Slice Harvester

by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf

  off the train

  I slammed the rest of my beer, ran outside, hopped on my bike, and sprinted toward the subway. As I got closer, I pulled out a couple of tulips and held them in one hand, so that when Tina spotted me she’d see my raggedy ass on my raggedy-ass bike holding out some raggedy-ass trash flowers, and if she didn’t think I was the best boyfriend, she would be crazy.

  I took her to the fancy French restaurant in my neighborhood that I always thought was for yuppies, but it turned out to be really good. Romantic dinner ahoy! I ordered us a bottle of wine and some escargot, which Christina had never eaten before. She got the coq au vin and I got a steak, and we ate and drank and looked into each other’s eyes, and everyone was in love and the world was okay.

  We finished our entrees and ordered dessert. As the waiter was leaving, I filled up my wineglass and realized the carafe was empty. I looked up at Christina with a mischievous glint in my eye. “Should we get another bottle?”

  She didn’t say anything at first. I thought maybe she didn’t hear me over the other customers and the music and the rapturous delight of eating such a fine meal with such an awesome dude. But then she answered coldly, “Do whatever you want.”

  I couldn’t understand what was going on. We were supposed to be having a romantic dinner. We were pretending to be normal, square adults celebrating an anniversary, and it was supposed to be fun and silly, and why was she acting like this? I was starting to panic, as I am apt to do. “What’s wrong?” I asked a little too loudly.

  “I’m still on my first glass, Colin,” she said, her voice flat and sterile. “You drank the whole bottle yourself.”

  “So we won’t get another one! No big deal. We’ll eat some dessert, have an espresso, and then go get a nightcap at the bar. Or we can just go home. I don’t care! We don’t need more wine. I’m sorry I’m drinking so fast! I’m nervous. I don’t need to drink anymore.”

  “It’s not just the wine, Colin. You’re drunk all the time. You puke every morning. I think you have a problem.”

  I was furious. “How dare you! This is ridiculous. I might drink a lot, but I don’t miss work, and I keep up with Slice Harvester. I’m fine. I think you’re the one with the problem,” I shouted.

  Dessert arrived, punctuating my angry outburst. Tina got up, put on her coat, and left the restaurant. I finished our crème brûlée in silence, paid the bill, and went to the bar alone.

  The day after Tina’s and my failed date night, I was scheduled to eat pizza with my friend Jonathan Tesnakis, a great writer from Staten Island who lives in San Francisco. I wanted to cancel because I was hungover and sad. Slice Harvesting wasn’t gonna fix things with Tina, but I realized that if I stayed at home, I would get drunk, watch Valley Girl, and then listen to “Another Girl, Another Planet” on repeat till I cried myself to sleep. I decided that it would be better for everyone if I actually did what I was supposed to do instead of lying around feeling sorry for myself like a big whiny baby. So I trooped into the city and met up with Jonathan.

  It was good that I went, because we ended up eating at what was one of my favorite pizza places, and it really helped me dig my way out of the funk I had put myself in. Siena Pizza is a totally nondescript storefront right across from the Port Authority. When meeting out-of-town friends who arrive by bus, it’s often the first place I’ll take them. The slice isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty damn close, and it’s nice to fill yourself up with the loving warmth of New York City first thing upon arrival.

  When I was nineteen, I spent a week in Baltimore hanging out with these totally rugged, White Rasta gangbangers. I had spent time in that town as a young teenager and had always meant to go back, because it’s so grimy and strange. In the summer of 2002 this guy Doug, whom I smoked weed with, mentioned that he was going home to Baltimore, and I don’t remember whether I invited myself or he invited me, but we both went back to see his crew. They were these totally wild boys, small-time criminals, living crazy lives on the outskirts of town. This was toward the end of my teenage all-day-every-day weed smoking years, so I was still puffing hella blunts, but it was starting to wear me out and make me miserable. I think that Sunday morning in Baltimore when all those thugs got me stoned and then had a White Rasta bible discussion was the last time I ever felt comfortable being high around strangers.

  I was grateful to have been afforded the opportunity to observe someone else’s weird life for that week, but I was really glad to go back to NYC. I ended up walking from Doug’s parents’ house to the bus station in downtown Baltimore. About halfway there a downpour started, a fitting end to a strange week for sure, but I spent the whole bus ride shivering under the air conditioner, soaked to the bone.

  As soon as I got off the bus I practically ran out of Port Authority and made a beeline for Siena. That slice hit the spot so perfectly. When I munched that incredible pizza and felt its warmth spread throughout my body, I knew things were going to be different from now on. I had changed somehow, but I was safe, and I was home. Sure enough, I more or less stopped smoking weed after that.

  My slice with Jonathan was just as good as the one I remembered. Heading home that day, I thought about the cycles my life had taken: smoking weed all the time in high school until I more or less quit when I was nineteen, at which point I started getting drunk pretty regularly. Maybe it was time for that to end, too.

  A few days later I sucked it up and apologized to Christina for acting like such a baby, acknowledged that she was right about my drinking being problematic, and promptly began to lie constantly about where I was and what I was doing in order to avoid having to actually change my bummer lifestyle. This, dear reader, is what we call “being proactive.”

  Sometimes lying can be fun and harmless, like when you tell some lady who picks you up while hitchhiking that your parents are Orthodox Jews and your dad owns a Food Lion outside Louisville and your mom is a cantor at one of the only synagogues in the area, and that you went to high school in New Jersey, where you lived with your aunt and uncle while your parents were going through an ugly divorce because your mom cheated on your dad with the rabbi, and that’s why you don’t have a southern accent. The point is, I may have done that once or twice. But up until the aftermath of the dinner debacle with Tina, I had never lied about anything serious or lied to a partner.

  It’s fucked-up how easy it turned out to be. The more I lied, the more natural it became. And the more I lied, the more lies I had to tell. What started as a simple act of deception suddenly became a labyrinth. I was King Minos, and my drinking was the Minotaur that I was desperately trying to hide. It started out with little things. If Tina and I went out for a drink together and she went to the bathroom, I would quickly order a round of shots for us and then drink both of them before she got back. If we were sitting at a table with friends, I would always offer to go up and buy the next round, because that way I could secretly slam a whiskey without anyone noticing.

  I did honestly curtail my drinking, because I realized I couldn’t be puking in the morning when Tina and I slept in the same bed. To make up for it, on the nights we weren’t together, I would rage twice as hard. When I realized that I couldn’t call her to say good night at seven a.m. when I was leaving the bar, I started waiting to go to the bar until after she had gone to sleep, or leaving the bar for ten minutes, going to my quiet house to call and pretend that I was going to sleep at two or three, and then going back to the bar. These were little things, but they added up.

  Eventually I started spending so much time at the bar that they asked me if I wanted to work there. It was a definite step up from being a delivery boy—easily twice as much pay, I got to work indoors, and I was expected to drink at work (!!!)—but I knew Tina would never approve of my working there. This problem had an easy solution: I just didn’t tell her. Technically, I never lied about it. I told her I was working different days and that my hours had changed, which was the truth; I just happened to never mention that my job had changed as
well. I talked around it. When she asked how work had been, I gave noncommittal, one-word answers. I described interactions with customers but implied that they were people I was delivering food to, though I never said it outright. I left a space for her to fill in with the knowledge that she already had, and I convinced myself that it was okay, because though I wasn’t being honest, I wasn’t exactly being dishonest, either.

  All this lying was really hard on me, and to cope with it, I started drinking much more. Not that I was getting drunker—I had actually finally learned a modicum of self-control and had stopped blacking out every night. Instead, I began to stay slightly drunk for most of the day. I was never into beer for breakfast, but I quickly grew to love White Horse Scotch in my coffee. And I drank a lot of coffee. This lifestyle of constant anxiety coupled with slight drunkenness gave me heinous, consistent diarrhea. I’m sure it didn’t help that I basically ate only pizza, Dumpstered bagels, and sardine sandwiches.

  I made up for all this by being the best boyfriend ever when I wasn’t lying about being drunk or doing drugs with strangers. I brought her flowers all the time. When her lease ran out I borrowed a friend’s van and helped her move. When she lost her job at the burger restaurant I got her a job at the coffee shop my friend Johnny ran. I cooked her meals, I bought her groceries, I got her cute little presents from the dollar store or the thrift shop all the time. I ingratiated myself to her friends, so that if I ever got found out, they would hopefully convince her to stay with me. I built her a really cute bike. I got an old frame from Marcia and then spent weeks riding around at night with bike tools in my bag, lifting parts from the many obviously abandoned bikes cluttering up the telephone poles and parking meters of our fair city. I may have accidentally stolen some parts from some bikes that possibly weren’t abandoned, but never anything big.

  My behavior was clearly intolerable by any standard, but it is especially hypocritical for me because I spent the better part of my twenties working with Support New York, a punk political collective engaged in accountability work with accused sexual assaulters within the activist community. That’s a really complicated sentence, maybe, but the gist of it is very simple: the tentacles of patriarchy have been codified in our judicial system to the point where it has become difficult for survivors of sexual violence to receive actual justice. Couple this with the inherent distrust of the state found within radical communities, and the fact that patriarchal socialization leaves even the most ardent anarchist susceptible to unconscious proliferation of abusive behavior, and what you’ve got is a space that needs to be filled, and SNY stepped in to do that.

  At the time that my terrible behavior with Christina began, I was in the midst of helping facilitate three concurrent accountability processes with three different abusive men. I certainly felt a sense of disgust with myself, chastising these people for behaviors I was participating in, but I also let my participation in forms of feminist activism in other parts of my life obscure the harm I was causing to my partner. How did I get away with this? By being slightly drunk all the time and pretending that I was passively swayed by uncontrollable outside forces rather than being an active participant in making decisions that had outcomes and impacts in my life and the lives of those around me.

  Just to really bring this point home: this stuff was All My Fault. I was behaving like a manipulative piece of shit, even if I pretended I was just “doing what I had to do.” But Slice Harvester was going well, at least. Somehow, through it all, I never faltered in my obligation to pizza reviewing. In fact, my writing became the one part of my life that wasn’t stressful. It was an escape from the persistent, nagging fears of my day-to-day, and a chance for me to have unself-conscious fun, to be playful. As I continued to make my way through Midtown, eating unexceptional slices and finding clever ways to describe how gross or boring they were, the crummy pizza didn’t even sadden me anymore. I knew I would make it downtown one day, and that somewhere below Fourteenth Street there was a perfect slice of pizza waiting for me.

  During this time I did some really fun pizza eating, too. I went Slice Harvesting in Times Square with local folk musician and comic-book artist Jeffrey Lewis, who finally convinced me to institute a uniform rating system for all my reviews. Characteristically, I decided on a totally counterintuitive system. All pizzerias would receive a rating between zero and eight slices, with zero slices being the absolute worst a slice could possibly get, four being totally average, and eight being utter perfection. Had my rating system been in place for my previous reviews, for instance, Hell’s Kitchen Pizza would have received a half slice because it was so gross I barfed it up, The World Famous Little Italy would’ve received a four because it’s inoffensively average, and Gino’s would’ve received a seven for being nearly perfect.

  I also went out on a Slice Harvest with the band Hot New Mexicans, five touring punks from Athens, Georgia. On that particular day I was joined by my kid sister and my old friends Ella and Kevers as well—nine people in all, including me. I learned that there is such a thing as too many people on a pizza mission. We stood out far more in the pizza places because we were such a large group, it was difficult to take notes because there was always more than one person talking at a time, and our whole day was derailed for about forty-five minutes because one of the Georgians got lost in the subway. Oy yoy yoy. At least I learned a valuable lesson.

  At one point I didn’t update my blog for, like, two weeks or something, because Tina and I went to Miami so I could meet her mom. During that time I got an e-mail from this dude Thomas, a frequent commenter on my blog, that said, “Hey, where you been? I hope you’re okay.” I told him I was and thanked him for caring. He wrote back:

  Not just me, Bro. Last year I was on a plane from Singapore to NY—I started talking to this guy working in the backwaters of Malaysia. He was visiting NY for the first time and looking forward to getting pizza.

  I asked him if he needed recommendations. He said no, he knew where to go because he’d been reading this blog from some guy who was eating at every pizza place—your blog.

  Think about that! Some dude in Malaysia was reading my blog. I know that’s probably normal for all these Tumblr teens, but for me, a humble suburban punk rocker living out my dreams in the Big City, that was just mind-blowing.

  And listen, things with Tina weren’t all bad. It might seem that way, but, like, I did all this crummy stuff and she didn’t dump me. She stuck around for a reason. Maybe we each thought the other was an ultimate babe. Maybe we had mutually compatible pheromones. Maybe we had both just been looking for someone to spend time with who wanted to wear weird wigs and lip-sync to Abba songs. Who knows? Whatever the reason, we built a real love on that rickety foundation. I’m talkin’ ’bout a real love—someone to set my heart free.

  The reason I’m telling you this is because, while that stuff is cool, it’s not very exciting. So where’s the drama, you might be wondering. Where’s the excitement at this point in our story? It’s certainly not in the moments of pure, sweet joy. It’s not in the synchronicity of our personalities, nor in the electricity of our touch. It’s not in the late-night bus and bike rides to see each other, nor in the moments stolen from sleep. It’s definitely not in how well we danced together or how it felt when we kissed.

  That’s not the stuff you want to hear. You want to hear about me making her cry, over the phone, on her birthday. You want to hear about her throwing a steel-toed boot through my window, toppling my bookshelves like some two-bit thug from a Walter Moseley novel one day while we were screaming at each other. You want to hear about the time she threatened to leave and I freaked out and cried and stomped and shouted and started tattooing her name on my arm with India ink and a sewing needle duct taped to a pen I stole from the bank. She made me stop because it was clearly off-center, and eventually we were both on the floor laughing. You can still see the faint C on my right wrist, like a war memorial.

  The night Tina found out I was working at the bar,
she didn’t believe me at first. See, what happened was, it was a slow night. By two a.m., there was just one lady in there drinking. At one point the two of us went out front for a cigarette. Normally I would smoke in the back, but since I was working alone I had to go out front so that if a new customer showed up, I could get back behind the bar. You get it.

  Anyway, there I was, standing out on the street with my one customer, making some bullshit small talk. I was pretty drunk by this point in the night and was just kinda counting down the hours till I could go home and pass out. Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden an entire bicycle came flying across the sidewalk to hit the rollgate of the vegetable stand next to me. Imagine my further surprise when I noticed that it was the bike I had just built for Christina.

  She was biking past on her way home from a friend’s house when she saw me standing outside the bar talking to some lady. She knew I was supposed to be at work, and so she assumed, since I had lied to her about being at work, that I was secretly dating this other woman. Then she did what any sensible person would do when they saw their boyfriend on a date with someone else: she got off her bike, lifted it over her head, and threw it at me.

  My customer quickly shuffled back into the bar. I tried to explain the situation—that I wasn’t on a date, that I was at work, that I worked at the bar now and had been meaning to tell her but it kept slipping my mind, and this was for the best and I was making more money and I didn’t have to work outside anymore and another excuse, and another explanation, and it goes on and on forever.

  She was mad that I lied to her. That’s reasonable. You find out your alcoholic boyfriend has been secretly working at a bar, maybe you get a little mad. I was really drunk, though, and I wanted her to just “be cool,” which I think basically means “don’t have any opinions and be okay with me doing whatever I want.” And when she wouldn’t “be cool,” I got mad. Much like the night she tried to talk to me about my drinking being problematic, I felt uncomfortable and so I lashed out. “You think just because we’re dating you get to police everything I do? I don’t go around telling you how to live YOUR fucking LIFE, so don’t you DARE tell me how to live mine. Working at the bar makes sense, it’s the right thing, it’s good for me, and if you don’t like it, you can fuck off.” So she did. She flipped me the bird, got on her bike, and rode away. I went back into the bar and got incredibly wasted. My one customer left at three, and it didn’t look like anyone else was coming in, so I locked the door an hour early and drank all the whiskey in the universe.