Floor pizza

The other night – and I use that term rather loosely, since it was a Monday in November – I went to a Knicks game with some buddies. While I have in the past taken the somewhat juvenile route in recounting drunken evenings and listed all the crap I put into my body, I will not do so this time. I am attempting a less juvenile approach to my tales of rageosity, indiscretion, and periodic humiliation. As you will soon read, the story itself takes care of that.

Anyway, we first went to dinner at El Quixote, a fun joint in Chelsea that serves up piles of tasty grub and sangria, then walked up 7th Ave to the game. The Knicks played the Rockets. Tracy McGrady. Dikembe. Freakin’ Yao, dude. When your home team sucks the root, you have to try to make it to games in which they play teams with cats you’re psyched to see – not that I had any control over which game I saw, but still, I was psyched. This was also the game during which little 5’9” Nate Robinson rejected Yao (at 7’6”) in a major way, leaving Yao clutching his face as much in shame as in pain.

Many drinks were consumed at dinner and at the game; evidence of this fact, without going into specific numbers, includes my knocking a contact lens out of my buddy’s eye (some sort of mislaid high-five attempt, I believe) and ripping a one-hitter of KB in the bathroom of the Garden. For the record, I have never done that. Never. I have always considered it completely stupid and nuts to pull something like that, and I still do – it was just that twenty-second period when I actually did it that my opinion briefly shifted to the, uh, well, the opposite. Since I mess with that stuff basically never these days, I ended up completely, comically blazini. I was interplanetary.

So after the game, we head back down to Chelsea where these guys work (and where one of them had parked his car) and proceed to down a few more drinks. By now I’m slurring and apologizing for the verbal slurry that’s coming out of my mouth, and it’s time to go. Bid farewell to friends newfound and old and get on the L. I’m noticing that some of the hipster douches standing near me are stealing looks at me, and I conclude that I’m probably just stinking of alcohol or seriously red/bleary/insane-eyed. I also conclude that it would be rather delightful to grab a slice of pizza when I arrive in Brooklyn.

I get off the train, head to the slice joint, and order up a plain slice. Now, I have been somewhat adverse to this place for a long time, and I never really knew why. I’m not especially xenophobic, I used to go there quite often back in, I don’t know, 1994 or something….it’s weird, but I always had this inexplicable bad feeling about the place. Like something bad would happen to me in there.

My slice came up, I paid, and as I went to grab the paper plate, the slice just jumped off the plate. I was having coordination problems, ok? Yeah, so the slice just jumped away from me and landed perfectly flat on the floor, face up. Right in front of the counter, where three or four hundred pairs of shoes, boots and, this being hipster town, stupid heels and crap had probably trod that day. The white tile was marbleized all blackish from sneaker prints and shit like that.

In a moment of drunken panic and embarrassment, and to a small chorus of “Ohhhh!”s from people who saw the slice get away from me, I chose not to think AT ALL and, in one swift motion, bent down and deftly (yeah, now I’m being deft, now that I’m picking the slice off the floor) slid the pizza back onto the plate. We’re talking two seconds, instant reaction shit here. I stood, looked right at a dude sitting at the table closest to me (they were all aghast), and said, “Watch me walk out with it, yeaaaah!” and laughed. Laughed like they were the idiots, you know? Oh man, I'm laughing about that moment right now.

As I walked out of the joint, I heard a woman say, “Is he going to eat that?” Hell yeah, monkey, I am. Get your own floor pizza. I giggled my way down the street, completely embarrassed but too shitfaced to find it anything but hilarious. I sat down on the steps of my building, finishing the slice and still laughing out loud about the episode. Went in and told my wifey, who loves me so much, dig -- she found the tale pretty funny herself and assuaged my fears that I would die of shoe-AIDS or something in a few days. Shoetulism. Sho-e.coli.

The next morning, I felt just absolutely ashamed of myself – the massive hangover and dry heaves also did wonders for my self-esteem, let me tell you. Almost 36 years old, married, six figures, blah blah, and I’m still getting hammered and eating pizza off the goddamn floor. I vowed never to wear my red parka again on Bedford Ave and to start wearing contact lenses, both in an effort to hide my identity. That lasted, like, zero days. I think I rocked that parka to work seven hours later, now that I think about it. In fact, when I walk past the pizza joint nowadays, I actually stroke the parka, pop the collar and shoot the cuffs, and grin right into the window of the place.

That floor pizza was pretty good.