You could argue that drinking a Diet Coke with a slize of pizza this size is a lost cause. But every little bit helps.
Besides, I’m doing it for your benefit, to provide a sense of scale to the monstrosities they sell at Koronet Pizza, a neighborhood joint a mere two blocks from my new apartment. I’m in so much fucking trouble. I have eaten more falafel sandwiches, Gray’s Papaya hotdogs, and pizza slices in one week than I’ve consumed in one year. And all this without a current gym membership. And don’t get me started on the mocha eclairs around the other corner at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. I slip into daydreams about the eclairs.
Until I moved into W 112th St I could pretend that I was eating like this because I was couch-surfing. But now I’ve been here two days and my only excuse is that the avocados on my kitchen counter aren’t ripe enough yet to make a nice salad.
But I think the real reason I’m eating like this is because I can. Unlike my lovely San Francisco apartment, tucked away on a hill, my new apartment is in the city that never sleeps. I am around the corner from, well, nearly everything one could want; pizza parlours, deli’s, banks, bookstores, mediocre grocery stores, the 1/9 train, a hospital, a post office, an Ivy League campus, an enormous cathedral, 24 hour drug stores, bars, coffee shops, newstands, a farmer’s market, sidewalk vendors, a public library, hair salons, an art supply store, dozens of restaurants, Riverside Park, hardware stores, and various construction sites where some of the most beautiful men in the world work.
But one must make compromises. My first night in my new home, one of the construction crews began putting up scaffolding on the building next door, right outside my window, at around 6 pm. At eight pm I called Jennie.
“What time do they stop?” I asked her.
“They never stop.”
I thought she was kidding. But she wasn’t. At around midnight I went around the corner to the 24 hour drug store and bought ear plugs. Around one-thirty in the morning, when I was finally ready to take a break from unpacking and get some sleep, the workers were gone. Since then it’s been quiet. But I’m holding on to the ear plugs, for when the other shoe drops.
The worst part about eating all those slices of pizza, though, is that Louie’s not here to eat the crusts.