Baked Fresh Daily

The Great L.A. Pizza Hunt
by Dan Gillis

There was no sign of it letting up.

No indication of how long I had been sitting there, no mention of how this was going to end, as my eyes were caught in a staring contest with the un-inflated airbag hiding in the dashboard. It was a Thursday night in Reseda and I was waiting for it to hit me-that feeling of stoned exhaustion, a bodily blowout enveloping me as the cab of the black pickup filled with smoke. We were parked between the curbside blue and gray trashcans, and I was wedged in the middle of this never-ending assignment.

After all, it was garbage day, and I was here to get trashed.

This is a story that begins in the middle of things. “In Medias Res,” as those literary dicks say. It’s the feeling of “jumping right into it,” and for this story it’s the only way to eat my way out of this pizza supreme; from the hot gooey center to the outer crescent crust of existence, piece by piece by piece. Reconstructing reality, one slice at a time.

This was my third day of the routine, and I was beginning to feel my body shift from idle to haggard as each smoke and slice suck a little out of me. If I only knew what was going to happen once I got out of that truck or the insanity that these drugs would bring, perhaps I would have paced myself a little more. But as I said, this is the middle of things, and I still had a long way to go, and a lot of mental wreckage to incur before it would all make sense.

The Dough

As all good stories begin, this one starts on the porch of a yellow Craftsman in Highland Park. Knocking for the second time, I saw a Moog in the window as the door opened to reveal one of my editors, always smiling and still basking in the cheesy glow of his Grilled Cheese Invitational trophy from the night before. I was there too, but I had no trophy to show, just lingering paranoia of the woman in the Kraft-single skirt who used breast milk in her ’sammiches.’ It’s Freudian, and it’s disgusting, and I’d rather think about the matter at hand.

Or rather, the green matter in my hands. I had a story to write, and in my grasp was a lidless spice jar of pot, which was slipped to me just as nonchalantly as this bizarre assignment weeks before. As usual, my role of human guinea pig was going to be put to the test, as I put our fair city to the test to find that fleeting slice to end all slices. This was the pizza litmus for the Alpha Slice, a culinary vivisection of this psychotic town, tasting the sociological toppings offered by a Los Angeles pie with everything on it. All seen through a lens of green. The idea was to thrust myself into the un-stoned public to take the brunt of embarrassment face-on, head first, and without fear. If I could inflict enough awkwardness upon myself, would anything hurt anymore? Could I become an outsider looking in on the social machinery of L.A., examining the rituals and habitual grazing paths that establish the routine, the status quo, and the scaffolding that holds together the pieces of a perfectly boring life? After all, don’t we sit in the Laundromat to not be alone? Don’t we search for things to say between sips of latte, or smoke pot and call Dominos?

Now, it was time to invert this perfect panacea for the mid-week bore as I set out to deliver my baked ass to the pizza.

The Sauce

When you begin a journey with no destination, it’s best to go with what you know, and what I knew was that Abbot’s Pizza Company reigned as a foodie favorite for the finest in pizza fare. A wooden stake in the ever-farting heart of Venice, Abbot’s consistently wins “Best Of” titles and holds a special place in tourist books for confused European travelers. It even has a fucking Myspace page. Of course, this is Abbott Kinney, the thread holding together the patchwork of aging hippies, dot-com soccer-moms and performance artists that speckle the Venetian landscape.

It is here that I fall into it, staring at the chalkboard menu, in the midst of deciding between a slice of Popeye’s Chicken pizza (featuring spinach, mushrooms, and tequila lime chicken) and the Greek (with fresh sliced tomato, red onions, olives, mozzarella and feta cheeses). Behind the counter, a man tossed the dough into the air, impossibly spinning like that slow-mo bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I begin to think how we were betrayed by the Hippie Generation. The ultimate hypocrites. The free-loving freedom lovers hoping to break the paradigms and change the world, just to burn out, check in, and settle down 40 years later. The lies of love-in only led to our generation’s wave of fatherless children, whose dads were not taken by a war of bullets, but by a war of shifting values and unattainable ideals. We are caught in the crossfire of the changing tide that our parents’ parents lived in, the first casualties in a war of spirit.

Fuck, man. What’s in this pizza?

And it looked like I’d ordered both slices. As my hunger peaked, my motions slowed down, and I alternated between each delicious slice, which somehow now included a third slice of cheese-undoubtedly ordered by my stoned-self as a “control” slice, the common denominator. I stood at the stainless steel counter and watched the people come in, with their Escalade-sized strollers and warm-up pants.

I began to get paranoid, as I was obviously eating with my mouth wide open. Soon, it subsided as I remembered that if there’s one thing you can count on in Venice it’s that the help is just as stoned as you are. It was a wonder that they could contain their munchies with such delicious delectables within snacking range. The slices were thin crust, low on sauce but garnished with fresh basil leaves and roasted garlic. The tequila lime chicken was hugged by melted mozzarella as warm spinach wove through the cheese toward the sesame seed bagel crust, a signature specialty made famous at Abbot’s. They were so good (and I was like, famished, dude) that I even tried to construct a pizza-wich…with mixed results.

The fresh toppings, thin crust and fine cheeses of these slices are actually muy tipico of that newest pizza beast: the California pizza. Just like Wildfour on Main Street in Santa Monica (where coincidently, I lost control of the volume of my voice three days later, while trying a slice of wheat crust pizza), this “California” pizza has these distinctive qualities of being light, thin, healthy-probably the trait most similar to Italian pizza in Italy, not the grease buckets we eat while watching Super Bowl commercials.

It’s no wonder that California Pizza Kitchen has capitalized on this prototype. Not only bringing the style of healthier pies to the masses, C.P.K. also espouses the commodification of California, the idea of California Dreamin’ in these boardwalk and beachside joints, harkening back to their grand opening 30 years ago, serving up the slice of our hazy coast that represents all of L.A. in the global collective memory.

All coming to a freezer near you.

Yet, there is another side to this cliché L.A. coin that becomes elusive to most of those who call this sprawling city “home.” For our relatives around the world, they’ll be the first to ask if you’ve ever seen a celebrity, yet they never ask if you’ve seen a celebrity high. Actually, I should rephrase that: while high (’cause I’ve seen Seth Green at the Puma Store on the Promenade, and he looked like he was starring in Austin White Powders).

With this in mind, I put on a suit, booked a reservation, toked, then sat on the couch for a bit, watched the first half of Last Action Hero, tape-recorded my stoned friend pondering if Helen Keller could “see color in her mind,” then, an hour later, showed up to The Ivy by the Shores. If there were a better place to “network,” I couldn’t think of it.

After getting lost for 10 minutes, we ran to make our reservation (have you ever seen a man run in a suit? It’s not pretty). We arrived to white-clad waiters opening the doors and ushering us to the outside seating area. I think it was a hint to air out our hot-boxed jackets, but it turned out to be advantageous as we watched the sunset over our Pacific Ocean, which I suddenly realized I all-too-often take for granted.

That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, man…

I gazed out the window. Well, not directly out the window, because there was a woman who looked way uncomfortable while caught in the periphery of my slightly crazed stare. But fuck her, dude, it was pizza o’clock and it was time to order the most expensive thing on the menu. After our waiter Charles-or whatever name he used in his acting career-gave us the upholstered menu, I changed my course of action, ordering the $18.75 imported smoked salmon pizza. My companion ordered the gulf shrimp pizza (also $18.75), while the word “chutney” rattled around in my brain.

I’m sure there’s a chutney to accompany every dish at The Ivy.

Although the pizza was the size of a Wham-O Frisbee, it was very filling after having some beers, which helped us feel like this was a business lunch-or perhaps a power dinner-where serious decisions were being made about some serious fucking shit. We complained about the “bear” market (I think that means bad, right?), we proudly announced cutting health benefits to all employees, and eventually continued our discussion of Helen Keller.

If only I could have been Ms. Keller and not heard or seen what happened in Reseda, the night before…

The Meat

Pulling myself out of the airbag stare, we eventually parked in the ’70s style strip mall, and I stumbled out of that black pickup in a toot-like cloud of weed, aiming my trajectory toward Casa De Pizza and its soon-to-be-infamous “Sinatra Room.”

Reseda is a grim reminder of what 90 percent of our country looks like: strip malls and drive-thrus. With no centralized Italian community like in New York or Chicago, there is no Little Italy in L.A. anymore. Especially after the Italian persecution during World War II and the dispersal of its former Downtown location. So Los Angeles only has caricatures of Italian restaurants from movies, copies of copies, like some sort of post-modern nightmare. With meatballs.

The Sinatra Room in Casa De Pizza proved to be one of these Xeroxed places, complete with walls checkered in Sinatra memorabilia. We were showered in the gaze of a thousand pairs of Ol’ Blue Eyes. Not only were these 8×10s and movie posters sketchy, but we were sitting at a booth in direct fire of a drum set that was crammed in the corner of the room. There was going to be a musical act and I hoped to god that it wasn’t Vito, the man we met in the parking lot with the Andrew Dice Clay meets Bilbo Baggins shtick.

We ordered the deep dish Sicilian, and before it arrived at our table Vito walked in with his “band,” comprised of the finest unsullied specimens of male pattern baldness and Hawaiian patterned shirts this side of Palm Springs.

“How does Michael Jackson know when it’s time to put his kids to bed?” Vito asked into the microphone as he slung his guitar around his neck.

“When the big hand is over the little hand! Booya! Seriously, folks, it’s great to be here tonight.”

Parents held their kids closer, kids looked at each other, and I stared directly at the Parmesan cheese shaker on the red and white tablecloth. Before you could say “awkward,” he launched into a surprisingly dead-on rendition of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” as I nervously watched the waitress slide our pizza on the Plexiglas tabletop. Without hesitation, we started jamming pizza in our faces, trying to get out of there before Vito could single us out for one of his soliloquies about how old he was, or how he “loved broads.”

Supposedly, the 74-year-old, black clad Vito was the son of the original owners of Casa, and when they passed, they passed it on to him-one-liners and all. Now, it seemed that as the resident musician his main job was to berate the customers with disturbing jokes over Doogie Howser sounding keyboards. Somewhere around my sixth slice-and way past the point of satiety-I caught Vito pointing at our table and inquiring about our ages. We promptly responded between greasy, cheesy bites.

Vito retorted, “I’m your age tripled! My god, you kids should have stayed at Chuck E. Cheese.”

Which didn’t sound like a bad idea at all.

The Cheese

Two days later, I found myself standing onstage beside an animatronic rat in Inglewood. Maybe it was Westchester. Wherever it was, it had to be in the proximity of Magic Johnson’s T.G.I Friday’s. We rolled in around 9 p.m. and the joint was jumpin’. Lights flashing, skee-balls flying, sliders sliding, kids leaning against arcade games unfolding rolls of tickets, all with a Robotic Mr. Cheese at the helm of this runaway groove train. This was the other side of the tracks from Sesame Street, for this was baby Babylon, and there was no escaping the mental carnage that would ensue.

I slowly inspected the perimeter, taking small steps like I was following an invisible walker. A tiny African American kid in a Yao Ming jersey ran past as what appeared to be two sets of identical septuplets crowded around the cybernetic Chuck E. Cheese. This was their Golden Calf-Mr. Cheese was their messianic being of pure light and goodness. Wading through their paper crowns, I headed back to our table where our order number (33… just like Jesus!) and my three tokens remained (representing the trinity). Tapping my feet furiously, I was succumbing to the culmination of a week’s worth of grease and weed. My senses became hyperaware.

It was like Zen.

I could hear the children climbing through the cheap plastic tubing suspended above us; I could see the grease on the soda fountain buttons; I knew that the middle aged white lady in the rhinestone miniskirt was not there just for the pizza. This was a pickup place for single parents. This is where to go before the bars open, or if you weren’t old enough to get into them. Fixated on the roadmap of cellulite on the back of her legs, I didn’t even notice that our pizza sat in front of us, our number was gone, and a half-consumed cup of construction-cone-orange soda, or Sparks or something, had appeared on our table.

I felt sick. This was too far.

But this wasn’t about me anymore. It was about all those stoners out there, petrified by fear, afraid that prepubescent children have taken over our beloved pizzerias, forcing us to stay at home and sit on our futons, while trying really hard to remember the number for Pizza Hut and watch Robocop at the same time!

This will not stand! The munchies will prevail! And later that night, they did.

The Crust

Somewhere around your 24th slice of pizza, you begin to hallucinate. Even now, I’ve put my Polaroids in line, shifting them like Tetris pieces, trying to make sense of the skewed angles, the disembodied hands and random fragments that I amassed over the week, but to no avail. I try to read my notes, but all I see are the words “Sweep Foot” and “Crotch Punch,” jotted down from the depths of cheese. It seems like a dream, but I have the zits to prove it.

In the end, my journey wasn’t really about pizza; it was about finding something unique in L.A. and searching for what truly makes you happy. From Vito and his guitar, to Chuck E. Cheese and his plan for robotic domination, you may encounter roadblocks along the way. The journey may not be easy, but with determination, you can really take a great big cheesy bite out of life.

Oh yeah, and weed fucking rules. LAA