BRIAN LIBBY

Slice Slice Baby: An Ode to Ray's Pizza

Earlier this month I exchanged a couple of emails with a Brooklyn woman named Jane. Her public relations company had pitched to me a story about a Midwest zoo’s new tiger exhibit. (It had been designed with ample natural light, according to green building principles, and the PR firm had evidently seen my name in some architecture magazine).

As often happens when I get talking with a New Yorker, I wind up referring back to my time there while in college and beyond from about 1990-97. Before long, I always reminisce (probably whether the person I’m talking to cares or not) about my favorite pizza destination.

The place is called Ray’s, but as many of you know, that name gets confusing. In New York there are scores of pizza-by-the-slice outlets called Ray’s, but virtually none of them are connected in any way. There is Original Ray’s, Famous Ray’s, Famous Original Ray’s, and so on.

The Ray’s that I love is a very specific one. It is located at the corner of 6th Avenue and 11th Street in Greenwich Village. I’ve probably eaten there a hundred times, and it’s my favorite eatery on the planet.

So it was with shock that I read an email from Jane saying that Rays—my Ray’s—had moved to Brooklyn. Apparently, she said, the landlord had jacked up the rent so much that selling pizza by the slice there just wasn’t profitable anymore. (No matter that a New York Times feature rating all the city’s Ray’s franchises ranked my home shop #2 overall.)

I first came across this Ray’s late one Saturday night during my freshman year at NYU with my roommate, also named Brian. I believe we were on our way back to the dorm from seeing Jazz at a West Village Club—I want to say Sweet Basil, but perhaps it was the Village Vanguard. I’d saved up some of my work-study money.

We stopped in for a slice in the manner Manhattanites often do. One tends to assume there is always a pizza shop within a block or two (and a convenience store/deli). Maybe some are better than others, but they’re all going to be fairly similar and dependable, with a floppy texture and lots of cheese. So stopping for a slice at an unfamiliar shop is kind of like taking a freeway exit you haven’t driven before: It’s technically an unknown, but you trust the fact that it will be satisfactory enough to deliver you.

Our reaction to this pizza, however, was in my memory pretty instantaneous. We thought it was great from pretty much the first bite.

Soon we were walking from our dorm at Broadway and 10th Street, about ten minutes away, westward over to Ray’s a few times a week. I particularly remember Saturday nights about midnight or 1:00AM, after Saturday Night Live was over (this was before I began to find it unwatchable later in the decade). Brian and I would just look eat each other and monosyllabically say to each other, “Rays?..Rays!” When I graduated from NYU, my parents and sister came with me to Ray’s for my post-graduation meal after the ceremony. The Washington Square Hotel, where they were staying and I had moved in the night before from my dorm, was only three blocks away.

Today I got a new email from Jane saying it wasn’t my Ray’s that had moved after all. It was another Ray’s, this one a few blocks south on Bleeker Street. (Incidentally, it had ranked #1 in that Times feature.) It was that palpable sense of relief that got me thinking so much about Ray’s. And while I’m enormously thankful, I also was reminded I can’t expect things I love to be around indefinitely.

Since moving back to Portland for good in 1997, I’ve visited New York about once a year, or maybe every other year. Each time, Ray’s has been about the most important stop on my trip. Every time as I’m about to eat there, I wonder if I’ve overblown the taste of Ray’s pizza in my mind. But every time, it tastes like the best slice of pizza I’ve ever tasted.

Despite how many times I’ve eaten it, I can’t really describe what distinguishes this pizza shop’s slices from another. I just know it has a lot of cheese, and that the crust is neither paper-thin nor densely thick. You know it’s there, but it’s not overwhelming the cheese. Quite the contrary, actually.

There is a lot of sophisticated, artful food with more complex flavors that makes me swoon: seared foie gras and figs with a veal reduction; duck confit; coconut soup; aroncini; fettucini with puttanesca sauce; Ciabatta straight from the oven. But no taste pleases me more than that big greasy triangle of bread, tomato sauce and mozzarella from Ray’s.

Crazy From the Heat

Each winter, particularly in a perennially gray place like Oregon, one hears talk of seasonal effective disorders. I've begun to genuinely, and not just in the name of hyperbole, believe that I suffer from it too. Only I suffer in summer.

I've got light skin and strawberry blonde hair. I can get a sunburn after just minutes in direct outdoor light. But the fear of burning is just the start. Whereas 75 or 80 degrees might feel very manageable to most people, I'm uncomfortable. So when it's 85 or 90 or 95, I feel almost nauseous.

The last two days have seen high temperatures in the mid-90s. On days like this, sometimes it feels like I can never get away from the heat. We actually have two window-mounted air conditioners, one in the bedroom and one in the living room. Starting at about 11AM on these extra-hot days (the average July high in Portland is 79), I fire up both air conditioners. I feel guilty doing it, considering how the nasty refridgerants contribute to global warming.

What's more, all day I write about green buildings that efficiently use natural ventilation to cool down, flushing in the cool air through the building at night and using thermal mass (like a basement) to hold those cool temperatures through the day. But at home I'm blasting these brutal machines to refridgerate my apartment.

And yet by about 4 or 5PM the heat overcomes even these high-BTU chilling machines I've sold my soul for. At night, we've got the bedroom door closed and one of our AC units blasting the space. Yet often in July and August I find myself tossing and turning on top of the covers, sweaty. When your sleep is affected, that just feels like the last straw.

I know a lot of people reading this are likely to roll their eyes. This is the weather most Oregonians wait for during all those rainy weeks and months. But think of it this way: No matter how cold or rainy it gets in the winter, you can come inside and turn on the heater. Problem solved. But when it gets hot, we in Oregon by and large have to just endure it. Here almost no one has central air conditioning in their homes. (I certainly plan to have one when I own a house someday, but for now I'm stuck in an apartment where somebody else chose the heating and cooling systems or lack thereof.)

Of course there are alternatives to staying home. I could go to a movie or sit in a cafe. But I've got work to do, which means being in my office in the second bedroom of our apartment.

And even when I do find a satisfyingly cooled space, the depression doesn't go away with the heat. I've always joked about how I love air conditioning, and I do see it as a kind of life preserver. But when it's perennially too hot outside, when high temperatures are in the 90s for a string of days, the accumulated time inside without access to fresh air and sunlight breeds claustrophobia in me. It feels like there's some sort of bio-hazard outside that will contaminate me, and my house is a plastic bubble I can't leave.

(Incidentally, I have to say I find society's favoring of tanned skin to be absurd. Tanning is what you do to a hide to toughen it up. I like soft, milky skin that hasn't been aged in the sun. It's hilarious to me that our obsessions with youth and with tanned skin are at cross purposes. Lay out in the sun and you're asking for wrinkles, not to mention the increased chance of cancer.)

I know Oregonians like me have it relatively easy, that our summer temperatures are nowhere near as hot and humid as many other parts of the nation. But the fact that I'm merely less uncomfortable here during the Dog Days than I would be at points to the south and east doesn't mean that I'm actually comfortable. The consolation only goes so far.

Still, I try to keep things in perspective. I've got Sunday marked on my calendar because it's the last day of July. That means it's only about another month until Labor Day, which I count as at least the beginning of the end of summer. Before long I'll be able to put on a jacket and feel human again.

Norma, Oskar and Me

Last night while web surfing Valarie came across an online test in which you answer somewhere between nine and forty-five questions and the website then tells you which movie and/or star of that movie best matches your personality.

Valarie's answer was Apocalypse Now, which came with this description: "You are a rogue wanderer on the winding river of life, searching after your shadow self." A bit surprised at first, she took the test a couple more times (selecting different numbers of questions) but came up with the same movie again.

I took the test twice and came up with wildly different results.

The first time, when I answered forty-five questions, my personality-defining movie came back as Sunset Boulevard. "You are all about fame and success," the website told me, "and avoid being seen as ordinary." Obviously I was rather mortified, wondering to myself, "Am I really as much of a diva as Norma Desmond?"

The second time, however, when I answered nine questions, I was matched with Schindler's List. The explanation said, "You put the needs of others before your own. You strive to be helpful to your fellow man." I doubt I'm as noble and giving as Oskar Schindler, but if you're gonna be called a Norma Desmond figure, it's nice to have this kind of persona too, just to balance things out.

Although at first when I realized I'd been given two such wildly different movies and/or movie protagonists to describe my personality I took it as evidence that the test was not to be taken seriously, ultimately I realized this yin-yang actually describes me better than any one movie could have.

After all, I'm someone who doesn't even have a dominant right hand or left hand. I'm called "ambi-lateral", which means I can only do certain tasks with my left hand but other tasks only with my right. (As opposed to the more well-known ambi-dextrous, which denotes the ability to perform some tasks with either hand.) I also have a combined Western/Chinese zodiac sign ("Taurus/Rat") that is shared most notably by William Shakespeare and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

It should go without saying that I'm prouder of the Oskar Schindler tag than the Norma Desmond one. I fully confess to there being an element of my personality that enjoys, for example, seeing my name in the paper or one of my photos on display. But when I am given the privilege of the spotlight, it's an oddly but unmistakably humbling experience. If you can't do something useful and noble and altruistic with that opportunity, you've squandered it.

The best part of getting older (I turned 33 last month), at least in my own experience, is developing a more solidified sense of who you are. So while the movie test didn't tell me anything I didn't already have some semblance of self-awareness about, it was still a surprise to have my fortune told by means of two extremes. But because I think the notion of balance is so crucial to what I aspire to, I am at peace with the reading I've been given. I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille, but I'll break down if the end comes and I haven't given of myself.