Bottom Dwelling

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I walk around the city with my bible under my arm: the newest, glossiest edition of the local rag, rating the city’s best cheap eats. That’s when it hits me — I might as well be called Shrimp. Small, curled up, and festering upon itself, that’s the shrimp.

I had walked past Lazzo’s, #3 on the list, so many times in the scramble of the alphabetland blocks downtown, the helter of mismatched storefronts I found so hard to take seriously. It didn’t even resemble a pizza place, with its blue-and-white hand-lettered sign, so un-Italian in my sensory lexicon. I was on my way to take a confessional from my close friend Elana, who lived in that neighborhood; it was a kind of spiritual favor, since she was going on a trip abroad and wanted to be unburdened of some emotional baggage before she left, so I had agreed. I figured I would use it as an opportunity later on to check out Lazzo’s, meeting my husband and daughter there when they got off work. My umbrella went up to shield me from the misty rain, then it came down as I walked, since neither I nor the weather could decide which was necessary. It was thus as I passed by Lazzo’s, just to check it out beforehand, umbrella half up, half down, and me, a skelter of indecision.

What with the sawdust on the floor and the electrical wires, I wasn’t quite sure. The scent of raw wood pervaded the rainy air — had they been closed for a renovation or holiday? I didn’t see any kind of sign. A neglected, torn menu was tacked to a wall in front, hardly enticing, just a list of…pizzas. 

“Will you be open later?” I asked, half expecting to be told they were closed for the week, half hoping.

“Six o’clock,” someone said. They looked like neither carpenters nor waiters, milling about, but I was unusually preoccupied with the scaffolding obscuring part of the front, preventing me from knowing if I still needed my umbrella open to cover me for the rest of my trip.

My whole family, we loved to eat, and pizza was one of our favorite foods, elevating it to something of sovereignty, with me being the expert. I had made it, studied it, eaten it, judged it, criticized it. For some reason, perhaps the economy, it was making a huge resurgence, and pizza places were springing up all over the city, necessitating this rash of would-be aficionados coming out with lists, and my fastidiousness was losing ground, or the headlines were getting the better of me. I hadn’t even checked to see who had written these latest ratings, and though my instincts weren’t fully focused, we were forging ahead.

At quitting time from work, my daughter called. I was exhausted from the three hours of nonstop outpouring of all the various misdeeds my friend had committed, none of them particularly eyebrow-raising, but this was becoming manifestly the world I was inhabiting: in the pursuit of self-improvement, innocent lives were becoming mired in nitpicking…nitpicking hairsplitting. It was no wonder I emerged, stumbling down the fourth-floor walk-up on Avenue B, nearly forgetting my butterfly umbrella. I was in such a daze, I could barely find my way back to Lazzo’s, whose doors belligerently welcomed me and a cluster of other probable tourists and foodaphiles at the ungodly hour of 6 p.m.

I am usually so scrupulous about my nesting places, where we take our meals, meandering about, checking out the pizza counter, getting a lay of the land, but I was clearly put off at once. 

Sit wherever you want, an indifferent waitress, one of several who would serve us through the course of the night, said to me, as if she was doing me a big favor. I was holding a huge shoulder bag, my umbrella having been stashed up front, and my raincoat, totally unnecessary in the humid heat — my chic French black, shiny trench coat, hung heavy over my arm. I sat at a mismatched set of two tables pushed together, one higher than the other, and deciding it was uncomfortable, went for one of the blue-painted picnic table types. Had I been up to par, that would have been my first tip-off that this place had something wrong with it.

I took a few deep breaths. None of the waitresses looked in my direction, and I was in need of a glass of water or two, since Elana had been so anxious to disgorge her list of petty sins, she hadn’t even offered me a drink in her tiny studio. She was always complaining about lack of money, so I didn’t want to ask for water, seeing her drinking out of a Polar Spring bottle; maybe her water wasn’t drinkable and I felt funny imposing. So there I waited in a restaurant, parched and without a drop of service, listening to the bartender pour buckets of ice into his barrel.

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