Slice Harvester

by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf

  This is the important lesson about that first seminal psychedelic experience or major hangover, because it carries over to other parts of life, like your first bad breakup or the first time someone you love dies.

  At twenty-three, I was on tour with an old band—this was before Jamie died, and he had canceled two weeks’ worth of moving jobs and lent us his van for the tour. My cell phone had been dead for days, but I wasn’t expecting anyone to call me, and besides, I was going to be home soon. My friend Kevin, whose band had squeezed into Jamie’s windowless van with mine to take our decidedly derivative and banal punk rock to our friends and acquaintances down the East Coast, pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, listened for a few seconds, and handed the phone to me.

  “Hello . . . ?”

  My father was on the other end. I thought I could hear him laughing and wondered what kind of joke was so urgent that he’d spent god knows how long tracking down Kevin’s number.

  “Dad . . . ?”

  Still laughing. I started trying to trace backward from Kevin’s number to other people who knew other people who knew someone whose phone number my dad knew. This wasn’t making any sense to me, and it was beginning to make me uncomfortable.

  “How’d you get this number?”

  I suddenly realized my father was crying, not laughing. I’d never heard him cry.

  “Your uncle Scott . . .” he choked out. “Your uncle Scott . . . my baby brother . . . he had a heart attack. He was in the car with Mom. They’d pulled into a rest stop. If it had happened five minutes before or after, he would’ve been behind the wheel with her in the car, and she would’ve been dead, too.”

  I was on my way to the last show on my first tour playing a guitar my uncle had given me. My dad and I talked some more and decided I should play the show. I’d be home in two days. By the time I curled up in the back of the van sobbing, the seven other people traveling with me had overheard enough of the conversation to give me some space. I took my knife off my belt and carved “FUCK YOU” into the bottom of the guitar. Cory put a Kimya Dawson record on. I fell asleep.

  When we got to DC, my friends Marcia and Alana were waiting for us. Someone had told them what was going on with me, and Marcia had already gotten a fifth of whiskey and a box of beers. I sat in the van slugging whiskey and pounding beers, and then went into the house long enough to play the show through my tears and to drunkenly try to fight someone who lived there. I was home the next day.

  My family celebrates birthdays for a whole week, so it’s fitting that we should celebrate funerals for a year. We had a family funeral and a friends funeral; we scattered the ashes; we buried the urn. All were separate occurrences, some months apart. None of them served to dull the indelible pain that comes with losing someone close. That year I got drunk and cried a lot, wrote one totally bullshit Social Distortion rip-off song about being sad, and listened to “Kiss The World Goodbye” by Kris Kristofferson every day. None of it worked to assuage my grief, but it distracted me. And then one day I wasn’t living with the constant specter of my sadness anymore. Maybe I’d feel a tender moment when listening to a song or I’d have a dream where Scott and I went and ate ribs and he told me about where I was fucking my life up, but mostly I moved on. I didn’t forget him by any means, but I was no longer fixated on his loss. It just became part of me.

  And I guess what I’m saying is, every hangover is like a miniature run-through of the grief cycle. Every morning that I woke up feeling like the entire world was full of nothing but piss and shit, like I didn’t deserve to see sunlight, like I was going to turn into a CHUD, led ultimately to a triumphant afternoon of overcoming the odds. Living most of my life in an intense fog put my moments of clarity into greater focus. It taught me to value lucidity, but not to rely on it.

  That afternoon when I stepped off the subway into the misty spring air, I was in the eye of the storm—the part of the hangover where it fakes you out and you think it’s over, so you start behaving like it’s over (ingesting things besides water, standing upright, being more than ten feet from a bathroom), only to have it rear its ugly head once again, screaming “PSYCH! YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SOME KINDA TOUGH GUY? YOU THOUGHT ALL OF A SUDDEN THAT EVEN THOUGH YOUR HANGOVERS HAVE LASTED MOST OF THE DAY FOR YEARS, YOU HAD ME BEATEN IN ONLY TWO HOURS? WELL, YOU DIDN’T! I TRICKED YOU!” Sadly, I was still an hour or two away from that startling discovery, and so I approached the world with unchecked optimism.

  The first pizza parlor was a 99¢ Fresh dollar-slice joint on Forty-Second Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, on the outskirts of Times Square. A New York slice is an altogether different food from a traditional Neapolitan pie, in the same way an apple is different from a pear. One is a little more pedestrian, a little more blunt and rugged, while the other is subtler, more gourmet. Similarly, a New York slice is different from a dollar slice in the same way an apple is different from a bodega apple pie. The former may be common, pedestrian, but it is still real food, and in its simplicity lies its charm. The latter, while one can tell it was somehow derived from the former, has been abstracted to such a point that it belongs more in the realm of science than anything else. Which is to say, it exists in an entirely substandard milieu, though within that milieu there is a full spectrum of varying quality.

  I was feeling subhuman that afternoon, though, so it felt appropriate to be eating subpar pizza. And while this slice was destined to fail, it was appealing in its own way. We took our time eating, savoring the fast-food quality of the slice and the vibrant memories it conjured. I remembered adolescent Friday nights spent at the ice-skating rink. Leah called it “a carnival slice with a little dash of cafeteria.” Caroline agreed that it was sentimentally pleasing, but to her health-conscious palate, it just tasted like massive amounts of corn syrup.

  The bites of dollar slice having made me a little less wobbly, we set out to eat more pizza. We hit a handful of shlock joints (square slices; unremediable grossness; massive undercooking) and one actual pizzeria (Claudio Pizzeria on Tenth Avenue—good slice, great vibes) before we walked into what would be our final stop of the day, the possible nadir of my entire pizza-eating career. Hell’s Kitchen Pizza, on Tenth Avenue up toward Fiftieth Street, serves, hands down, the worst pizza I’ve ever eaten in my life.

  Now, the place was not without its charms. I am certainly fond of the mid-nineties White Zombie aesthetic. The mash-up of the heavy metal and psychobilly subcultures creates something so uniquely, guilelessly, and confidently corny that it almost moves straight past kitsch into the realm of cool. Paint everything black, and then paint flames on all of it and hang old Betty Page bondage pinups everywhere, and then play a live Springsteen album, and I am pretty much smitten. I know the combination is in objectively bad taste, but that doesn’t matter to me. It reminds me of my adolescence, when I was a sort-of goth/sort-of punk/sort-of skater/generally unsatisfied little dude corndoggin’ all over town, thinking I was the coolest. In eighth grade, I wore to school, earnestly believing I looked fucking cool, a pair of cropped JNCO jeans paired with combat boots with Day-Glo orange New Kids on the Block shoelaces I had stolen from a store on St. Marks Place and a T-shirt with the lyrics to the Shaft theme song, with my hair in four pigtails. I am neither proud nor ashamed of this legacy, but that was me trying to be me, and I will never scorn someone who presents himself in a similar fashion.

  Anyway, no amount of cute décor could convince me to like the awful pizza in this wonderful place. Biting into the blobby cheese and mealy dough was unpleasant enough, but when the putrid flavor of the rotten sauce hit my tongue, I felt like I was gonna hurl—though to be fair and accurate in my reporting, the feeling quickly subsided. “Hell’s Kitchen” is right—this pizza might have been prepared by Lucifer himself. Caroline actually spit her first bite into a napkin and said, “I eat out of the trash pretty regularly, and I don’t have this problem.” Leah seemed unfazed by the slice, but she didn’t make any claims that it was good. She and I finished it,
but Caroline had chosen to abstain from eating any more.

  About half a block from Hell’s Kitchen Pizza, Caroline and Leah noticed dozens of antique nails and plumbing fixtures sitting in a garbage can on the sidewalk and began to dig through to see if any of them were worth taking home. Suddenly, without warning, I was seized by an intense need to vomit. Perhaps my hangover had crept back up on me, but more likely my body had begun to digest the food I had just eaten and revolted before the poison could be fully assimilated into my system. Whatever the cause—residual hangover or repulsive pizza—I managed to make my way off the sidewalk and in between two parked luxury cars, which I leaned on as I barfed my brains out for a good seven minutes.

  I looked up between heaves to see a few Yuppie Moms pushing their Beautiful Aryan Babies down the street. When they saw Caroline and Leah digging through the trash, they looked somewhat aghast. When they noticed me in the gutter (where I belong) puking my guts out, they grew alarmed and chose to cross the street rather than pass through the Dirtbag Strait of Messina that the three of us had transformed our portion of the sidewalk into.

  I was still a bit dizzy when my puking subsided, so I sat down on the curb to roll a cigarette. As I lit my smoke and regained my vision, a family of birds alighted upon my puke puddle and began to sup. They chirped to one another as they ate the food I had just expelled, probably talking about some other meal that they had recently eaten, which is what my family always talks about when we eat.

  “This puke is good; what do you think it is?” chirps Baby Bird.

  “Maybe a can of Spaghetti-Os and a piece of white bread?” his father chirps back.

  Mama bird chimes in, “Tastes like pizza to me.”

  This excites Papa Bird. “Remember that pizza we found in the phone booth on Thirty-Eighth Street?” he asks, his eyes glazing over with fond memories.

  “Oh boy, do I!” Baby Bird interjects.

  “Much better than this pizza we’re eating right now,” says Mama Bird definitively.

  And so on.

  After my Slice Harvest with Caroline and Leah, I had an hour to kill before meeting my friend Milo after he got out of work, so I decided to sit in a park and read my Samuel Delany novel. I looked forward to it. Sitting and reading in parks has been a favorite activity of mine since I was a teenager, when I would perch on a bench with a Kerouac novel or a book of Rilke poems angled conspicuously so that passersby might see how cool I was. I sat and stared at garbage prose and poetry in the hopes that someone interesting would start a conversation with me about it and I could say something precocious. These days I care far more about what I’m reading than what people will think of what I’m reading. I like to read outside, because it’s a true test of a good book. If it can draw me in despite the myriad distractions and stimuli available outdoors in Manhattan at any given moment, it’s definitely worth my time. A block from the park it started pouring rain, so I ducked into a McDonald’s where I knew I could sit anonymously and read undisturbed for an hour.

  Ten pages into my chapter, I was yanked out of the elaborate civilization that Delany had carefully crafted for me by a cacophony of screams. I looked up and saw a solitary gentleman wearing nothing but a pair of forest-green sweatpants and an NYPD baseball cap berating everyone who was trying to walk out of the fast-food store—another Ghost of Christmas Future. He was a bedraggled man of about fifty, though he may have only been a haggard thirty for all I knew. He stood in the doorway like a defensive lineman on a football field, screaming “CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHERE THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ARE?” or “I WORK FOR THE CITY!” at no one in particular while pointing at the acronym embroidered on his hat. I felt an overwhelming sympathy for him. I wanted to give him a sweatshirt and something warm to eat, maybe walk him over to Callen Lorde Community Health Center for a psychiatric evaluation. But more than that, I felt terror for myself. This man was the embodiment of all my deepest fears. I felt like I was only a few poor choices, a few slight missteps away from myself standing barefoot, shouting at strangers in the foyer of a McDonald’s. He brought together all of the fears that came with every hangover, which I tried to stave off with varying degrees of success. I’m sure this man hadn’t always been such a wreck. But he had Gone There one day and never came back.

  I spent the next forty minutes trying to pay attention to my book through the racket. No one in the McDonald’s made even the slightest attempt to eject him, and no one walking by engaged him. Everyone ignored him. Here he was, making a spectacle of himself but remaining entirely invisible at the same time—the ultimate magician’s illusion. As I packed my bag and got ready to leave, I steeled myself for confrontation, wondering whether I would say anything, if I would try to have a conversation. As I approached the door, I watched the man lean over to scream his desperate question into the face of a child of no more than ten, who didn’t even bat an eye. I watched him turn around and holler in the face of a biker walking in the door. He swiveled again when he heard my footsteps approaching, looked me up and down, smiled, and gave me a nod that said, “Hey, brother,” as if he knew me. I nodded back.

  So many moments happened that could’ve been my bottom but weren’t. The time I ate half a dozen Klonopins because I was so drunk I kept forgetting I had taken one already and then took some mystery pill, I think maybe methadone, that I had traded my neighbor a beer for; the time I was biking around, drunk out of my mind, wearing headphones and running red lights, and then an SUV driver slammed on his brakes and barely didn’t hit me, and the only reason he hit those brakes in time was because he heard me screaming along to the chorus of “It’s Late” by Queen before he ever saw me; any of the times I ended up in the hospital from wrecking my bike while drunk; driving drunk home from Jamie’s funeral because I had to do eight hundred shots at the shitty Long Island biker bar next door before I could cry; puking in the bathroom at my grandma’s tiny apartment on Thanksgiving morning while my mom was having a meltdown because she was watching her own mother die slowly before her eyes and she was powerless in the face of it, and instead of being there for her I was sweating like crazy, hoping she was too distraught and distracted to notice. And even all those moments are pretty PG-13 for the real rock bottoms we’ve all seen in TV and movies. Hell, those moments are PG-13 compared to those some of the shit friends of mine who still drink and do drugs have made it through unfazed.

  As enticing as it is for narrative purposes to try to find a bottom to refer to, there just isn’t one. (If you ever hear me mention “my bottom,” you can rest assured I’m only talking about the butt in my pants.) My alcoholism, which continued well past the moment when I finally recognized it, was far more mundane than that. Luckily, I found my way up and out eventually—­thanks in part to my Pizza Quest, which had, at this point, actually hit bottom.

  Pizza Suprema, 413 Eighth Avenue

  CHAPTER 8

  Blue Rose Deli

  Pizza like this is ruining America. Well, pizza like this and Walmart and the Religious Right and the Prison-Industrial Complex and the Military-Industrial Complex and on and on and on. Fuck it—America was ruined from the get-go, but at least New York’s all right, and this pizza is ruining New York.

  —Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 5, “Twenty-Third to Forty-Second Streets,” visited on May 26, 2010

  Leaving the McDonald’s, I walked over to Times Square to pick up Milo from the patent office so I could borrow a hundred dollars to take Tina out for our three-month anniversary. (“Tina” is an abbreviation for “Christina,” as if you didn’t figure that out.) Milo and I have been friends since we were thirteen. And in the community of Punk, which is just as much a family as it is a gang, Milo is my Better Twin. We have very similar mannerisms, though he is generally more successful and productive than I am, and more capable of dealing with the intricacies of life. He’s an Actual Mathematician with a degree from MIT, who works as a patent agent and has managed to hold the same cool-ass job for the past decade despite living in wild pun
k houses and partying relentlessly for years, whereas I’m a “writer” who dropped out of college and has been fired from or quit a string of service jobs. Milo is a man who has only one flaw, and you won’t believe what it is: he doesn’t like pizza.

  He would certainly not agree with that self-deprecating assessment, of course, and nor do I, at least not always. But that’s how it feels sometimes, and that’s definitely how it felt when I was meeting him to borrow a hundred bucks to take my girlfriend out to dinner.

  Anyway, after meeting Milo, I dipped into some shitty Irish pub and had two shots of well whiskey in quick succession before getting on the train. I went home and tried to read, dozed off, and suddenly awoke with the realization that I was running the risk of being late for dinner. And I hadn’t gotten flowers yet! I checked my phone—Tina hadn’t called. There was still time.

  I threw on my clothes and jumped on my bike. All the flower shops were closed, but after a quick rummage in the garbage bags out front I had a basket full of flowers. Dumpster flowers are cooler anyway. I arranged them into a series of bouquets tied together with shredded plastic and ducked into a bar. I got a shot and a beer, drank the shot right away, and was taking my first sip of beer when my phone buzzed with a text from Tina.