The next stop in the Tenth Circle was Milk N’ Honey, the kosher fast-food joint two doors down. Now that Nate had assumed the role of Moses in the desert, we were about to suffer like some real Jews.
(I am the child of a lapsed Jew and a lapsed Catholic, though I feel my roots lie more within the secular Jewish intellectualism that dates back to the 1800s than with any kind of American Irish-Catholic identity. I grew up in a very Jewish place, and I have known some orthodox Jews in my life. I have been to synagogue a lot, attended a lot of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, and seen a few foreskins get cut. My family has a Seder every year for Passover, when we talk about how the story of Passover relates to the plight of oppressed peoples worldwide. We mumble through a lot of the Hebrew but sing goofy songs in English. For the past few years my dad has tried to read the same really long e-mail forward that’s a parody of “Who’s on First.” You get it—Cultural Jews, Ethnic Jews. We’re even lower than Reform. They might have female rabbis, but at least they have rabbis! The point is, I feel a certain link to Jewishness if not Judaism, and yet there is an incredible distance between myself and the gray-bearded, mystical-looking old men and the fancy, wig-wearing ladies surrounded by children who sat in Milk N’ Honey.)
I stood there that day and silently cursed Nate for bringing me across this threshold. I didn’t understand these people, with their adherence to traditions and their easily articulated ethos. And they didn’t understand me, with my weird tattoos and general antiauthoritarian surliness. Yet, I realized, we were linked in a number of inextricable ways. From Joey Ramone’s ethnic identity to the fact that we are both weird separatist communities, there are many parallels between punks and Jews. Cory knows—Cory is Jewish in a weird, nonreligious way, too. Nate’s goy, though. I know what you’re thinking: “A goy from Berkeley? Poor guy can’t catch a break.” And you’re right.
But all of the theoretical linkages between Punx and Jewz in the world couldn’t change the fact that when we walked into Milk N’ Honey I felt like an alien. And it didn’t help that everyone basically stopped eating to stare at us, jaws agape, the entire time we ate our pizza, which, no surprise, wasn’t very good, though it wasn’t bad for a kosher slice. Nate said he liked it, but I think he was just afraid that any criticism on his part might be misconstrued as anti-Semitic.
After we finished eating I strolled over to the register to pay and a guy in a suit, who I assume was the owner, looked me up and down. “So, vhat did you tink of the slice?”
I gave him the High Brow, a shoulder shrug, and the most noncommittal “Wasn’t bad” that I could muster. I mean, I didn’t want to hurt the guy’s feelings.
And you know what he did? He looked me straight in the face and said, “How good can it be? It’s just pizza.”
This man and I could not have been more different.
After Milk N’ Honey, we crossed the street to eat another slice of total garbage pizza at Metro Market Deli, a crummier, more soulless version of Ambrosia, which at least had some character, even if the pizza sucked. There is an abundance of these terrible places in neighborhoods that are more commercial than residential. Something about corporate business districts enables the proliferation of these totally barren spaces that serve utilitarian Blade Runner cuisine. Nihilist food. “Might as well be a pill” food.
The pizza here was junk. It was tiny, it had no sauce, and the cheese felt synthetic. The dough was gritty and seemed more appropriate for exfoliating my athlete’s foot than for eating. This pizza tasted like it came from somewhere outside New York, like some terrible road pizza you get on tour in Northern California or western Pennsylvania. It was disgusting and not worth it, but I’m glad we ate it, because if we hadn’t, we’d be left to wonder how bad a slice of pizza could truly be.
Our final destination on Forty-Fifth Street (though only our penultimate destination for the day’s pizza mission) was a place called The World Famous Little Italy Pizza (say that five times fast), and it was the only actual pizzeria of the four pizza-serving establishments on the block. We were fooled into thinking that perhaps this place might be decent, and therein lay its danger.
The air inside The World Famous Little Italy Pizza was thick and humid, like that of a tropical rain forest. There was a leak in the ceiling and some busted-ass steampunk light fixtures that looked like the décor on an airship in one of the PlayStation Final Fantasy games. The front of the restaurant held a few crummy tables, and there was a narrow hallway leading to the too-bright back, where it opens up into a pizza counter. The good thing about this place is that you can just walk in here and sit and read for, like, an hour, and it’s a pain in the ass for the employees to come tell you to leave because they’re all the way in the back. The bad thing about it is everything else.
When we walked in, Nate and Cory secured an empty table while I went to the back to organize a slice. I walked up to the counter and surveyed the scene. A smattering of pies sat behind Plexiglas, none of them looking spectacular but none of them looking downright bad, either. Maybe this place was gonna be okay after all. I asked the cool teenage slacker working there for a plain slice.
“There’s a fresh pie coming out in a second,” he told me, paying more attention to his phone than to my order.
I let him know that I didn’t mind if he had to reheat one. “I actually prefer it,” I told him.
He just shook his head. “No slices left. Fresh pie in a few minutes.”
This was possibly a first for me: being in a pizza place that didn’t actually have a plain pizza sliced and ready to reheat. I tried to convince myself that maybe The World Famous Little Italy Pizza was so good, so popular, that they could barely keep up. But then I looked around the empty restaurant, recalled that no one had entered or left in the ten minutes since I’d wandered in off the street, and realized that these people were just lazy. Okay, more power to ’em! As a former lazy employee, I stand in solidarity with slackers and layabouts worldwide, even when it slightly inconveniences me.
I was starting to worry about getting a fresh pie because I wanted to like this place, and sometimes fresh pies aren’t crunchy enough for my tastes. A good pizza place knows how to do it, but at your average shlock joint they partially cook the slicing pies during the slow times of day so that they won’t burn when reheating. I was scared this slice might be well prepared but undercooked. My fear wound up being groundless, though, because the slice this guy handed me was totally incinerated. Just burnt to a fucking crisp.
The cheese was burnt to the point that it didn’t have flavor, only the terrible texture of a rubber spatula. The sauce was a sick paste that made the whole slice taste like the minestrone soup my friend Matt Birdflu used to buy me with his California food stamps from the dollar store across the street from the West Oakland BART station: deeply entrenched in a culture of high fructose corn syrup and bad vibes. Biting into the crust was a troubling experience.
Looking introspective, Cory said, “You know that part of Demolition Man where Sylvester Stallone freezes Wesley Snipes with liquid nitrogen and then smashes him up with a hammer or whatever?”
Nate and I both nodded our heads in the affirmative.
“When I bite this crust, it feels like that’s happening in my mouth.”
Having made it through the perpetually worsening punishment that is the pizza parlors of Forty-Fifth Street, we felt a certain sense of invulnerability. We strode through Midtown like a gang, blustering and powerful. In the face of an obstacle so great we nearly folded (aka Ambrosia), we’d fought on and found a source of strength within ourselves we hadn’t known we possessed.
We had one more stop on our day’s excursion, and in line with the weird theme of the afternoon, it was called The World Famous Little Italy, one word away from the name of the place we’d eaten at beforehand, although this place was around the corner rather than on the same exact block, as with PP and PP&B.
The first thing we saw, before we even walked into the place, was a three-foot-tal
l sign in the window proclaiming that The World Famous Little Italy is an independent, autonomous entity with no affiliations:
* * *
To Our Customers:
Little Italy Pizza
Has
ALWAYS Been our
ONLY Location and
NOT Affiliated with
any other Little Italy.
Thanks and Have
A Fantabulous Day.
The Management
* * *
The sign itself was etched into a piece of metal, an affordable approximation of stone. Basically this thing was, like, commandment status. In no uncertain terms, they wanted you to know they had nothing to do with that shithole around the corner. Surrounding the sign were “artifact” ceramics and weird-shaped glass bottles full of olives, a classic example of the Olive Garden school of rustic, Tuscan décor.
There were no seats in the place and, like, four hundred employees jammed behind the small counter. The back wall was fake marble and sported a mural of a horse hanging out in some cobblestone alley surrounded by family crests, shields, and other olden-tymes paraphernalia rendered in muted, “distressed” earth tones attempting to evoke a sense of being Back in the Day but actually revealing themselves as woefully contemporary.
If this were the movies, the next slice of pizza would be the best slice I’d ever had. Its delicately flavored sauce would meld seamlessly with hot, gooey cheese, and it would all rest atop a slightly salty, perfectly crunchy, doughy foundation. In the movies I’d eat the slice, and everything would turn around. My life wouldn’t feel so stale; I’d find my purpose. Maybe I’d befriend the pizza man and become his apprentice. I’d learn the trade and strike out to open up a pizzeria of my own.
Well, this ain’t the movies, kid.
The slice at The World Famous Little Italy was totally dead center, middle of the road—neither particularly good nor particularly bad. If we lived in a better world, this would be the worst that pizza ever got, and then things would incrementally get better until we found my holy grail, the perfect slice.
The good news is, the best slice wasn’t far away. But Forty-Fifth Street had chewed me up and spit me out the way I might’ve done to the pizza at Ambrosia if I wasn’t too PC to waste food, and I was left unresolved. Probably I went to the bar that night and drank myself into oblivion. Likely I recited morbid poetry into my not-quite-girlfriend’s voice mail. Slice Harvester, which had once been my anchor, was no longer working. What’s a boy to do when he can’t even believe in pizza anymore?
* * *
1. Jealous Again lineup.
A pigeon, feasting
CHAPTER 7
Hell’s Kitchen Pizza
Sadly, this pizza is the worst pizza I’ve had in my entire life. It was so bad that after I took my first bite, I felt like I was gonna puke. Caroline took a bite, gagged, spit it into a napkin, and said, “I eat out of the trash pretty regularly, and I don’t have this problem.”
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 4, “Forty-Second to Fifty-Ninth Streets,” visited May 22, 2010
One hundred eighty-eight slices since I’d started Harvesting, and it was one of those nights. I was working the five-to-eleven shift at the burrito restaurant in the pouring rain bringing seitan chorizo enchiladas to lazy yuppies who didn’t tip. The new bartender at the restaurant had a policy that entitled the delivery guys to free whiskey whenever it was cold or raining and the owner wasn’t looking, so I was working on a solid, sustainable drunk by about eight p.m., biking around without a care in the world. Sometimes I would get a credit card order where I could see the tip was bad and I’d reach into my basket and mush the food up with my hand, but otherwise I didn’t have a bitter thought for anyone—not the cars throwing their doors open in front of my bike, not the women pushing their baby strollers out into the street. None of it could bother me. It was a picturesquely rainy spring evening and I was drunk, and I had a cool new girlfriend and people really seemed to like my new zine and I had friends from the Northwest in town visiting and I was meeting them at the bar after work.
With the help of a half dozen shots of whiskey and a few beers, my six-hour shift flew by in what seemed like a matter of minutes. I ate a quesadilla, smoked a cigarette, and headed to the bar to meet my friends from over yonder. I’m certain we drank whiskey. I’m certain we all hugged and clinked glasses at some point, talked about punk stuff, asked after mutual friends, and made plans to travel to one another that we all knew no one would follow through on but that felt nice to make. I’m certain I felt very happy. I’m certain that I drank to the point where it felt like I was being carried through the room on the wings of an angel. I know that I stayed out way too late drinking and reveling, but what’s the point of being alive if you don’t spend any time living, right?
The next morning I was meeting Caroline and her sister to go eat some pizza around Forty-Second Street in Hell’s Kitchen. And when I say morning, I mean two p.m. the next afternoon. I have no compunction about sleeping through the day. Maybe it’s important if you’re part of the square world and need to go to an office job, but as I’m sure you know by now, I do not. When I woke up at 12:30 on my mattress on the floor and bulldozed through my sloppy apartment to the bathroom for my morning puke, I had barely enough energy to text Caroline and her sister to ask them if we could meet an hour later than planned. I puked again, drank a little bit of water, and went back to sleep until 2:30.
While the morning puke had become something of a norm for me at this point in my life, I understand that perhaps not everyone can comprehend such an existence. The human body’s adaptability to uncomfortable situations is one of the evolutionary traits that have kept us successfully out of the jaws of extinction. Think about the countless cultures that have flourished in extreme climates and barren wastelands. And since then, at least in the first world, technology has advanced to the point where adversity is rarely so extreme, so this inherent trait has been deflected toward other, less-urgent obstacles. People in Pennsylvania, for instance, think the pizza in Pennsylvania is good. This is not because the pizza in Pennsylvania is actually good pizza—it’s because the average American teen can’t survive without ready access to good pizza, and so the minds of Pennsylvanians are necessarily warped from childhood as a survival tactic. Similarly, I had puked on so many mornings for so many years that my body was inured to it. It was just something I did.
I guess the groundwork for my acceptance of such a life was laid when I was nineteen or twenty. I was sitting in this weird café in New Orleans with my friend Tony, telling him about the new apartment I had just rented. I was complaining about the small bathroom, and he said, “I love a small bathroom. It’s really important to have a space where you can puke into the sink or tub while you’re sitting on the toilet shitting. For hangovers.”
I was shocked. “I hope I’m never that hungover in my life.”
“What are you talking about, man? Hangovers are great—probably one of the most life-affirming experiences there is. It feels like shit is gonna suck forever and you want to give up for good, but if you force yourself out of bed and go about your day, first you get used to it, and then eventually it ends. And, seriously, if you just pretend feeling like shit is awesome, then it actually doesn’t suck.” Tony had a way with words.
Within a few years I was more or less living by these words, and on this particular spring afternoon, sitting on the train heading into the city to meet my best friend and her sister, I was in the throes of just such an experience—looking around the subway feeling like a goon, worrying that everyone knows. Riding the subway with a terrible hangover is not dissimilar to riding the subway while waiting for the two hits of acid you just took to kick in. You’re the only one wearing sunglasses and you think everyone is staring at you, and you feel an acute awareness that you are somehow So Different from all of them and an equally strong impulse to keep it a secret.
And the appeal of a hangover is not so different from
the more triumphant aspects of the majority of my psychedelic experiences. The awesomeness of The Drunkenness or the Majorly Tripping Out is the precursor to the Real Intellectual Activity. Which is to say, the inevitable moment when you start to wonder, Will this ever end? Have I finally doomed myself to an eternity of living like this? I have. I’m stuck like this forever. I may never recover. Shit. You start scribbling an apology letter to your mom, stressing how you’ll tie up all your loose ends. Gotta find someone to take care of my cats before I go AWOL. But it eventually does end. You return to normal cognitive lucidity, to absolutely regular human functioning.
The first time I ate mushrooms, at sixteen or seventeen, was in my friend Jason’s apartment in a building that had been converted from a former elementary school. The 1970s decor in the hallways was reminiscent of The Shining, and his bedroom was in the clock tower, with the face of the clock transformed into a giant window, cobbled together out of bits of glass. Unlike my first acid experience, which was relatively anticlimactic, eating mushrooms felt incredibly revelatory. After I ran around the apartment pretending I was Spider-Man and climbing up and down everything that was climbable, I wandered outside barefoot and sat on a bench in the park with my feet in the snow and felt like it had been a fun time and I was glad it was over.
That’s when I started hallucinating again. I grew very afraid that I was some special type of person on whom mushrooms work too well and that I was going to be stuck tripping FOREVER. I didn’t know what to do; I was freaking out, my feet were getting cold, and I was locked outside. This was before cell phones, so I had to just frantically ring the buzzer and hope that someone would let me back in, but my friends inside were tripping, too, and I didn’t know if they’d ever hear it and shit was getting so dark. (Not literally; it had gotten Literally Dark long ago, it being the middle of the night, but, like, things were getting Metaphysically Dark.) Eventually someone must have let me in, because my feet are still attached to my ankles as of this writing. I don’t remember coming inside or the segue between shit feeling eternally fucked and shit feeling okay again; the next thing I remember is lying on Jason’s bed, watching the sun creep through his weird window while smoking a joint and listening to Jimi Hendrix, feeling the swelling pride of a young man in possession of intimate knowledge. I knew that if I had gotten through that ordeal alive, I could face anything.
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