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  This book is for Scott Hagendorf and Jamie Ewing

  On August 11, 2009, I set out to eat a plain slice from every pizzeria in Manhattan.

  On November 22, 2011, two years and 435 slices later, I ate the last one.

  This is my story.

  PROLOGUE

  Less than a dozen blocks from the very tip-top of the island of Manhattan sits Grandpa’s Brick Oven Pizza, its oddly tropical facade a bright orange contrast to the drab surrounding buildings. There’s a fake wooden awning, the whole place is painted the color of an underripe clementine, and in the summertime the Italian ice cart stationed out front sports one of those grass umbrellas. Imagine if Tom Hanks built a pizzeria on the island he was stuck on in that movie I’ve never seen where he talks to a volleyball. That’s kind of what Grandpa’s looks like.

  The fact that the very first stop on my pizza-eating odyssey looked more like a tiki hut than a pizzeria was either auspicious or ominous, I couldn’t tell which—or maybe I was too hungover to care. But either way, I felt a vague sense of anxiety standing outside, knowing that if I stepped through the door and ordered a slice of pizza, I was committing to something big—and taking my plans out of the realm of Drinking and Talking and into the realm of Going and Doing.

  Not that Drinking and Talking is a bad place to be—tons of the best unshot films, unpainted murals, unillustrated graphic novels, and unrecorded music live together in the land of Drinking and Talking. They lead happy-go-lucky lives inside their consequence-­free bubble. If you take a look inside, it’s like peering through the window of the Barbie Dreamhouse at Barbie and Ken cooking some vegan chili while Skipper and Midge collate zines in the living room: the residents of Drinking and Talking are all perfect, fully realized, flawless. But as soon as you try to coax one of them into the world of Going and Doing, you realize that their legs don’t bend the right way and their heads pop off if you’re not careful. What I’m trying to say is, Drinking and Talking is much safer than Going and Doing.

  That’s what I was thinking about while looking in the window of Grandpa’s Pizza. A few weeks ago it seemed so easy. I was drinking wine with a buddy of mine and said I was gonna eat a plain slice from every pizzeria in New York City. I was gonna eat all the pizza. How had no one done that yet? ’Cause I was gonna do it! I’d call myself the Slice Harvester, like some kind of mozzarella-fueled superhero. Best idea I’d ever had.

  A few weeks passed. I continued riding my bike around delivering food, drinking with my friends, going to punk shows. I told everybody about my great idea (I didn’t have to take it out of Drinking and Talking to do that, since we were all always drunk). One night while doing speed with my friend Sweet Tooth and listening to the contents of this suitcase full of cassette tapes he’d found in the trash, I said, “Listen, I’ve got it. I’ll start at the top of Manhattan and go down, west to east, until I get to the bottom. That’s how I’m gonna do it. Start at the top, work my way down.”

  Tooth was intently respooling one of the cassette tapes; he didn’t even look up, just monotoned, “When do we start?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I work all weekend. What are you doing Tuesday?”

  And that’s how on Tuesday evening, August 11, 2009, I wound up standing outside Grandpa’s Brick Oven Pizza with a composition notebook and a pen I’d bought at the dollar store, wondering whether I had the chutzpah to follow through.

  At least that’s what I thought I was feeling, based on the nausea, but it may have just been that I was hungover and hadn’t consumed anything all day except bodega coffee and the shittiest cigarettes—the best I could afford on my delivery-boy wages (not that I’m complaining). I’d spent that afternoon guzzling weak coffee at the copy shop, printing up zines for Support New York, the survivor support collective my best friend Milo and I had been part of for almost a decade. The collective was getting ready to host a table at some conference or anarchist book fair, and because I’m an eternal procrastinator, I ended up schlepping this granny cart full of zines along on my inaugural pizza mission.

  Maybe I was nervous and hungover; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that eventually I tilted back my cart and pushed it through the door.

  Grandpa’s is just as ultraorange and oddly tropical on the inside as its exterior implies. There were quite a few customers on line ahead of me. I couldn’t really make out what any of them were saying over the Trio Reynoso record blaring from behind the counter, but there were two definitely stoned construction workers in front of me who seemed hella stoked for the pizza, and their excitement was infectious. I took it as a good sign, too, because in my experience, carpenters and electricians work all over the city and tend to know where the good food is.

  When it was my turn I intoned, “Gimme a regular slice” (because that’s how you say it in New York—none of this fakakta “Pardon me, sir, I’d like one piece of cheese pizza, please,” okay?), and headed to my table, which was also orange and was decorated with what looked like crayon drawings of lighthouses and other Beach Shit that in no way made Grandpa’s resemble a tropical paradise.

  I’d like to say I savored that first slice, but the truth is I slammed it in, like, one minute flat. See, the slice at Grandpa’s is too thin to support its own weight, and not good enough to be worth how little food you get for your money ($2.50 in 2009, $2.75 in 2014). I crammed probably half the slice in my mouth on my first bite. Admittedly, I’m really good at cramming things into my mouth, but even an amateur could’ve wrecked this flimsy pizza.

  Still, even in my hungover haze, I knew there was more to Grandpa’s slice than its lack of structural integrity. Despite being too small, the flavors were all totally right on—the cheese tasted like cheese, not like chemicals; the sauce was slightly sweet and slightly tangy; the dough was salty enough—but the ratios were off. There was a decent amount of sauce and cheese, but there wasn’t enough dough to support it. Pizza is a food that you’re supposed to be able to eat while you walk, and this slice would’ve been far too sloppy for that. What’s a guy in a rush supposed to do? If I had tried to eat this on the go, I would’ve splattered tomato sauce all over my Crass tank top. Good ingredients, good flavor, bad ratios, too much money. This was basically right in the middle of good and bad. Completely neutral.

  I jotted all these thoughts down in my new notebook, along with the name and address of the pizza place. Maybe it’s hindsight, but I feel like a slice with some ideal qualities and some obvious flaws was the perfect way to start my career as a pizza reviewer. It would now be up to me to travel across the island of Manhattan to sift through all the complexities of the various combinations of cheese and sauce and the nuances of crust, flavor, bite, ratios, and aftertaste in search of the perfect slice, and to warn my fellow citizens against inferior pizza. I grabbed my cart and headed out the door.

  The Slice Harvester was born.

  The author, St. Marks Pizza

  CHAPTER 1

  Pizza Delia

  Majorly undercooked; this slice hung like a limp dick when I folded it. The dough and the sauce were both way too sweet, and the slice itself was unpleasantly heavy. I could tell with each bite that it was gonna sit in my gut like a brick. I started to bemoan the fact that Sweet Tooth wasn’t around to help me finish it, because I can’t stand to waste food. I begrudgingly made it to the crust, which was totally awful—undercooked, but still dense. When I le
ft I actually kicked a telephone pole and muttered, “Fuck that place,” under my breath.

  —Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 1, “Uptown,” visited on August 12, 2009

  I grew up in a banal, bland, boring, busted-ass suburb.

  Okay, it wasn’t actually that bad. It was maybe even pretty cool, as suburbs go. But saying “I grew up in a pretty cool, ethnically and economically diverse city that seemed paltry in the shadow of New York but would be a huge cultural metropolis in Montana or Tennessee” doesn’t really contain the same dramatic tension.

  When I became a teenager and could get into the City on my own, I would go whenever possible. I wanted out of my circumscribed suburban existence, ASAP. I wanted to role-play another life—a feeling I imagine is universal in adolescents, at least among former overachievers with greaseball aspirations. And via a ride on a commuter train that lasted just long enough to polish off a forty of Old English, which had taken at least an hour of shoulder-tapping men outside the gas station to acquire, I could be transported into another world. The destination was always somewhere around St. Marks Place, located in the once-interesting East Village, the Colonial Williamsburg of kids from the suburbs who pretended to be kids from the City.

  I was in its thrall for the wild youth culture and the easy access to cigarettes and beer (which, for a fifteen-year-old, exercised the attraction of a tractor beam), but I also felt the gravitational pull toward St. Marks for its food. Coney Island High was great, and all those T-shirt shops and gangs of teenagers were really cool, too. But tacos at San Loco! My first ever falafel! Tofu and ginger dressing at Dojo! Burgers at Paul’s! By far two places I frequented most were Ray’s Pizza Bagel Cafe and St. Marks Pizza.

  I went to Ray’s pretty much exclusively for the everything bagels. For whatever reason, I was far more drawn to the pies across the street at St. Marks Pizza. My friends all thought I was crazy, because the slice at Ray’s was bigger and cost less—by fifty cents, maybe. Fifty cents constituted one-half the price of a forty of Hurricane back then, so it was a lot of money in some respects, but to me, it was always worth it to spend the extra two quarters and splurge on a slice at St. Marks; it was so much better.

  Perhaps because it’s been closed for ten years now and there can be no going back to double-check my memory, St. Marks Pizza is my Pie in the Sky. It is the slice of nostalgia that every piece of pizza I’ve eaten since has fallen short of. The pizza was good, damn good; this fact has been corroborated by countless other nostalgists I’ve met. But my memory of the pizza there is colored just as much by my teenage perceptions (and delusions) of the world that St. Marks and its constituents opened up to me.

  I ate at St. Marks Pizza the first time I ever set foot on the block. I was thirteen years old, languishing in the barren cultural wasteland that is Adolescence in the Suburbs, and had just read my first issue of Maximum RocknRoll1 thanks to a shout-out on the first page of Spin magazine. Shortly after I saw it in Spin, I was in Tower Records with my dad while he was buying some new Miles Davis remaster or something and spotted the zine’s flat, newsprint form on the magazine rack. By its glaring lack of effort to entice me, it stood out among the glossy music and tattoo magazines. It almost looked like it was trying to dissuade potential readers rather than draw them in. I was smitten, and the universe decided: I would be a punk.

  Sometime after reading that first issue of MRR I heard about St. Marks Place (or just “St. Marks,” if you’re not an asshole), I’m not sure where or from whom. I didn’t even understand that it was a street named “St. Marks Place”—I just knew it was a location, and I knew it was where I belonged. And at the end of that summer it became apparent that I would need, more than anything, a pair of awesome combat boots in order to officially be punk. And I knew I had to go to Trash and Vaudeville on St. Marks to get them.

  I don’t know where I got these notions. This was before the ubiquity of the internet, so I wasn’t exposed to new culture online. Most of my ideas about what being a punk meant were cribbed from Rancid videos on MTV or pictures of the Clash I had seen on albums in my parents’ record collection. Regardless of where in the cultural ether I had drawn my notion that Combat Boots = Punk Legitimacy from, it was something I knew to be incontrovertibly true.

  Plus, I had gotten a pair of fake-leather knockoff Dr. Martens for next to nothing at Caldor at some point, but they were stupid and made my feet sweat and weren’t tough enough.

  So I did the only thing that made sense to me: I asked my dad to take me to St. Marks to buy boots. I don’t think it even crossed my mind that I might have gone there unattended, even though by 1996 I had spent a fair amount of time in the Meatpacking District and the West Village, visiting my dad’s younger brother and his girlfriend at their various apartments. I felt at home in downtown Manhattan and knew the lay of the land, or so I thought. But St. Marks, by then already well on its way to being the gentrified playground it is today, was like a jungle to me—so fierce, so real. I was scared by it, but I wanted in. I wanted to feel comfortable there. I wanted to be part of the scenery that both scared and lured the next suburban kid to step foot on the block.

  Before attempting to acquire new boots, my father and I went to Paul’s on Second Avenue to get a couple of burgers so as not to shop on an empty stomach. The burgers from Paul’s were good, affordable and filling, as they have always been and shall always be. We set off down St. Marks with full stomachs, content, ready to find me the freshest combat boots in history. First stop: Trash and Vaudeville.

  Trash and Vaudeville has been capitalizing on teenagers’ desire to spend their parents’ money on comically stupid clothes since the mid-seventies. Upstairs is the clothing store, which we wandered into by accident. It is a cavernous space, full of expensive Punk Couture, the legacy of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex boutique. It was here that I saw my first pair of bondage pants, a far cry from my superbaggy JNCO jeans, which at the time I thought were the beginning and end of fashion. I also remember seeing a purple velour dinner jacket with a leopard-­print lapel and matching leopard tuxedo pants and silently promising myself, I will wear that to my prom (a promise that remains unfulfilled, mostly because I didn’t go to my prom).

  But bondage pants and dinner jackets were just fanciful distractions from the task at hand: the acquisition of tough boots, of which, to my dismay, there seemed to be none in inventory. My father questioned the aging clerk, from whom I would, years later, receive a discount on a pair of stretch jeans in exchange for letting him watch me change. He informed us that there was a separate shoe store in the basement and that we had to exit the store and reenter from the street in order to gain access to it. As we left, I made a mental note to get my whole wardrobe from this place as soon as I was a grown-up.

  Downstairs at Trash and Vaudeville is a scene. The walls are covered in decades’ worth of graffiti and stickers; there is a glass counter running along the west wall filled with band patches, buttons, spikes, studs, and weird Goth jewelry; and there are shelves and shelves of subculturally relevant shoes. There were big space sneakers for ravers, winklepickers for mods, brothel creepers for rudies, and, of course, boots (Boots!) for the punks and skins. I skimmed the wall, pointing out pairs to my father that I thought were cool. He looked skeptically at the price tags and hurried me out of the store.

  We walked together up the street. I was sad, but trusting. My father is a man of the world, and he seemed to have purpose. “This place looks cool, Colin, but it’s a rip-off. This street is where everyone comes to buy combat boots. What we need to do is, we need to find the store where no one goes to buy combat boots.” I think I looked a little crestfallen, because he added, “Let’s walk around a little, and if we don’t find anything, we’ll come back.” (Spoiler alert: we eventually found the exact same boots for, like, $50 less in the faaaaar West Village.)

  We set out west on St. Marks, our bellies still full of burgers. We got to the corner of Third Avenue, and though I had never be
en there before, I recognized this as the border of my newfound homeland. As we crossed the avenue, my father and I both stopped dead in our tracks in the middle of the street and turned our heads back to the eastern sidewalk. A wisp of smoke had unfurled from an open storefront window, taken the shape of a human hand, and was beckoning to us with a come-hither finger.

  I looked up at my father. “Do you smell that?”

  “Pizza,” he said, his eyes gleaming.

  “Those burgers were pretty big, Dad. I don’t know if I’m hungry.”

  “Me, either, but we’ll split a slice. This smells too good to pass up.”

  And so we turned tail and headed back to the corner, where St. Marks Pizza sang its siren song.

  We waited for our pizza with bated breath. I don’t remember if the pizza shop was crowded or empty, I don’t remember what the guy behind the counter looked like, I just remember a feeling of intense anticipation. It trumped my burning but childish desire for boots. All of my consciousness was fixated on the forthcoming slice.

  When the pizza arrived, shining with oil, I was so excited that I picked it up with two hands.

  “Hold on!” my father said urgently and slapped the slice down to the counter. “Only assholes eat pizza like that. Here, let me show you.”

  He took the slice in one hand and placed his index finger on the center of the top of the crust, with his middle finger and thumb beneath either side. “Listen carefully,” he said as he pushed the two sides up along the fulcrum of his finger, folding the slice perfectly in half. There was an audible crackling as the crispy bottom shattered along the seam.

  “Real New Yorkers fold their slices in half. Do it like this, or people might think you’re a tourist.” He handed me the folded slice so that I could take the ceremonial first bite.