“That same person was supposed to meet us here. What can you tell us about who that is?” I pressed.
He felt around in his back pocket and handed me a folded paper. “No idea. But I’m supposed to give you this.”
As I unfolded the paper, the group gathered around me, a few peering over my shoulder.
It read:
Dear 134th Street Apartment Residents: Sorry I can’t join you as planned. You are all connected.
—A Stranger.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“There’s a catch,” a woman named Michelle told me on the phone. She’d called minutes after Scott and I finished recording a stand-up in Bryant Park.
“What kind of catch?” I asked.
“I went into a Le Pain Quotidien near Washington Square at lunch. The waitress said my meal had already been paid for. Which was great, right? Like my lucky day or something, because I heard this has been happening other places around Manhattan too.”
“What was the catch?”
“I had to eat my lunch with a stranger. Someone else who was at a table for one.”
I scribbled in my notebook. “What’d you do?”
“Look, I didn’t really need the free lunch. I mean, I order the same salad every time I go there. I can afford it. And I’m really not one to eat lunch with other people. That’s kind of my time to read, you know. But I was curious. So I ate lunch with a random guy.”
“What was that like?”
She sighed. “At first it was strange. Then I found out he also grew up near Hawthorne, in New Jersey. Like me.”
“It turned out better than you expected?”
I heard her smile through the phone. “We had a long lunch together. Then he asked me out . . . and I said yes.”
I tried to wrap my head around her story. Someone was putting strings on the giving, making people jump through hoops to get the free meal. Was this all some kind of social experiment to see how far people would go for free stuff? A few years back, I’d covered a story about someone who had hidden twenty-dollar bills in parks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. People had torn up the parks, destroying flowers, dropping trash everywhere, and even smashing up manholes trying to find the money. I wondered: Was this a ploy to bring out the worst in all of us?
After I hung up with Michelle, I found Scott lounging on one of the blankets, immersed in a conversation with several of the residents and petting a chubby black Lab that had wandered into the picnic, looking for food. Scott looked surprisingly comfortable there, as if he didn’t notice that a few tourists were snapping photos of him. On his series, he came off as the kind of adrenaline junkie who would kitesurf, raft, skydive, kayak, or ski anywhere to find the most stunning places on Earth. But in this setting, he seemed relaxed, gently teasing answers out of the people around him.
“You have to hear what Ann-Marie’s grandson told her just happened at his school,” he said. He motioned to a spot on the blanket and moved to make room for me.
“He’s in second grade,” Ann-Marie said, beaming. “And today all the lunches in his school were paid for. Just like our rent.”
“Where?”
“East Harlem. It’s a blessing because he—Dannel—just moved here from the Dominican Republic. That’s where my son has been since before Dannel was born. He ate lunch alone every day since school began. But when the kids got to lunch today, they found out that everyone would get a free meal—some of their favorites—but only if no one sits alone.”
“But wait till you hear what happened next. Tell her,” Scott said.
“Some boys in his class invited Dannel to sit with them. This was the first time for him. He just called me to say, ‘Abuela, I made a new friend. He plays Minecraft too.’”
While Ann-Marie told her story to the others, I turned to Scott. “This isn’t just about giving. They’re connecting strangers.”
Tucked between a nail salon and a barber shop and with a faded yellow sign that had a seventies flair to it, the pizza joint didn’t look like the kind of spot that a celebrity journalist like Scott would seek out.
But after we finished shooting the last of our stand-up reports, Scott had suggested we get a bite to eat. I thought we’d grab a quick sandwich and head back to ANC, but he said that if I was willing to walk an extra couple of blocks, I’d experience the “titan of all pizza.” Given my disappointing experience with food in Manhattan so far, it seemed unlikely that any food here would deserve the “titan” moniker, but I’d agreed to try it out.
The line was out the door. Easily an hour wait. No combination of cheese and dough seemed worth that.
“He imports his fresh mozzarella from Italy,” Scott assured me. “And a coal-fired oven makes the crust perfect every time. I met the owner’s son, Vince, while mountain biking in Highbridge after I moved back from Chicago years ago. My first time here, Vince had me try the artichoke pizza, and after living in Chicago, I turned him down. Because artichokes don’t belong on pizzas.”
“Where I come from, we put artichokes, avocados, banana, even kimchi on our pizzas.”
He rolled his eyes.
I laughed. “Did you just make a face about bananas and kimchi?”
“I did.” He smiled playfully. “Stuff like that will get you banned from a Chicago pizzeria.”
Minutes later, one of the guys behind the counter spotted Scott and motioned for us to come over.
“Hey, good to see you,” the man said. He was a burly guy, wearing a too-tight black henley dusted with pizza flour.
“Vince, this is Kate. It’s her first time experiencing New York pizza.”
Vince’s eyes lit up. “Where you been hiding?”
“LA.”
He grinned. “Then you don’t know pizza. Not yet anyway. I’ll have something special for you in a couple of minutes, okay?”
True to his promise, ten minutes later he handed us a warm, boxed pizza, handcrafted by his seventy-two-year-old dad, the owner. The pizza was normally priced at thirty dollars, but Vince insisted it was on the house.
We tried to find a seat in the dining room, but it was so packed that people were standing in the aisles digging into their pizzas.
“I know a better place to go. Not far from here,” Scott said as we snaked through the line and out the door. We walked a few more blocks, then stopped at a six-story redbrick apartment building. “Welcome to the best place to eat the titan of all pizzas.”
“Here?” I stared, unconvinced, at the nondescript building.
“You’ll see.”
As we embarked on the hike upstairs, I wondered if I should be going with him. Where was the line between a collegial dinner and a date? I didn’t want to give him the wrong impression of why I was there. Or have to explain later why I went to a stranger’s apartment with Scott Jameson. But everything about it felt friendly, just colleagues on a mini-adventure after a long day.
“It’s my cousin’s apartment. But he’s always traveling,” he said, unlocking the door to a beautifully decorated apartment whose walls were lined with photographs and eclectic art.
He stepped over to a colorful fish tank filled with graceful fish shaped like small disks and dropped some food pellets into the water.