By Beauty Damned

Pizza

I love Fridays. I love them for so many reasons, but one of the biggest is that I can eat pizza or a cheeseburger without even the smallest hint of guilt.

Pepperoni pizza is one of my favorite things on earth. There is nothing like that first bite, when you lift the droopy, cheesy slice up to your face and tilt your head back just so that perfect corner will slide into your mouth blissfully. It's funny how certain foods can have such tight connections to happy times in your life and forever bring you comfort whenever you eat them.

When I was a kid I used to go with my dad to his office in Century City. It was always really exciting for me to go all the way up the elevators to the 27th floor. I liked putting my nose to the glass in his office and looking straight down at the busy street below. You could see the pizza place across the street from that window. "NY Pizza" it was called. Getting a slice there was one of the many things I loved about visiting my dad's office. It wasn't like other pizza that I'd had. There is a lot of what I like to call "hippie pizza" on the west coast. Don't get me wrong, I love that stuff on a whole other level. Throw pesto, artichokes, red onions, feta and tomato on a whole wheat crust and I'll tear that shit up. But in New York most pizza chefs don't know what an artichoke is and would be hard-pressed to have a sense of humor towards any bastard who would suggest putting such a thing on top of a pizza. And that's how NY Pizza was in Century City. Authentic NY style. All I knew as a kid was that it was greasy, had a super thin, crispy crust, and it looked just like the kind that Joey Ramone was cruelly deprived of in Rock N' Roll High School while being forcefed "alfalfa" by his slimy manager. And it was good. So. Fucking. Good.

After many years in New York, there are times when I think if I see another greasy, flat slice of pizza, I'm going to throw a hippie fit and demand that one of my friends in Southern Oregon mail me a slice before I have to tie down a fat Italian man and force him to learn to identify an artichoke. But then I remember Joey Ramone. I remember being 9 and looking down the verticle slope of my dad's office building at NY Pizza and the pure joy that I felt when he would take me there during his lunch break and it was just me and him and a few slices of greasy pepperoni, and then it all comes back. Like today. Looking out the 29th floor of my office building in NY, there is also a pizza place across the street. Though that particular pizza place lacks the same nostalgic quality of the one in L.A., it does seem a little ironic that about 18 years ago I never could have known that one day I would work in a big city on the other side of the country from where I stood, equally high up in the sky, yearning for a greasy slice just like the ones I had with my dad back then.

And that's when I take my ass to the counter of one of hundreds of NY pizza joints and get the one thing that will almost certainly put a smile on my face. A flat, cheesy, crispy slice of pepperoni pizza. Aaaaaah.