comparison, most of my friends who made zines at the time printed five or ten total and never showed them to anyone.
It wasn’t hubris or bravado that led me to make so many. I made zines in order to forge a connection between myself and the world around me, and it seemed that getting them to the most people possible was the best way to make that connection. Slice Harvester was the same, on an even grander scale—it was my letter to all of New York and the universe, beating out the Morse code that said, “I’m here. Where are you?”
And people responded! My friends, the older generation of punks, were proud of me, and that was great. But because I made the blog as well as the zine, because I stepped out of conventional punk channels, I connected with people who weren’t even punks! This dude Ron started writing regular comments on my site. He’s some dad from Long Island; we have nothing in common and never would have had any reason to interact, but over the course of his years of commenting, he’s dropped little facts about his life. And now he’s in this book. Hi, Ron!
At a certain point my weekly expenses of about $25 for pizza and train fare started to cut into my tight, young budget, so I placed a PayPal donation button on my webpage. I wrote a blog post mentioning that if people enjoyed the site, they should consider donating $2.50 (the average cost of a slice at the time) per month. The only reward I offered was that donators would be thanked publicly on the website and acknowledged in each issue of the fanzine. I wasn’t looking to make a profit, and I don’t think I ever really did, but over the two years that the blog ran, as long as I was regularly updating, I received these tiny donations from strangers to help me pay for the pizza. That’s really something.
Listen to this one: I got a one-hundred-dollar discount on a mattress because the guy at Sleepy’s recognized me from the paper. He called me the “Slice Hunter,” but who cares? That shit is crazy! All I had ever wanted as a kid was to create something that would resonate with people—and here I was, doing just that. It sure felt good.
My interactions with readers weren’t all positive, but even the negative ones were lighthearted and ended up with everyone laughing and joking around. When I reviewed Artichoke, a trendy nouveau pizza place that had gotten famous for their simple menu, lack of seating, and boho décor, I took a pretty snotty tone, because I’m punk and an antagonist and that’s what we do. My review opened:
Every time I tell a Time Out NY–reading, condo-dwelling truffle eater about Slice Harvester, they ask me what I think about Artichoke, because they read about it in the Times or on some food blog and heard it was the best new shit. And every time they asked me I had to tell them, “I dunno.” Because I hadn’t gotten there yet. And now I have, and I had their “margherita” slice or whatever, which is not the artichoke slice, which I hear is just to die faw, but fuck it, whatever, who cares?
And this resulted in some dude accusing me of “reverse-snobbery,” which resulted in me telling him that for the people wielding the power in 90 percent of situations, affluent yuppies sure do seem to get really defensive about being teased. Perhaps that’s because they know their stranglehold on hegemonic influence is actually unfair, and maybe since,
like, all of culture was presumably canted toward making people like this feel comfortable, they should learn to take a joke. Later that day, I received an anonymous $100 donation to my PayPal account, the donator choosing to be identified by the moniker “Yuppie Scum.” I can’t say for certain that Yuppie Scum and my anonymous commenter were the same guy, but it seems likely.
And there were other, more personal connections: getting a letter from Tobi Vail—OG riot grrrl, longtime zine maker, someone I’d admired since my adolescence—telling me she liked my fanzine; having Tom Scharpling, the greatest radio personality in American history, tweet that he liked my work; becoming friends with Ashok Kondabolu and Himanshu Suri from Das Racist because of a mutual creative admiration.
But it wasn’t all victories. Slice Harvesting, and my life in general, were about to take a serious downturn before they could rise again like a pizza phoenix from the ashes of a burnt pie.
The Pronto Pizzas
CHAPTER 6
Michelle’s Restaurant
This may be the first good slice I’ve had in weeks. In the pizza desert that is Midtown West, Michelle’s is a hidden oasis. This slice had wonderful, perfectly salty and crunchy dough. The sauce had that intangibly magical flavor that contributes to a slice without being overbearing, and the cheese had the perfect texture. You’d never think from passing by here that there was anything special lurking inside, but that’s why I’m pounding the pavement, doing the hard work for you.
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 4, “Forty-Second to Fifty-Ninth Streets,” visited on April 7, 2010
I had walked nearly every block of Manhattan from 207th Street down to 50th, and had eaten more than 150 different slices of pizza. Almost a year had passed; I wasn’t even halfway done, and the crappiness of most of the pizza was starting to weigh on me pretty hard. It seemed that for every Pizza Palace or Gino’s there were fifteen shitty bodegas serving frozen slices out of a convection oven and calling themselves pizza places. I was almost done with the second issue of the fanzine, the Upper West Side issue, and aside from other people’s art contributions, I wasn’t too excited about it. Just a boring guy making a boring fanzine about boring pizza in a boring neighborhood.
The slice slump extended into my personal life. I was working this dumb burrito delivery job that didn’t pay the bills, I was hungover all the time, the honeymoon period of my Saturn Returns was through, and though I put on a smile at the bar every night and pretended I was excited to be alive, the truth of the matter was that I was bored and listless and felt like crap every day. The only positive aspects of my life were my fanzine (selling enough to make rent!) and my relationship with Christina, which felt awesome even if I was on the verge of fucking it all up.
At twenty-seven, I was drinking to the point of blacking out almost every night that I wasn’t hanging out with Christina. And starting about halfway through April, every night at some point between five and seven in the morning, as I was lying in my bed chain-smoking (or in the bathroom of a bar where I’d stayed well past closing time), I’d call Christina and leave her long, rambling messages declaring my love for her, sometimes reciting Dylan Thomas poems into her voice mail and crying at their beauty. What a lucky gal, having a boyfriend who is totally cool and emotionless, and then gets drunk every night and becomes an inarticulate ball of unsorted emotional laundry.
You get the point. “I was fucked! In a rut! Something’s gotta giiiiiive!” to quote a nonexistent Black Flag1 song I just made up. The pizza in Midtown seemed to be mirroring where I was in life. Most of it was passable, some of it was terrible, and none of it was good. I didn’t know what I should do—I just knew I had to keep eating. It was time to call in reinforcements.
I’ve known Cory since he moved out of his parents’ house in Queens into a tent in the backyard of a notorious Brooklyn punk house as a teenager. He seems to have tapped into some kind of eternal spring of coolness that has probably existed as long as there has been human culture. Think Jim Jarmusch or MC Skat Kat from Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” video. Effortless cool. It’s a different kind of cool than James Dean or young Snoop Dogg, because it’s not dark. There’s no lingering scent of death hovering around it. But Cory wasn’t always cool. I watched him grow into it.
It’s like this: growing up, I thought cats were these naturally graceful creatures who possessed some kind of ultimate insight and wisdom, an impression I had thanks mostly to my staring at them while super stoned or on mushrooms as a teenager. When I was twenty I got myself two kittens, Sal and Growler, and I remember having this realization one day (quite likely also while on mushrooms) as I watched baby Sal flop around awkwardly, trying unsuccessfully to jump up onto my dresser, that cats actually have to learn all that grace they seemed to possess innately, and that as kids they are not yet accustomed to their future graceful bodies. When I first met Cory, he was an awkward kitten, but now he is definitely a wise old cat. (This, by the way, is a totally inappropriate metaphor, as Cory is allergic to cats.) He is also the only person I know who doesn’t look dumb wearing a fringed leather vest.
Nate Stark is also really cool, but in a more obscure way. I don’t know if his last name is actually “Stark” or if that’s just a descriptive punk name about his personality. Nate has a shaved head and a leather jacket, and he looks really serious all the time. Sometimes we stand on a street corner by the record store he works at in Williamsburg, just smoking and judging people. I know it’s horrible, but it’s cathartic, and frankly, the people of Williamsburg deserve to be judged.
He has also always played in only the coolest bands. I met him when he came to Brooklyn from out west to join Bent Outta Shape, Jamie’s old band, and transform them from a band with the potential to be awesome into a band that totally ruled and made the world feel like a better place. Nate has been partially responsible for transporting me away from my constantly nagging anxieties and helping me to lose myself in the present, for recording one of my favorite records ever in the history of the universe, and for so much more. Actually, I don’t really think there’s any more, but those two are pretty good. I don’t know whether I’ve ever thanked him for all this, because it would be awkward to do that in person. So here it is, awkwardly on paper: Thank you, Nate.
But the key quality in Nate-as-Harvesting-buddy was that he grew up in Berkeley and used to work in a pizza parlor there, which meant he could contribute meaningful insider knowledge to my ridiculous blog.
The three of us met up at the juncture of Forty-Seventh Street and Park Avenue, a relatively mundane corner in a relatively mundane part of Manhattan, featuring an even mix of cool-looking older buildings and totally ugly glass edifices. (I’ve been inside a lot of these buildings both as a bike messenger and while cooking for a catering company. At first it was exciting going into all the offices because it was, like, access to this weird world I would otherwise never be part of, but it turns out there’s nothing interesting going on, and office buildings are just as boring as they seem.)
When most people think “Park Avenue,” they think “elegant Old-Money rich people,” and that is totally true of Park Avenue on the Upper East Side. Up there, the architecture is beautiful and imposing. It’s like Mount Olympus, a place us mortals can visit but daren’t stay. Every building is guarded by a stately doorman wearing a smart little suit, and you can tell that high above, behind the glare of those windows, all kinds of people with more money than you can possibly dream of are doing crazy BDSM shit to each other and neglecting their kids.
Down in Midtown, Park Avenue is a fairly mundane urban business district spruced up a bit by some giant planters filled with festive perennials on the pedestrian islands separating the lanes of north- and southbound traffic, as well as these pathetic paved promenades where office folk can sit, weather permitting, and enjoy their lunches. Many of the benches are marked with tiny brass placards stamped NO LOITERING, which seems contradictory for a bench, but if you put on your They Live glasses, you’
ll see that they actually say YOU CAN’T SIT HERE IF YOU’RE HOMELESS.
On the day we three jerkoffs showed up in Midtown, abutting one of these sad “parks” was a food truck. Not such a bizarre sight, as the Midtown lunch crowd absolutely adores buying food from trucks, but this particular truck purported to sell pizza, and that is weird, because there is enough pizza in New York already.
Historically, only a small number of foods have been proffered from carts in New York City—roasted nuts, hot dogs/knishes/pretzels, and Middle Eastern/halal fare; that’s pretty much it, save for the awesome samosa cart that’s been in Washington Square Park since before Christopher Columbus was born. Lately, however, food trucks have become “a thing,” and now there are a million of them. They have cutesy names and Twitter accounts you can follow to find out where they’re parked today, and guess what—I hate it all.
The thing about this pizza truck was that what they served bore only the slightest resemblance to pizza. We ordered a slice, and what they handed us was, like, some weird cracker with a bunch of soupy sauce on top. There turned out to be cheese beneath the sauce, but really, the whole mess should’ve been served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. Now, the classic New York slice, when done right, is a perfect food to eat while standing or walking—it’s self-contained and doesn’t make a mess. So selling pizza from a truck kind of makes sense. But the decision to take a food that’s easy to eat while standing and make it sloppier and more unwieldy and then sell it out of a truck to people walking by on the street is absolutely baffling, and it turned out to be a harbinger of things to come.
After that strange culinary experience, we made our way to an unpleasant-looking cafeteria on Forty-Eighth Street called Toasties. Long and fluorescent-lit, Toasties presented us with a number of nonpizza meal choices: a pathetic salad bar, steam trays full of dried-out pasta, plastic soda cups full of cotton-candy-pink yogurt. Tucked away in the very back was a pizza counter, which seemed inoffensive at best, but definitely not promising. But we were Men at Work, so we sucked it up, ordered a slice, and found a seat at one of the handful of empty tables. Aside from a couple of employees eating grim shift meals, we were the only folks who got our food to stay. It seems the clientele of Toasties—mostly solitary, white males dressed in business-casual wear—prefer to consume their sad paninis and salads elsewhere.
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