Pizza Box

Pizza Box
By Austin Thomas

I count out sixteen quarters every morning to buy two things during the course of the day. Coffee at Bruno’s Bakery and a slice of pizza at Pizza Box. Bruno’s and Pizza Box happen to be two of the few places that have managed to remain on or around Bleecker Street. Over the years, the turnover rate of places in this area has steadily increased. About every six months there’s a Pinkberry that takes the place of a Red Mango that took the place of a Jamba Juice. But for as long as I’ve been alive, there’s been Bruno’s and Pizza Box for coffee and a slice.

The price of coffee has varied by a negligible amount over the years. It has been stable at six quarters, or $1.50, for a while now. Pizza though, as we all have followed, has gone from a general consensus of $2.00 to $2.25 and now to $2.50. I’ve adjusted accordingly. Ten quarters for a slice. Got it.

So I get up in the morning and count out sixteen quarters. Six quarters for a small black coffee from Bruno’s (which by the way is a bakery that still makes fresh loaves of bread each morning and might give you any left over bread at the end of the day for free), and ten quarters for a slice at Pizza Box. I pick up the coffee first because it’s on the way to Pizza Box and because I’d much prefer to sit in a pizzeria with a coffee than in a bakery with pizza. I enter Pizza Box and the same guy who has always ran the place is there and greets me hello. He’s lost most of his hearing by now, and although I’ve been coming here my whole life he doesn’t recognize me anymore. But I bet that if I’d come in with my mom and brother he would recognize me as the curly haired little kid in the stroller with his mom and brother. I begin to ask him for a plain slice, but as I do, I glance up at the menu and see written in black magic marker on a paper plate taped to the menu: REGULAR SLICE $2.75. “I’m sorry,” I say. “No thanks,” and proceed to walk down the block to The Pizzeria, but I won’t write about that because that’s for someone else to do.

It wasn’t that I refused to pay the extra quarter that Pizza Box charges for their pizza which has always been and will always be the best pizza in the neighborhood. It wasn’t that I was mad about how food prices have escalated because our federal government has subsidized the conversion of grain into ethanol which has raised the costs of food products that are made directly from such commodities as bread, pasta, and tortillas, or because the Federal Reserve Bank chooses to weaken the value of the dollar by printing billions of dollars to bail out reckless irresponsible buffoons from Bear Stearns, and thereby making domestic products like pizza more expensive for American consumers. No, it wasn’t that. I surely would have paid it if I’d brought eleven quarters. But I didn’t. I only brought ten.