My first New York City pizza

I can still feel it in my throat

A classic pepperoni from a now-forgotten pizza place somewhere in Manhattan

I was a couple bites in before I realized I hadn’t yet taken a picture of my very first slice of authentic NYC pizza from the city itself, found at a random hole-in-the-wall (as is required) while wandering solo and aimless on the trip I desired for practically a lifetime that would already come to be known as the one “from hell.”

When I was around 12 years old, I had become obsessed with New York City. I can’t remember anymore what triggered it, although it could’ve been my insatiable devouring of The Babysitter’s Club books and fantasizing about being glamorous Stacy from New York. Maybe it was the earlier childhood obsession with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the gritty scenes of New York from the first movie, permanently imprinted in my mind as a child, who had desperately wanted to be April O’Neal (“TV reporter” was nearly as good a gig as “actress,” in my mind — my primary career ambition). Maybe it was just the fact that everything in popular culture seemed to revolve around that city, and having an uncle who aready lived there and had since the 80s made me feel like I just belonged there. Either way, I needed not just to go there, but to move there. Immediately. I knew we couldn’t afford Manhattan on my mom’s income, where my uncle lived, but I had done some research and was pretty sure we could afford Staten Island, a suburb in reality, but technically I’d still have an NYC address. I informed my mother of my plan, so carefully thought-through.

After she very unsurprisingly shot it down, explaining that moving the family halfway across the country from our home and our established lives in Minneapolis would not be a realistic possibility, I sobbed as though someone had crushed my most important dream. It was, at the time, my most important dream, after all. My answer to the “what do you want to be when you grow up” question during my childhood was always “actress,” an ambition I later abandoned after enthusiastically — finally — joining the drama club in high school only to find that Shakespeare (what I was auditioning for) was not only incredibly boring, but that acting in general was actually, uh, hard. I moved onto other, more practical (for most people) dreams of being a journalist or a photographer. (I tried to become the latter and spent a year incurring a massive amount of debt at a private art college, but only do it now as a hobby, and the former eventually manifested itself into sporadic blogging, and after decades of floundering around different industries and crappy and/or weird jobs, I’m about to be a yoga teacher. Or maybe a data analyst. Or both. I’ll never figure this shit out.)

Anyway.

In 2014, I finally got to go to New York City. Moving to the city had long fallen from its original place at the top of my dream list, but I still wanted to see it for myself, and I hadn’t yet been on an airplane to boot — at 30! My boyfriend at the time was living there for a year while he attended Columbia’s journalism school, and I was visiting him over Valentine’s Day. The original plan was for me to move out there with him, but our relationship was tumultuous and usually unstable. The trip to New York, during a stable period, was supposed to solidify my decision to come out later that spring and chase our dreams of photojournalism together.

It did not.

I’ll spare you the more sensitive details, but a month or so prior, I had violated the muddy terms of our temporarily open long-distance relationship in some way or another, it came out the first morning after I got in, and I ended up wandering the streets of downtown Manhattan alone and hungover the day before Valentine’s Day, taking in the sights and marinating in the heartbreak I had brought upon myself. Eventually I came across this man standing on top of a stone structure, holding an enlarged photo of his friend Ariel and a note written on cardboard explaining that she committed suicide. He was crying as he described her to literally anyone who would listen. I listened, and I cried, too.

Ariel and her friend.

The pizza was an obligation. I had flown in the previous day and, like I mentioned, it was my first time flying anywhere since I was a baby, and I was terrified. I ordered a drink as soon as I could, a bloody mary, because I heard they tasted best in the air. Something about the chemistry of tomatoes and altitude that I still don’t fully understand. The sky-bartender asked I wanted to make it a double. I guess I looked confused, so he explained that the mixer is a 12oz can of bloody mary mix, and there isn’t really enough vodka in one regular bottle to make it as strong as a regular drink. Can’t argue that! I took his double.

Because I had no idea what I was doing and also needed the cheapest flight possible, I had a layover in Philadelphia. I found my gate, quadruple-checked the boarding time, and went directly to the bar nearest to it. I had two tall beers and delightful conversations with strangers from heavens knows where, sparking an immediate and ongoing love for everything associated with air travel. I looked at my ticket again, checked the time, paid up, and went to the gate, finding no one there. I waited and waited until I finally began to understand that something was very wrong. I found an airline employee and explained the situation. She unsympathetically informed me my flight to LGA had already taken off and offered me no other option but to begin drunkenly crying about how this was my first flight ever, I didn’t know what I was doing, I swear I was looking at the ticket correctly, I don’t know how this could have happened when I was sitting right there, I couldn’t afford to buy another ticket, and so on. I wasn’t pretending — I really was panicked. She rolled her eyes for probably the 12th time and somehow managed to get me on a first class seat on a flight leaving soon after.

Not knowing jack about flying or what first class entailed beyond larger seats and wondering how on earth my drunken sobbing got me there, I did not expect a very friendly flight attendant to offer me a free drink immediately upon seating. Thinking I wanted to avoid the calories and bloat of more beer, I ordered a whiskey soda. I felt very grown-up. He took it away from me before we took off, confusing me again, then came back to give me a fresh one after we reached altitude, noticing my expression and explaining that no one was allowed to drink anything while the plane was taking off and I hadn’t done anything wrong. I was fascinated, confused, and absolutely shit-faced. I was also exceedingly cheerful and talkative. The guy next to me happened to be a pilot who flew this route frequently and was thrilled to tell me all about everything we were seeing under us (mostly New Jersey and the incoming skyline of New York), so visible at such a short distance. I was enthralled.

I had far too many whiskeys by that point to remember exactly where this was, but it must have been between NJ and NYC as we descended to LGA.

I got off the plane, wandering the airport to find the exit to the bus stop where I was to then locate the proper bus to get me to my boyfriend’s place in West Harlem when I noticed that my phone battery was nearly dead. I was drunk as hell and feeling incredibly lost already, and not wanting to be without a working phone in an unfamiliar city, decided to stop and charge it… at the nearest airport bar I could find.

During this time, which is understandably a bit of a blur, I managed to contact my boyfriend to let him know that I had gotten in safely and that I was just at this bar charging my phone. Apparently I did not hide my drunkenness and related confusion well, as he became increasingly irritated with my apparent inability to navigate myself to the airport’s bus stop, let alone find the right route and finally told me he’d be picking me up in a cab and to wait outside. He was pissy but happy to see me, asking one question that still stands out in my mind a decade later: “why did you have to charge your phone at a bar? Why did you have to get more drunk?” I was nervous and overdid it, I told him. I was embarrassed. He was embarrassed for me. We went to his apartment, got reacquainted and dressed up, and then left to go see a musical on Broadway. He had recently declared, after spontaneously buying the tickets prior to my arrival, that he wanted our relationship to be more “normal” and “adult.” He didn’t want all of our interactions together to be drunk and at some party or on drugs or something like it was before he left for New York. And me coming there, already drunk as a skunk fresh off the plane, wasn’t giving him much confidence. I didn’t disagree with him about wanting to do more sober, responsible, normal things together, and I resolved to do better, and we went in to watch the musical I don’t remember at all beyond something about Polish people dancing a lot… we’d had a few more whiskeys at the show. Obviously.

Being a tourist in Times Square

The next morning after the proverbial S had HTF, he left the apartment to go work on a school project and I went to go explore NYC on my own. I was hungover as hell and realized only a few blocks into my journey that my choice to wear brand-new boots to a city in which it is widely understood you will be walking miles a day was a very poor choice, among the many others I’d made recently. I found a Duane Reade and bought an extra pair of socks, giant thick men’s socks, to cover my own in the hopes that they would cushion the blisters already forming and, wouldn’t you believe it, they did.

Hungover and starving, I finally remember where I am and see a pizza joint. I don’t even know if I was in the mood for pizza, but I do recall telling myself that no matter what happened, even if I did get dumped the day before Valentine’s Day because of my own stupid decisions, I was going to do New York Things, goddamnit. I ordered a slice of classic pepperoni pizza and slathered it with the standard toppings: parmesan cheese and crushed red pepper flakes. I took a couple bites and suddenly it felt like my throat was closing. Not quite like what I imagine it feels like to be deathly allergic to something, but more like being sick with strep throat or a bad lingering cough. It burned. Not spicy, either, more like… aggravated. (I experienced this a handful of times later over the years, always the day after a night [or, in this case, a full day] of heavy drinking. I’m still not sure of the exact relationship between the painful throat feeling and the alcohol, but I’m certain there is one.)

I don’t remember if I actually enjoyed the pizza. I am not even sure I finished it, although I can reasonably guess that, knowing myself and my mindset at the time and my determination to Do New York Things, I probably ate all the pepperoni parts I could manage and left the crust and a significant chunk of the boring parts of the pizza behind. I chugged my tiny cup of free ice water from the flimsy, clear plastic cup and found a Dunkin Donuts, my first time at the chain, which did not at the time exist in the Twin Cities.

The rest of the trip — another few days — went a little better. The freshly-ex-boyfriend and I didn’t exactly make up, but we decided to try to enjoy my time there, regardless, and a few months after I left and he graduated and came back, we got back together again and broke up again and got back together again and broke up again. We both got married (to different people) a few years after the last time. I don’t really know what he’s doing now because he blocked me from everything with a block function on the internet, but I hope he’s doing well. As for me, I’ve sure had an eventful decade since, but I can say that I feel like I am, in fact, doing pretty well, and that I am just about ready to go back to New York and make some better memories. As I settle into this Mid-Atlantic life and realize it’s only a few short hours away by train or car, it’s almost hard to avoid. And maybe this time I’ll eat pizza that I’m not too drunk, or hungover, to remember.