Slice.

I'm waiting for soy cheese pizza at Slice and my head is dull and buzzing.

There's reggaeton booming from the back, where the workers in the kitchen are chopping organic basil to sprinkle on my dinner.

There's droning acoustic in the front, and the restaurant is so small that it mixes with the bass boom and the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.


The overlap of music is not pleasant and I try to distract myself with the Claudia Rankine book I am reading.

I switched from Prozac to fluoxetine. Prozac's patent is up, and now the generic brand, fluoxetine, is available, the insurance company will only cover that, my editor says casually. Because Oprah has trained Americans to say anything anywhere, and because no longer does my editor see confession as intimate and full of silences, I happen to know so I tell her that Eli Lilly, the drug company that makes Prozac, is now marketing a new pill: PROZAC weekly. Try to convince your doctor that taking a pill every day for depression is depressing, I suggest. We are all in this together, whenever, whatever, wherever-in detail is ok.


The buzzing is not quite painful. I must just be overcaffeinated or undercaffeinated; underliving, overcompansating, something.

There's a hispanic couple outside fighting. The woman's back is pressed against the glass of the window, so I can't see her face, but I know that she's angry. Her hands wave frantically, in disagreement with what the man is saying. The man is yelling. I can almost hear him. Something about goddamn TVs. Something about kids and climbing stairs.

I'm glad I'm not a couple.

Oh, yay, my pizza is here.

Before his breakdown we had DVD evenings. I'd go over with a bag of Doritos and a bottle of wine. After the breakdown, he didn't wish to see anyone. He wasn't answering the phone. I called; I left messages--sometimes to break into the general silence and sometimes to check on him. Finally, he agreed I should come by. I walked the thirty-six blocks to his apartment. By the time I reached his place I was anxious but optimistic. I thought the apartment would be a mess; the apartment was dust free. He seemed fine.

He had rented Fitzcarraldo from The Movie Place. They pick up and deliver. Herzog is his favorite director. He refused the glass of wine I poured for him...He was on Lithium, one capsule four times daily. There was a red sticker on the bottle warning against alochol use. He handed me the bottle.


While watching the movie, tears rolled down his cheeks. Apart from their use in expressing emotion, tears have two other functions: they lubricate the eyes so that the lids can move over them smoothly as you blink; they wash away foreign bodies. It is difficult to feel much tear-worthy emotion about anything in Fitzcarraldo as it is about having outlandish projects and achieving them in the name art, but since the tears kept coming long after smooth blinking would have been restored and foreign bodies washed away, I decided that my friend was expressing emotion and was not fine, not ok, no.

The manager comes out from the back. She's wearing a long white dress and black eyeliner that's either stylish or smudged.
She approaches my table with a clipboard. I sign a list to get emails about a wine tasting.

"It's a wine pairing," she says. "20 dollars per couple, for three types of wine, an appetizer and dessert."


That sounds like my kind of meal, I think. Main courses often disappoint me. Red wine and chocolate never do. Maybe I should apply this philosophy elsewhere. Kissing, oral sex, then cuddling. Fuck main courses, I decide.


The Manager is still talking. "It's a really good deal," she says. She says her name is Mickey.


Tracy Chapman is now singing something about revolution, with the reggaeton pulsing behind her. It actually sounds like it was choreographed.


I wonder who I'll take to the wine tasting.