A long post or a short autobiography: My life in slices

Last Friday Drew and I had a play date in NYC to celebrate our three year anniversary.  When I got home from work around 2PM, neither of us had eaten anything since breakfast and were quite hungry. The original plan had been to go into the city and straight to sushi happy hour deal before hitting up the MoMA. However, since we needed food at 2PM, we weren't waiting until we drove to the LIRR station, rode the 1.4 hours into the city, and spent another 20-30 minutes finding the restaurant to have a bite to eat.

Instead we changed our plans a little and grabbed a slice at Cataffo's, the nearby pizzeria. It hit the spot. The place is a little more than a shot-gun hole in the wall with a door up front and a door in back and four or so booths in between, across from the counter. And even though the large slice of cheese threatened to ruin my All-You-Can-Eat expectations for sushi, I was having a near perfect moment, sitting across from my favorite person, thawing as an authentic NY slice settled in my greedy belly.

It was such a meaningful start to our date that I thought about it hours later as Drew drove us back home from the train station, our MoMA and sushi and Penn Station tasks all completed. Pizza may be the food I've had more than any other food in my life. Hamburgers and chicken fingers definitely had a head start during my elementary school years when they'd be all I'd order at restaurants, but combined with years of not eating beef, and all those vegetarian years, and I think it's safe to say pizza makes the final cut.

My life seen through pizza's eyes is like a child's activity book page, a sequence of connect-the-dots which together form a crisp, if not rugged, image.

When I was growing up in a small Texas suburb, there was a pizza buffet place a block away--Mr. Gatti's. We lived on a the corner of a T-intersection and the only thing between the Mr. Gatti's and our house was a grown-over field with a baseball diamond. I remember being about as tall as the buffet line I was supposed to push my plate down. The tiny two-room restaurant was kept movie theatre dark because it was a movie theatre of sorts. The entire back wall of each room was screen, usually playing some film channel or sports event. I remember Sunday afternoons with extended family and birthday parties of friends and spontaneous week day nights. It saddened me to see it close after my parents divorced, a couple years before we moved away.

I hadn't known that Mr. Gatti's was a chain at all, but the next and last time I saw one, I was on a road trip to the 1999 State Wide Drama Convention in Corpus Christi with twenty other drama club teens from my high school.  We had left the school early that morning, and on our way south out of town, some car stopped at a stop sign thought he had enough time to turn left in front of our bus to get on the freeway. He did not. The bus driver braked hard but we hit him anyway. My face slammed into the seat back in front of me. I thought my nose had fallen off.  We all got out, walking slowly past the bloody car, and waited for emergency response vehicles.  The teachers called our parents. Some went home, most stayed. We were told later that the man in the car died on the way to the hospital. We got a new bus driver, and since we hadn't planned on such a delay, ended up needing to stop off the highway to eat lunch before we arrived at the convention. There was some kind of chicken place and a Mr. Gatti's. I remember wondering if it had dropped down out of the sky, like Dorothy's house, to be a comfort on such a day.

Even after high school, a slice of zza was still a sign of safety. After a particularly rough school year, the summer between my junior and senior years of college I spent at NYU, reinventing myself as an artist and living off of the Sbarro two blocks away from my E 10th and Broadway apartment. The summer was unbelievably hot without air conditioning on the 9 floor sharing a space with four other women. Most of my roommates were already at internships or in class when I ate lunch. Sbarro offered air conditioning and cheap food outside of the NYU cafeteria, where eating alone was unusual. Sbarro, in that case, also offered me concealment, a way to blend into the city as just another independent on-the-go. Ever since, when I'm in an airport or breaking at an interstate rest stop--I always feel tempted to get the Sbarro, as if paying allegiance to a great mentor.

I ended up going to a small school for college in a town so close to Oklahoma you could drive there and back between classes. The newly manufactured Wal-Mart and the fact that we had KFC and Quizno's meant that Sherman, TX was on the map--the envy of rural towns to the east, west, and south of us. While small college towns are known for quintessential drunken party memories that "prove" college is the "best time in your life," my collegiate highlights are filled with the smell of baked cheese. Papa John's wasn't the only pizza place in town, but it was the closest at .5 miles from campus, and if you were a student, you could always get an $8 large. By the time I was a senior, and lived in a 4 bedroom apartment on campus with my best friend Amanda, the speed dial number for Papa John's was flaking off my cell phone.  Our second floor windows always lit up late in the evening, were the frame for me working on a moquette or a Milton paper while Amanda bent over her neurobiology notes at the breakfast table. One of us would look up, decide it was time for a break, and order a thin crust, extra-cheese and green bell pepper pizza. We'd discuss the nerd projects we were so diligently attending and listen to The White Stripes latest CD. I imagine our silhouettes seen from the outside pulling away from the furniture and coming to life at the sound of the doorbell.

Drunken moments with pizza happened way more in graduate school than they did in college for me. And even then, I didn't have them right away. I finally left my home state when I went to graduate school in Washington D.C, and for a while there, I didn't eat much pizza at all. I was the brokest I've ever felt my first semester of graduate school, working part time checking at Balducci's to help pay for the extra class I was taking. Ordering pizza would have been a luxury that replaced grocery money for half a week. However, when a friend from college came to visit for her birthday, we hit the town. After a day on our feet, we had Sangria and tapas for dinner before finding an Irish pub in Georgetown. The night was still young when we wanted to leave, so we went to Adam's Morgan. This is when D.C's famous Jumbo Slice came into my life. Around 3AM the clubs were closing, my friend was even more wasted than I was, and we were waiting on a housemate of mine to pick us up. The light beckoning us like a herald angel lead to single pizza slices equivalent to half of a large pie somewhere else.  My friend ended up loosing some of hers on the sidewalk, more in the car, and the rest in my bathroom, but I'm still a fan.

A few years after this first D.C. pizza experience, Drew, our friend Jean, and I get kicked off the penultimate Red Line train out of the city to Silver Spring because Jean took a bite of her (Dupont) Angelo's slice on the train. A literal bite. I still have a few pictures somewhere of us waiting on the platform for what we hoped would be another train. I've never been kicked out of a club, a bar, or even a party, so being kicked off the public transportation vehicle supposed to take me home was quite a shock. I remember planning the logically superior letters I was going to write about how unfairly we were treated and thinking I just needed to finish my pizza first.

After graduating with my MFA, living in Silver Spring, MD was cheaper than living in D.C, but I still had to find multiple jobs to help pay for bills. At one point, I was teaching three college courses, tutoring four hours a week, giving myself to Johns Hopkins research studies on malaria, and working as a hostess for a local Italian restaurant chain who sold pizza by the slice. The Germantown branch may have been in trouble for money laundering, and the place may have warranted my friends nicknaming it my Mob Job, but the food--as long as you stayed away from the salad--was excellent. I had a slice of pizza most nights I worked there and even got to take some extra pizza and rolls home.  The chefs had crushes on me and the gelato maker was a sweet white haired Sicilian who smoked a cigar, sometimes inside the restaurant as we cleaned. At this time I was still broke, and I was a little scared of the men I worked for, but while it lasted, the smell of day old pizza warming in the oven was enough to make me feel content.

I left Silver Spring for Long Island, where most of my pizza experiences are Papa John's, with friends and games. These are all good memories, but the best two pizza moments so far since I've lived here have been the Brooklyn play date Drew and I had late last year randomly on a Monday--where we ate at a pinwheel, knish, and pizza joint near the base of the Brooklyn Bridge (photo above)--and last Friday's lunch right here near home. Maybe it's not so rare to have good pizza memories when the food has become number one in America for slumber parties, school day treats, and quick order meals. The vision of the USA that is touted on the TV is one where pizza is always eaten with a group. It brings a family together, it celebrates a little league victory, it takes the pressure off cooking and cleaning for a friends-night-in. And in my case, it can reveal illusions of family closeness, conceal temporary loneliness, and be a key part in celebrating my love of being in love. Once the memories are connected, the full image makes me thankful for having such a food staple in my life. Through thick and thin pizza will always be here.


Do you have a pizza memory to share? I'd love to read it!