Marc Spitz

I just finished a second draft of a memoir. The book is all about slowly becoming a real New Yorker, a real artist and eventually a real man (last one still in progress) and as I was re-reading it the other day, it occurred to me that one of the keys to the first distinction is pizza. There are other instances, getting asked for directions by a tourist, for example, where you stop and say to yourself, “Wow, I’m really one of ‘them’ now. I live here. I made it.” I was having a bourbon with my agent after a meeting on Friday. We were listening to Merle Haggard (as he does) and talking about the book and I said, “When did you realize you were a real New Yorker?” It’s one of those questions. His response, which I won’t go into in detail, had to do with pace. The speed of the City. How it fucks you up for every other City. But back to the pizza. I write about pizza in the memoir less than I write about girls but more than I write about say… pet cats. Less than Pixies or Pavement or Strokes but more than the Unband (and yes, I write about the Unband). I write about pizza way more than I write about Franz Ferdinand but less than I write about Joe Strummer or Morrissey. When my father first started spending divorce Sundays with me in Manhattan, we’d always go to Ray’s on 6th Avenue at 11th street. Rays as some of you may know, is a sort of dense slice. A lot, almost too much cheese, and it’s big. Not like Bleecker Street pizza, which is understated and thin. Rays is like “When the Levee Breaks,” Bleecker Street is like “Goin’ To California.” (yes, I did just compare NYC pizza parlors to Zeppelin moods). I discovered St. Marks, which is not there anymore, on my own and THAT above all was the slow opening of the door for me. I didn’t even know there was an “East” village until 1985 (I started coming in with the old man on Sundays around 1981 or 2… I remember because I asked him if he’d buy me a cassette of Ghost in the Machine… which he did). I read about the barbers on Astor Place… how they cut all the punks and new wavers’ hair, sought it out and once I had my, God it must have been short back and sides with a long drapey bang at the time, maybe even a wavy, drapy bang like the guy in Blancmange, I was hungry and saw the pizza sign in the distance…. Out of the East! St. Marks was a more creative experience in that the basic pie was already there on the pan, but if you ordered say a mushroom slice, they’d take a scoop of the gray mushrooms, layer it onto the slice, then put a handful of white, stringy mozzarella on top of that and put the pie in the oven. It felt like building something together… They had a poster of Marilyn Monroe along the wall and it was sexy and sad. I lost myself in that poster a lot while waiting for my slice. Before I’d ever seen a naked woman, I saw Marilyn in her calendar pose in St. Marks Pizza and thought, “Sex must be cool.” Years later I would have coke powered sex in the St. Marks hotel but that’s for a different blog post (which will never come). St. Marks pizza is gone now and I miss it. The St. Marks Hotel, not so much. Enrico Caruso is still in Penn Station. That’s the slice I would get while waiting for the Far Rockaway line to be called by the track announcer on my way home from the City. There’s a sadness to that slice. It’s the goodbye Manhattan slice and it’s appropriately vulgar. It’s massive, first of all. It barely fits on the plate. It’s salty. Not to the point that it feels unhealthy to consume it, but it certainly distinguishes it. I like that the parlor is named for a famous opera star and there is something operatic about it… it’s big and loud and over the top… but I was never much of an opera fan. I don’t miss Enrico Caruso. I’m working on a film with a bunch of filmmakers who have a production office in that weird zone just above Penn Station and below Times Square/Port Authority. It requires me to take the train through Penn Station but never go in. I sometimes wander in though, and have an Enrico Caruso slice just for old time’s sake. It feels good to not have to wait for a train… to be able to stay. Last night, I decided was going to be a night of happy slack. I wasn’t going to work, blog, write or have any social ambition. I watched Star Trek (the Wrath of Khan, which taught me more about writing a good villain than I can even say) and the City on the Edge of Forever with Joan Collins. I thought about ordering a pizza. It seemed like the thing to do… Star Trek and no answering phone/checking email after a hectic and tense week. But the real indicator that I was off duty was the lack of thought that went into the pizza. I live in delivery range of Bleecker Street. There’s a Rivoli on Christopher that is decent enough. But I opted to eat a frozen, doughy, slightly disgusting but only slightly, Di Giorno pizza which I impulse-purchased at the Rite Aid months ago. It was that or Domino’s and I forgot what a liberating thing slack pizza can be. It was like the kind of pizza you order in college (or suburban Illinois). You can’t even really call it pizza. It’s more like a topless calzone. Really nasty. But extremely valuable if you’re looking to give everything, including your type-A approach to pizza, a rest… which I was. Am back covering the pizza waterfront today though. It’s a serious business. It’s something to write about anyway.
The Wrath of Khan, by the way, features Merritt Butrick as Kirk’s son. He was Johnny Slash in Square Pegs. He died of AIDs in 1989. I was in college and didn’t read newspapers and there was no internet so I had no idea when celebrities died. I didn’t even know the Soviet Union collapsed until someone beat me up in the Chelsea Hotel elevator for my ignorance but that’s a different blog post (which I may write… it’s in the memoir)… and my mother had to tell me Freddie Mercury died when I came home for Thanksgiving break 1991. Anyway… I was Wikepedia-ing everything about that movie because I was so inspired (or maybe compromised by chemically treated green peppers and black olives) and uncovered that sad fact. RIP Johnny Slash. Totally different head. Totally bogus pizza.