Slice Harvester

by Colin Atrophy Hagendorf

  Before we got to ABC, we walked into the bodega on the corner of Clinton and Rivington and bought forties, which I was amazed they would sell to us without even asking to see our IDs. I told myself I played it cool, but honestly, the bodega guys wouldn’t have cared. No amount of playing it cool and pretending we looked grown-up could hide our baby faces.

  I think the Skabs were playing that day, though I could be mistaken. No matter whether they played, they’re the perfect band to stand in for my impressions of that whole punk scene back then. They were this terrifying vaudevillian street-punk band. The singer talked in a thick outer-borough accent but sang half the songs in Polish. Though it never materialized, the threat of violence hung ominously in the air for their entire set. They were fun and frightening, a fitting introduction to this subterranean world I desperately wanted to be a part of, although to be honest, I didn’t really pay attention to the bands I saw at ABC back then, even though I went there almost every Saturday. Mostly I ate pizza, drank forties, and did drugs.

  Remember that scene in Pinocchio where all the kids go to Pleasure Island and smoke cigars and play pool, and then eventually they grow donkey ears if they don’t leave? That’s what No Rio felt like (except that instead of donkey ears, you ended up with face tattoos if you stayed at ABC too long). It was awesome. For, like, five to seven hours every Saturday I was able to escape my mundane life in the suburbs and go to the city, where I was part of a ragtag gang of miscreants. Sure, I was too shy to really make any friends beyond the small crew of people I already knew, but it felt good just to be around a bunch of kids who also felt alienated by the world around us. And all that aside, it was a totally unsupervised place full of teens doing drugs and drinking, and there was loud, scary music and everyone looked like a cool freak. Who wouldn’t want to be part of that?

  There were a brief few years—let’s say between ages nineteen and twenty-one—when I fell out of love with punk and decided it was childish and that I should grow up. During that time I stopped going to ABC entirely. Those were dark days. I believed in nothing. I grew a pompadour.

  But around the time of that first Bent Haus show, I returned to the enveloping warmth of the Punx—my community, my gang, my family. Those among my new friends who had grown up around New York City had been at many of the same shows I had been to back in the day. We soon realized that none of us had talked to one another because we’d all been too shy or too drunk.

  In the face of increased police and fire department pressure, stemming, I believe, from fear brought on by the fire at the Great White show in Providence, the No Rio Hardcore Collective abandoned its laissez-faire attitude toward teenage substance use in mid-2003, the same year St. Marks Pizza closed. Apparently that was the year that my first New York vanished. The hardcore matinees were now (mostly) booze and drug free. In return for free entry into the show, I would sometimes volunteer to stand watch in the backyard, politely asking anyone who was drinking to pour out their beers or to drink them elsewhere. The irony of a guy who had spent most of his teenage years dribbling puke down the front of his shirt in that very same backyard telling new teenagers not to drink wasn’t lost on me, but the decision seemed prudent for the sustainability of the space, and that was my highest priority.

  Whenever I went to No Rio as a teenager I would get a slice from New Roma, the horrible pizza parlor on the corner of Delancey and Essex. It was a total disaster of a place, and the food was disgusting, but the slice cost only a dollar, and there was a certain savage quality to the clientele that I found quite thrilling and appealing. When I returned to No Rio in my early twenties, some of my new friends heard I had been getting slices there and, appalled, brought me to Mama’s pizza, a nice neighborhood joint around the corner on Clinton Street that served an absolutely ideal street slice—tangy, not-too-sweet sauce, crisp crust, good quality cheese, all working together in the delicate balance of ratios that separates a great slice from a mediocre one.

  In 2006, on the anniversary of Joey Ramone’s death, my old band Gloryhole played a set of Ramones covers at No Rio, and I invited my parents down to watch. I was twenty-three and had been playing in bands for almost ten years, but this was the first show I actually invited them to. After we played, when it got too weird to be hanging out with my mom and dad in the backyard of ABC, the site of so much of my teenage debauchery, we went around the corner to Mama’s for a slice.

  As we were talking, I mentioned my disdain for the current iteration of the Lower East Side, how inauthentic it seemed to me compared to the LES of my youth. Sure, it still presented itself as grimy, but it seemed disingenuous, like three-hundred-dollar jeans that are artfully stained with grease and dyes to look like the owner has been doing some kind of actual work in them.

  “Man, this part of town has fuckin’ changed in the past ten years, huh?” I said to my mom. “Remember when I was fifteen and you were scared for me to come here? Now Moby has a boutique tea shop around the corner!”

  “Yeah, I do remember,” she replied, “and it has changed, sure. But whose fault do you think that is?” She raised her eyebrows.

  I looked at her, puzzled, “NYU? Giuliani?” I shrugged my shoulders in befuddlement.

  “You, Colin. You and all your little friends coming down from the suburbs every Saturday to playact at being tough street kids. I know you guys thought you were so scary with your boots and Mohawks, but really you were just razing a clear path through a historically immigrant neighborhood for Moby to stroll down.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked that my mother, of all people, had leveled such a scathing and insightful criticism at my revolutionary subculture, so I didn’t say anything; I just stared down at my pizza.

  She put her hand on my shoulder. “Look, that’s just what happens in cities. Neighborhoods change, they metamorphose; they’re living things. I just want you to think about the part you play. Who can say if this change is for the worse or for the better?”

  I certainly couldn’t, although I knew it felt worse to me.

  By February 2011, 380 slices into the project, it was time for me to head down that way to review pizza. I decided to call Kevers, a nice kid from Bay Ridge whom I’ve been friends with for many years. In my punk family tree, Kevers is the cousin I’m closest to. We might not see each other all that often, but when we do it’s always a great time, and we remember why we’re related. He’s a little younger than me, and our teenage times at No Rio barely overlapped—although he does remember the days when drinking was still permitted and the backyard was a picturesque urban wasteland of teenage Mohawks and studded leathers.

  Kevers is interesting and hard to pin down, though I can say he is the most effortlessly punk guy I know. It’s not that he’s got big, spiky hair or crazy clothes on (although when I met him ten years ago he was wearing a pair of bondage pants, a tuxedo shirt, a bow tie, and a bowler), but his outlook and general attitude toward life are perfectly punk. I’m not sure how to put this succinctly or to describe this indelible “punkness” to a layperson. If you don’t get it already, you’re probably never going to; but let me just say this: never in my life have I met someone more willing to walk around for hours looking for copper to scrap. Shit, maybe that just made it even more inscrutable.

  Kevers has a Jewish father and an Irish-Catholic mother, just like me, and the weird, jumbled-up name—Kevin O’Connell-­Peller—that comes with the territory. This cross-pollination, it seems, is very typical of the outer boroughs. I’m not sure what facilitated so much interethnic breeding in New York in the seventies and eighties; maybe it’s as simple as different immigrant communities sharing the same neighborhoods. I do know that I like it. There’s something distinctly American, in a way I can be proud of, about all these mutts running around together making new families.

  When I met up with Kevers at the corner of Delancey and Essex, it was pouring rain, a gloomy and overcast day at the tail end of a piddling little winter. We were both incredibly hungover, a
nd thus hypercognizant of the stench of death and decay that lingered over everything and everyone in the city. We sat in the window of that horrid pizza shop from our youth, watching the pedestrians on their continuous march toward death.

  “I hate the future,” Kevers said, taking a drink from his scientifically enhanced water.

  And I was all, “That is, like, the foundation upon which everything we do is built! I wouldn’t expect you to even say it out loud. What makes you think you have to say something so obvious?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked around, sad but stalwart. “Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s sitting here looking out the window at an advertisement for a Chipotle BBQ Bacon Angus McSnack Wrap while I drink a Vitamin Water Formula Fifty and we talk about how fun things used to be when we were teenagers. Maybe it’s something else.”

  And then our slice came up and we both realized the real cause of our malaise. The future we hated so desperately in that moment was not the distant threat of corporate monoculture, not the frightening new weather patterns and what they foretold, but the more immediate future: the knowledge of how bad the pizza we were about to eat would actually be.

  And so we ate that piece of pizza, even though we knew it would be terrible. It was. Yet we survived, like we always did, and continued on through the gloom. We ate at a few pizzerias we’d never been to, none of them particularly exceptional. We were just waiting until we got to Mama’s, because that was our reward, our trusty ally waiting on Clinton Street.

  We had eaten many slices at Mama’s over the years, though our moments there had dwindled lately, as we both stopped spending so much time in Manhattan. The last time we had eaten there together was a year prior, on St. Patrick’s Day, and neither of us had been back since. That day, I had gone to Kevers’s grandmother Winnie’s apartment in Chelsea to have a raucous dinner with his whole clan. My grandmother had recently passed away, and I felt an urgent need to spend time with a rambunctious family in a tiny New York apartment. At Winnie’s house, all my emotional demands were met. After eating and hanging out with the family for a while, we noticed that we had drunk almost half of Winnie’s fifth of Philadelphia Blended Whiskey, and we decided to cut out and start walking home.

  We left the building and began to walk east, leaning on each other for support, chummy like two characters in a Flann O’Brien novel. After walking a few blocks, I pulled a bottle of cheap port from my backpack.

  “I bought this for your grandmother,” I said as I brandished the bottle.

  “Well, then why didn’t you give it to my grandmother?”

  “I forgot, I guess. Should I run back up?”

  “If you want.”

  “I don’t know, though. I mean, we already left; I wouldn’t want to leave twice. That’s not very dignified. And besides, other people may have left, too. What if I go back there and it’s just Winnie, and she’s watching TV or something and I disturb her, and she had been having a really perfect night and it was ending so well, and then all of a sudden I show up again and throw everything out of whack.”

  “I really don’t think she’d mind, Colin . . .”

  “Yeah, but what if she does? I think we should probably just drink it ourselves. Save her the trouble.”

  At this, Kevers grinned. “I think you’re probably right.”

  We pulled the cork and each took a taste.

  By the time we reached the base of the Williamsburg Bridge, we had finished the bottle, and despite our best efforts, no one had been willing to fight us. I knew I badly needed a pint of Old Grand-Dad from the liquor store on Delancey or I wouldn’t be able to make it through the nearly two-mile walk across the bridge, but Kevers pulled me aside on Clinton Street, pointed at Mama’s, and slurred, “Wait. Weeneepissa.”

  He was right. Neither of us had eaten in hours. We each got a slice and ate while standing in silence on the sidewalk. We devoured our meal, and when we finished eating I got my whiskey and we hit the bridge, and the rest of our night proceeded as you might expect, ending with both of us asleep on my stoop.

  For the entire afternoon we spent together eating pizza for Slice Harvester, we rhapsodized about that slice we’d had a year prior. We saved Mama’s for last because we knew it would be a nice contrast to our humble beginnings shoveling shit at New Roma. But when we approached, the facade was unrecognizable, and the sign read NONNA’S now. It was a similar-enough name, I guess—from mother to grandmother, from English to Italian. But nothing on the crisp, new awning held any of the schlubby charm of our old standby, and when we stepped inside, the décor was a faux-rustic Olive Garden disaster. It was clear that Mama’s was gone for good.

  I thought back to that slice a year earlier and asked the pizza man, “How long you guys been here?”

  “I dunno.” He looked up from the food he was preparing. “Two years, maybe.”

  “Are you sure?” I was startled. “I was here last year, and I could swear this was still Mama’s.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you been smokin’, pal, but Mama’s ain’t been here in a while.”

  The slice at Nonna’s was garbage. Maybe I was a little extra judgmental because I had been expecting a nostalgic favorite, but this piece of pizza was definitely, objectively no good. The cheese was the only acceptable thing about it, and that’s all it was, acceptable. There was no sauce to speak of, and the crust was not only flavorless but crumbled to bits on the third or fourth bite.

  And yeah, it’s upsetting to see another one of my youthful favorite pizzerias turn into some soulless dump with a crappy slice, but that’s just part of the ephemeral nature of New York. Sitting there with Kevers, I realized that even if the architecture and neighborhoods change, the people that you choose as your family are always gonna be there.

  The final slice

  CHAPTER 12

  Da Vinci Pizza

  All told, this slice was totally satisfying, though not mindblowing. But it was good, and I am happy to end on a positive note. I wouldn’t go out of my way for this slice, but I stand behind it. I’ll eat here the next time I spend an afternoon riding the ferry back and forth and reading. As we finished eating, Christina let out a huge belch, smiled, and said, “That was a burp of satisfaction.”

  —Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 7, “The Rest,” visited November 22, 2011

  Getting through the LES was like zooming past the shortstop all the way to third base. With that neighborhood blacked out on my imaginary map, I could see home plate, and it was absolutely thrilling. I had one goal in mind: to get through the rest of this shit so I could eat the final slice with my hot, amazing, very patient girlfriend and then be done with it.

  I had been seeing Tina for almost the entirety of the time I was Slice Harvesting, and I would sporadically ask her if she wanted to come along on a pizza mission. I felt like I wanted to introduce her as a character on my blog so that the throngs of “ladies, fellas, and the people that just don’t give a fuck” (to quote a surprisingly gender-inclusive Limp Bizkit lyric) would stop throwing themselves at my feet, begging to date me. Just kidding—no one was begging to date me, but Tina was a really important part of my life, and Slice Harvester was so personal, and I just wanted her to be part of it.

  But being from Miami, Tina has a flair for the dramatic. At first when I would ask, she would shoot me down with a grin. “Why would I wanna be part of your dumb project anyway?” It wasn’t mean, it was flirty. I liked it. Maybe it’s because I’m from New York, but when I’m thinking about my ideal partner, I want a lover and an adversary. Someone who’s gonna challenge me when I’m fucking up, who will have strong opinions and express them, even fight for them; also, someone who can participate in the grand East Coast tradition of Busting Balls. To put it in perspective: I’m 99 percent sure “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You” by the Ramones is a love song.

  So I kept asking Tina if she wanted to join me, partially because I knew she liked it when I invited her, and partially because I liked it
when she turned me down and gave me a little shit. Eventually she caved. I asked her to come along for some pizza, and she said, “Listen up, okay? You’re gonna take me to eat the last slice. That’s it. I don’t wanna do some nothin’, nobody slice in the middle of nowhere that don’t mean shit in the grand scheme. I wanna eat the last one . . . if you’re lucky enough to still be dating me.” And she blew me a kiss as I headed out the door.

  And listen: things with Tina were going more or less well. I was sticking to my moderation practice, at least when I knew I had to hang out with her. Some nights I wouldn’t drink at all, and I didn’t even notice it. But the fact remained that when I did let myself drink the way I really wanted to, I would REALLY DRINK, and there seemed to be no controlling it. I let this slide for a few months, and it seemed to have balanced out. I was only drunk some of the time, and I could keep it together when I wasn’t.

  On October 28, Tina picked me up from work, and we were walking around together holding hands and being cute. Slice Harvester was almost done, I hadn’t been drunk in a few days, and she was congratulating me on how well I was doing. We decided that since I had become such a capable, functional adult, we should go have a couple of drinks to celebrate. Tina even said she didn’t mind if I got drunk that night.

  We got to the bar, and I just went for it. I had been given the green light, and there was no stopping me. Two hours later when Tina suggested that we head home, I threw a tantrum. She had given me permission to get drunk, and now she was trying to take it back. That was the sort of nonsense I wouldn’t stand for. I ordered a round of shots for us, drank them both in defiance, and stormed out the door.