That Time I Maybe Accidentally Slid Between Universes On The Lower East Side: A Modern Pizza Brigadoon

Okay, we’re trying this again. With the words. Let’s give it a shot.

I was telling this story over the weekend, and it struck me that it’s something I’ve never really written down. But I think it’s worth documenting - you know, for science.

I guess I have to preface this by saying that I’m not the type of person to accept the unexplainable. In the Mulder/Scully matrix of assumptions, I lean much more Scully, assuming that most things have a reasonable explanation once more data is uncovered or known. I say that just so that I can say that one time while on a business trip to New York, I’m pretty sure I drunkenly slipped back and forth between parallel universes Sliders-style while trying to grab a slice.

Right, so let’s set the stage of our merry little fever dream of a play, shall we?

It’s 1:30am and I am drunk.

Wait, let’s be clear: I’m not just “I’m in New York and let’s have some fun” drunk, I’m “we’re at a digital media event in the late oughts, and we’re all in our twenties” drunk. I think it was the Webbies, but who knows. It could have been social media week or any number of other things. But if you were in the DM scene at the time, you remember (or not…) that any event which brought together the weird crossover between tech, social media, and nascent web video had, at its intersection, going hard in the motherfucking paint, if you get my drift.

The late oughts were where SXSW got its reputation as an epic and riotous shitshow where long term memories went to die. Companies lived and died by the parties they threw way out in the wasteland that was “anywhere off of sixth street.” It set the scene for an arms race of irresponsibility that wouldn’t peter out until about 2012. And New York, being much larger than Austin and with a scrappy underdog of a tech industry, had a reputation to uphold.

So that’s how I find myself at my third after party, in a bar called (I think?) Ford’s, on the lower east side, surrounded by the technorati, glitterati, and all other manner of descriptive terms for young, pretty, newly and soon-to-be rich people, before we discovered that they were called “influencers.”

This bar is a proper dive. Not quite “you could destroy everything in here and you’d be out like fifteen bucks” but still well into “you’re gonna need more than a new paint job once the artisan cheese shops roll into this neighborhood.” Put in 2009 money, we were still getting five dollar beers in Manhattan, so do with that what you will.

Back to the story: right around 1:30AM, I’m thinking three things: 1) I would very much like to slam an inordinate amount of pizza into my mouth, 2) I probably need to use the restroom before I do so, and 3) The four or five people I’m with are probably feeling the same way. So I check in with my crew, tell them I’m gonna hit the head and then we’re gonna hit some pizza. First things first though: I gotta get some crucial info from the bartender.

I saunter up to the bar and ask where I can get a slice. The sole bartender, a man who is both younger and exponentially cooler than me, tells me “New York’s best pizza is two blocks up and one left.”

“New York’s best?” I clarify, because wouldn’t that be a coincidence?

“Yep, New York’s best pizza. Two blocks up, one left.”

Well, I know that everyone thinks they know the best pizza in town, but this dude looks like he’s a perpetual trend setter, so it feels like it has a higher-than-average likelihood of relative goodness. Besides, I’ve assaulted my sense well past the realm of good taste, so as long as it’s not cooked on a literal garbage can, it should serve it’s purpose. I pop the directions into the old memory banks, and wander off through the broken door that indicates relief (and, in retrospect, possibly tetanus.)

True to its dive bar requirements, this restroom is super classy you guys. Just above the pee trough (like an actual six foot long trough that horses would drink out of) (in other circumstances) there’s a mirror where someone has carved “Smoke Beer” - a particular exercise that I contemplate for far too long. Is this a flavor profile of some cheeky new porter? Are they suggesting you replace your bong water with Budweiser? Or is this an actual “get a beaker and some burners and let’s get high in the science lab” situation?

Regardless, my attention turns back to the core mission: Operation Pizza Face Hole Intersection. So I push away the culinary suggestion, zip up, and return to the main room to find…no one.

I don’t mean my friends were gone. I mean that when I left, there was somewhere between 150 and 200 people in this bar, and now there were two. And I was one of them. The other one is a bartender, but very crucially, not the bartender I was just speaking to one or two or five hundred billion minutes ago. This is a new bartender. He’s older. And has a beard. This is very distinctly a different person, but I’m still hung up on the reality that there is no one else in this bar except for him and me.

I look at this new bartender. He looks at me. I look around to see if maybe my friends are hiding behind something, but this place doesn’t even have tables, let alone hiding spaces. I look back. He’s still looking at me. So I do the only logical thing to do in this scenario: I run away.

Outside, I pull out my blackberry (shut up, I’m old) and call my friends. Voicemail. Every one. No one picks up. I text them “where the fuck are you assholes” but drunkenly, on a keyboard the size of a postage stamp, so they don’t write back, even to clarify whether I just had a stroke.

Something has definitely gone horribly wrong. I am very drunk in a strange part of a strange city. Everyone I know and several dozen complete strangers have been Thanos-snapped into the ether of the universe. I am alone and have no real understanding of how to get home from here. But, you know, I also still really want pizza. So I do the only thing that truly makes sense in this scenario: I start walking towards pizza.

One block up, things start getting weird(er). Now weird in nighttime Manhattan isn’t quite as weird as it used to be, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Venice Beach, so my weird meter is a little skewed compared to most people. But it’s as-near-as-matters-2am now and the streets of the lower east side are deserted, except for…

Look, there’s no way to say this without sounding like I’m writing a David Lynch spec, so I’m just gonna say it and you’re gonna have to trust me here.

Directly in front of me there is a group of a dozen or so seven to ten year old girls playing double dutch in the middle of the street. A totally normal sight at 2pm - less so at 2am. There are no adults here. Or anywhere. Except me. And right as I notice them, they notice me. They don’t stop their monotone chanting, they just continue to do so while swiveling their heads to follow me like a leopard follows a [whatever leopards eat - I’m not looking it up on Wikipedia right now.]

So once again: empty streets in the LES, except for me and a gaggle of girls wielding a pair of twin jump ropes. And chanting. I briefly wonder if they’re okay and why they’re out here all along performing what’s starting to sound more and more like some pagan ritual before I keep fucking walking because there’s no scenario in which any good comes from me stopping and hanging around. But I start thinking that I need a witness here.

The blessing of living in California and spending a lot of time in New York is actually time. More specifically, that you can call your girlfriend at what’s almost your 2AM and she’ll still be up and wondering what the absolute fuck you’re talking about when you open with “I hope I didn’t wake you but everyone disappeared and I’m kind of scared because there’s this creepy group of girls playing double dutch but I think it’s going to be alright because I’m walking to get pizza.”

We’d been together for a while at that point, so thankfully I’d build up a reservoir of good graces to pull from in moments like these.

Witness achieved, I told her precisely (ish) where I was, so the police could find my body, and continued my Epic Pizza Quest. Two blocks up, and one block left, where I found…

New York’s Best Pizza.

That’s the goddamned name of the place.

Motherfucking hipster bartenders.

It’s open, for some reason, and empty for good reason, but after some back and forth that includes “well I don’t have any and I’d have to make a full pizza” and “I understand but I don’t want a full fucking pizza, I just want a slice” I get a couple slices and, for lack of anything better to do, decide to head back to Ford’s.

Now you might be asking yourself, dear reader, why I would march back through a fae revelry towards a crack in the universe, and that’s a very good question. The answer is that I was very drunk at the time.

So back I went.

The children were still there, still playing double dutch. (In my memory of this, they’re doing everything slowly and in a minor key, but it’s likely they were normal speed and tone, and I was just perceiving things slowly for chemical reasons.) My phone comes out again and I subtly (HA) narrate my way through this gauntlet to my girlfriend (and for the police report) and back towards the bar/Tardis.

Which brings us to our climax. See, there’s something even more disconcerting than leaving a restroom to find an erstwhile packed bar with naught but tumbleweeds, and that’s coming back to the deserted bar and finding it full again. Like packed full. Like normal full. Like Digital Media Event after party full. You know, like you remembered it pre-restroom (which is as weird a sentence to type as it is, I imagine, to read.)

I immediately run into my friends, who not only know nothing at all about the empty bar, but proclaim that they’ve been looking for me for “like an hour.” They’ve called and texted me, they say, which is ludicrous because I’ve been using my phone and I would have…

I looked at my phone. I had seven missed calls. A dozen texts. None of which were on my phone when I used it just moments ago, but all of which were timestamped over the past hour-ish.

I call my girlfriend again. Please pick up.

“Did you just talk to me and did I just tell you about everyone disappearing and the bar being totally empty and the weird creepy double dutch girls and getting into an argument with the pizza guy at New York’s Best Pizza?” I shouted into the phone, to the absolute horror of my friends (who were probably wondering what legal obligations they had to return me to my hotel and/or the insane asylum before I hurt myself.)

“Yes…” she responded, probably wondering what obligations she had to guide me to my hotel and/or the insane asylum before I hurt myself.

“Good!” I shouted, and promptly hung up, having proven my sanity, but really testing the depths of that aforementioned reservoir of goodwill. She would later tell me that somehow the second phone call was weirder than the first.

Moving past my friends, I stormed back into the bar. The bartender (the first one, the hipster one, the human one) clocked me coming in, but before he could open his mouth to ask what was probably going to be a very friendly question about whether I found the pizza place, or did I want to close out the tab I’d left open, instead got to be on the receiving end of me shouting “You sent me to a really fucking weird pizza place!” before marching out the door; thus cementing my reputation as a gifter of bizarre and inexplicable social interactions, and the probable punchline to someone else’s very different story.

For the rest of the week, my friends would swear up, down, sideways, sober, and drunk that no, the bar did not empty out; no, this was not a prank; no, they didn’t see me leave; and yes, they were in the very full and active bar the entire time I was gone.

It’s ten years later, and I don’t have an explanation for this event. I wouldn’t say it haunts me, but it’s definitely one of the weirder things that’s ever happened to me. And weirder still, in writing down this modern pizza-driven Brigadoon, I looked up Ford’s and New York’s Best Pizza just to see if I remembered their names right - and I can’t find any trace of either of them.

I’m still with the same girlfriend, and she still remembers the phone calls (vividly), but no one else was actually there, so no one else can verify the very weird set of events and circumstances that happened late that night, and into the early morning, across a series of overlapping universes.

Somewhere, out there in the ether of the multiverse, I imagine one version of me is still wondering where everyone went, and yearning for a slice of New York’s Best Pizza.