Some time around five thirty or six, I suspect, I let myself out of the bar and headed home, though I don’t remember locking up or leaving or walking the few blocks to my house. I just know that at seven that morning I woke up slumped against my apartment door with my keys in my hand. My next-door neighbor’s door was open and her kids, who must have been on their way to school, were staring at me wide-eyed. She lifted her children over my prone body one at a time, gave me an admonishing glare, and headed down the stairs. I let myself into my apartment and passed out on my kitchen floor for the next ten or so hours.
I woke up to about ninety million missed calls and text messages. They started out in basic “WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM” territory, but they eventually made their way into the “hi are you alive? are you okay???” zone. I wiped the dirt off my cheek, rolled a cigarette, and braced myself to call Christina.
The phone rang. She answered but said nothing.
“Hi. Hey, listen, I’m alive. Sorry. I got really drunk after we fought.”
“. . .”
“I know you’re mad. You have every right to be mad. I’m sorry I got mad back. That was stupid.”
“. . .”
“I was drunk. I know that’s a problem. I’ll stop drinking at work, but really, this job is so much better than working delivery. I understand if you’re uncomfortable, but hopefully we can talk about it.”
“. . .”
“I just . . . What are you thinking? I’d like to have a conversation about this. I’m really sorry.”
“. . .”
“How are we supposed to talk about this if you won’t talk? Just tell me what you’re thinking. Please.”
“. . .”
“PLEASE!”
She took a deep breath. “YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT I’M THINKING? I’M THINKING YOU’RE A FUCKING ASSHOLE LIAR IS WHAT I’M THINKING. WHAT ELSE ARE YOU LYING ABOUT?”
And she hung up.
I started to consider that maybe I should stop drinking for good.
The labyrinth
CHAPTER 9
Amadeus Pizzeria
This slice was so soggy that when I folded it over it did that thing where it looks half like a neck bandana and half like a butthole. It tasted like a butthole, too. Just don’t go here.
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 5, “Twenty-Third to Forty-Second Streets,” visited on July 17, 2010
Around this time I found myself listening to “Two-Way Street” by Slick Rick every morning. On the hook, he raps, “If goodness is what you’re filling your soul with and you’re looking for a woman you can chill and grow old with, who keeps no secrets (like who she creeps with): realize early it’s a two-way street, kid.” Now, Ricky the Ruler might not be the most sterling example of antipatriarchal thinking, but in this instance, he nailed it. If you’re not being honest and up-front with your partner, how can you expect your partner to be open and honest with you? I knew I needed to get my shit together. Not just for Tina, but for myself.
I still didn’t quit drinking altogether, but I signed up for a moderation management website, and every night I would log in and chart how many drinks I’d had on a spreadsheet. If I hadn’t had any, that day’s number appeared in an inspiring green; if I had between one and four drinks (ostensibly no more than one per hour), the number was a forgiving blue; and if I had more than four, the number glared a reproachful red.
I didn’t like to see the red, so I used tricks: I’d take a Percocet or Klonopin to slightly augment the drinks I was having. Or I’d go to the bar at two thirty in the morning and have all four of my drinks in an hour and a half. It was still only four drinks that day! One night I got to the bar just in time to see a drinking buddy, Josh, show up. It was sometime around two. He had a job as a cook and had been at work all night, whereas I had been pacing my apartment staring at my watch since ten p.m., waiting until it was late enough to justify going to the bar.
We hugged and sat down at the bar together. I bought a round, he bought a round, I bought a round, he bought a round. As I was buying the fifth, I unconsciously muttered “Red five” under my breath.
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked me.
“What the hell does what mean?”
“Red five.”
I hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud, and I was a little surprised. “Oh, it’s nothing—it’s just this dumb moderation thing I’m doing where I log how many drinks I have on a website, and if it’s more than four, the number comes up red. It’s so arbitrary.” I was getting myself worked up. “I mean, who has only four drinks?”
He was appalled. “Four drinks?! What if you go to a barbecue?”
“What if I go to a show?”
“What if you go on a date?”
“What if I’m out dancing?”
“What if you had a hard day at work?”
I paused compassionately. “Did you have a hard day at work?”
“Sure did.”
“Wanna do a shot?”
“Sure do.”
So I ordered us some nice whiskey. We touched our glasses, drank our liquor, and leaned back in our chairs, satisfied. Neither of us spoke for a few minutes.
“You know,” he interjected into the silence before pausing to sip his beer ruminatively, “it’s kinda bullshit that neither one of us can imagine going out and having fun without having more than four drinks.”
“I know.” I had been thinking the same thing, but when Josh said it, I knew it was true. I thought about going home. I mean, I liked Josh—we had good conversational chemistry, and he liked to drink, but we’d already been hanging out for an hour or so; wasn’t that enough? I could go home right then if I wanted to, but what was I gonna do there—look at the internet? At least here I was interacting with a human being who was right in front of my face. “I mean, I know it’s bullshit or whatever, but you wanna do another shot?”
He nodded his head yes.
A few weeks later on a hot July afternoon, 220 slices since Slice Harvester began, I met my friends Eliza and BBC (which stands for Big Brother Chris) to eat pizza. Of the two, I had gotten to know Eliza first. We’d been drunk and done drugs together at parties and shows, definitely had some wild times and shared some best friends, but at some point we were both trying to help our respective BFFs kick dope and would hang out at the falafel place she was working at and kvetch to each other, because we didn’t want to put too much pressure on our friends but we needed an outlet to process all those feelings that come with someone you love and care about lying to you all the time. I don’t need you to point out the irony. I’m right there with you.
But it wasn’t all grim. Eliza and I ate a lot of pizza and Chinese food together. In fact, the first time I met BBC for real was when I tagged along for a slice with him and Eliza. He’s maybe a year or two older than me, but he definitely had that “cool senior” vibe, along with the greasiest hair I had ever seen. I’ve always been intensely drawn to older boys with long, greasy hair. I don’t know why, but tall, dark, mysterious greaseballs have always seemed like the gatekeepers to everything awesome. It probably all goes back to Jordan Catalano. Jared Leto turning out to be a weird Dad Rocker and not the ultimate Mainstream Outsider Cool Guy is basically my generation’s 9/11.
Whatever; greasy weirdos are great in general, but BBC in particular is incredible. BBC fact list: he went to every punk show and just, like, lurked around looking so cool but not really talking to anyone; he sang in a band called Tender Wizards (RIGHT?!) who kind of sounded like the Peechees—guitar overdriven till the separate chords were barely discernible insistent drums, a loping bass line holding it all together, and on top of it all, BBC’s strident screams about god only knows what; he lived at the punk house but secretly also had an apartment upstate because he had a job there as a physicist helping to build a particle collider. That last one is still so unbelievable to me. Greaseball Rock’n’Roll Physicist is the new Hot American Dude archetype. Y’all can have that one for free.
The day we went to eat pizza was a red-number morning, but I had been out with Eliza and BBC the night before, so at least we were all experiencing the dreary stages of a hangover. As some form of cosmic punishment for not adhering to my moderation routine, it ended up taking us almost two hours to get to Midtown from my Williamsburg apartment, a trip that normally took a trim twenty-five minutes. Over the course of those hours, walking between stations, sitting on trains that stalled out in tunnels, waiting on sweaty platforms, we all developed monstrous appetites. But when we finally got above ground and saw our first destination, right outside the subway station, we were decidedly not excited.
The place was called Pizza Suprema (generic Italian-sounding name), and it had a giant banner hanging above the entrance:
* * *
Awarded
“One of the 10
BEST PIZZAS IN N.Y.C.”
* * *
And when I say giant, I’m talking six feet tall and, like, thirty feet wide. It covered up two windows of the apartment above the pizzeria. It was positively ostentatious. And it also seemed too ambivalent a boast to warrant such a huge sign. Like, who awarded that? Had they eaten at every pizzeria? The whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way.
We walked inside, and it looked like any run-of-the-mill pizza parlor. There were a ton of people, but it was lunchtime, and we were a few blocks from Port Authority, right across the street from Penn Station, so the crowd didn’t seem exceptional in the least. I ordered our slice from the guy, and he grabbed a piece of pizza from a pie sitting under the Plexiglas, plopped it on a tray, and slid it over to me.
We trudged to our table, expecting nothing special. I took my first bite and passed the slice to Eliza, who took a bite and passed it over to BBC. By the time it got back to me, we had all chewed and swallowed our first taste and were looking at each other, jaws agape. This was the best pizza I had eaten in years. I took another bite without saying anything and passed it on. We ate the whole slice in astonished silence. When we finished, a quick consensus was reached, and we ordered another. At this point in Slice Harvesting, I had eaten at over two hundred different pizzerias, and I had never gotten a second slice. I had come close at a couple of places, but it never seemed worth it to jeopardize my appetite. Pizza Suprema was the exception.
The slice was everything I ever wanted. The dough was thin and crisp, perfectly salted, and crunched when it folded. The sauce and cheese created a delicious flavor combination and melded in perfect quantities. And there was that special something—that New York magic that makes a Ramones song timeless and a Screeching Weasel song boring. It is impossible to characterize in words—a mystical, modern-day witchery.
Feelings that are similar to eating magic pizza: when music perfectly matches the weather or your mood (Billie Holiday on a trembly tape deck when it’s rainy; Cam’ron out a car window at the beginning of summer, drinking a beer on the stoop with your pals with Thee Headcoatees on the jambox, Lee Moses on spring evenings, etc.); the sense of relief and/or exultation felt when you’ve been having an ambiguous “not a date but not not a date” hangout with someone you’ve been crushing on and tension has been mounting all day, and then you finally hold hands or have some other affirmation that The Feeling Is Mutual; finding a rare record or book or stamp or baseball card or shirt or coin or whatever the fuck you collect in a thrift store or at a garage sale or whatever; when you look so sharp right after a haircut and you got on your new black jeans that fit just right and you know you’re going to be the flyest person in whatever space you’ll be in for at least the next couple of hours, if not the next few days. What these disparate moments share is the feeling of everything falling into place, the feeling that regardless of all the external bummers of day-to-day living, things are at least momentarily going your way; the fates are smiling down on you. Maybe your feelings aren’t the same as mine; maybe for you eating a perfect slice feels like stealing home in your softball league, your kid getting straight As, or slam-dunking the Henderson account. You get the point, though. The right slice makes it all feel okay.
Eliza, BBC, and I didn’t have another transcendent slice after Suprema. In fact, the slice directly across the street at Amadeus Pizzeria was especially horrid. But the day certainly stayed interesting. We ate at a couple of crap places, totally unexceptional slices. Nothing worth mentioning until we gooned our way into the underground shopping mall that sits below Penn Station. There’s something very sci-fi about being in this literally subterranean place of commerce. I’ve always liked places of transience—train stations, bus depots, rest stops, on-ramps, freight yards—places where it feels like, if I were desperate or courageous enough, I could start my life all over again from scratch somewhere else, simply by boarding whatever means of conveyance was at hand.
Sometimes when I’m feeling crunchy I think that maybe when I’m in those transient places I’m especially in tune with the universe, that I can feel things that not everyone else feels, that I can pick up an extrasensory wavelength that only certain people are privy to. In these locales, these Between Places, I feel comfort and peace in the lack of stability. So much frenetic energy buzzing all around, and here I am, stationary, watching. I could leave, too, if I so desired—just walk up to a window and buy a ticket to somewhere. Travel imbues everyone and everything with a sense of vast potential. Everyone could be anyone. Everything could be anything.
So it is at Penn Station. And inside Penn Station is a sprawling mall. There are nearly a hundred shops and restaurants, four banks, and access to six different transportation services that could ultimately ferry you to anywhere in the US or Canada. I don’t think anyone actually comes inside Penn Station specifically to eat or shop; I think the incidental traffic of the three hundred thousand people who pass through there on any given day is enough to sustain so many businesses. This makes for an interesting dynamic. Since no particular place is anything more than an impulsive destination for the various comers and goers, even amid the chaos of commuters there’s a feeling of being on a slow, casual stroll. “Should we eat at Columbo Yogurt or Zaro’s Bread Basket? Maybe we’ll just grab something quick from Planet Smoothie and have a real meal when we get where we’re going.” So many options! But eating in Penn Station is also a game of chance. The place is labyrinthine and huge. What will you be offered in the course of your walk from the entrance to your platform? Dare you risk missing your train and venture out of the way to find something better? Every trip through Penn Station is a throw of the dice.
My friends and I, however, had a destination: Don Pepe Pizza, which was everything I could’ve wanted a pizzeria inside a science-fiction mall to be: neon lights everywhere, and some of the most bizarre humans I’ve ever seen camped out at the tables seemingly since before time began. One dude, an older gentleman with unintentional dreadlocks wearing white velour pants, a white down coat, white Timberlands, and a white knit cap (though all of his gear had taken on the same pervasive grayish-brown hue that my white T-shirts had, a patina the Punx lovingly refer to as “permadirt”), looked like an urban yeti. He had various dusty tomes spread out before him—multiple volumes of an encyclopedia, an art book, some sheaves of photocopied paper—and was taking notes in what looked like the Enochian alphabet. And the pizza was good to boot! It had nothing on Suprema—the ratios were a bit off—but overall, the ingredients were decent, the slice was warm and enjoyable, and, most important, it satisfied us.
There is something very special about Don Pepe Pizza. It’s a place I feel should exist only in my dreams or in the dystopian future presented in a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel. But it is real, one of the many unsung wonders of New York City. Step right up to the sci-fi pizzeria! Marvel at the Urban Yeti and his mysterious, hermetic alphabet! Witness the Slice Harvester defy the laws of god and man by eating his tenth consecutive slice of pizza! Smell the odor produced by three hundred thousand commuters! See the Adult Frat Babies, the Modern-Day Sweathogs, the whole r
owdy gang! Enter if you thirst for adventure, but enter at your own risk!
By Halloween, Tina and I had patched things up a bit, and she took a trip to visit the Good Witch of Philadelphia for a weekend. I took the train into the city and waited around with her for the bus, like a good boyfriend does. After watching her depart, I wondered what to do with myself, and then I realized I was only a few blocks from Pizza Suprema. I decided to head back there to see if the slice was as good as I remembered.
When I got there, I noticed that they had blown up my review into a huge poster and plastered it in the front window, facing the street. This was the first time, as far as I knew, that a pizza place had publicly acknowledged my work. I walked in, wondering whether they’d spot me. The place was bustling, and there was a guy behind the counter who was clearly the owner. I approached him and asked, “You own this place?”
He looked me over. “Yeah, why?”
“Well, I wrote the review that you have blown up in the window.”
He literally dropped the soda he was holding, sprinted out from behind the counter, and lifted me up in a bear hug. After a second he realized that it was maybe not polite to lift a grown man whom he didn’t even know off the ground. He set me down gently and put out his hand to shake. “I’m Joe. This was my father’s place. I knew you’d come back.”
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