Let me set the scene.
New York City, summer of ‘89. Brief research indicates this is actually somewhere in North Carolina, but made to look like NYC. They did a good job, so lets stay in the fantasy world. This is ‘80s New York. Rudy Giuliani is still about 5 years away from becoming mayor, and experiencing a seemingly perfect ascent toward greatness and popularity. He is simultaneously about 30 years away from completing a total annihilation of his dignity and proving that what goes up, sometimes comes way fucking down. His controversial “tough on crime” policies have not been enacted in 1989. As such, the city is rampant with crime. Filthy too. Say what you want about him, the place needed cleaning and he cleaned it. At a cost… but we’re not here for politics are we?
It’s night time. City sounds fill your ears. Steam or whatever is venting from the underground, like it does. There is an exotic danger to this place, because you’ve never seen anything like it before. There are more people in a square block of this alien habitat than you have ever met in your life. A fresh faced teenager wanders on to the scene via a vespa, carrying a familiar cardboard box. He’s dressed in a red, white and blue uniform and emblazoned across his hat is a product placement (Dominos if you must know).
His groove is halted, and he takes another look at the address he’s scrawled on the box with confusion. 122-1/8. He looks up and sees 122. He pans right and sees 123. He pans left again. Right again. What the hell is 122-1/8?
A voice emits from the sewer.
“You’re standin’ on it dude!” Money is exchanged for the pizza through the sewer grate along with sage advice: “wise man say, forgiveness is divine but never pay full price for late pizza.”
The voice belongs to a turtle. Man-sized, likely a mutation. Based on how he’s speaking and his preferred mode of transport (skateboard) you would have to guess he’s a teenager. He’s laden with weaponry. Ninja weaponry. A teen-aged mutant ninja turtle. There has never been a more perfect combination of attributes assigned to a character in man’s long history of story telling. Wait, there’s FOUR of them? For all their differences, they seem to share one thing in totality: a love of pizza (no anchovies).
I love pizza too.
Inspiration struck while on a bike ride. This is somewhat rare on a bike actually, because I like to use that time to catch up on news and so forth (podcasts) but my headphones had died. Without any other voices in my head I could hear only my own. “Dude, you should ride your bike to every single Abo’s Pizza location. Wait, are you getting a little too old to be using the word dude all the time? I mean, do other people your age still talk like that? Now that my generation has inherited the world, should we be acting more professionally? Should I stop wearing my hat backwards? Is it weird I still listen to hip hop? Wait… back to the Abo’s thing.” I sat on that idea for 2 years, as one does, always finding excuses to do something else instead—even when something was actually nothing. It was my daughter Zoey that got me psyched, after she showed interest in it. My family rarely shows interest in what I get up to, and so it stood out. If she thinks this is cool, I should probably do it.
Abo’s was started by Steve Abo, who opened his first location on The Hill in 1977. My older brother framed his house, or so he once told me, but that was after Steve Abo achieved whatever success that first location brought to him, plus all of the other locations since. The pizza is “NY style”. They regularly win the “Best of Boulder” award, but I won’t defend such an accolade. This can’t be the best slice of pizza in the entirety of Boulder. Pizza can be a lot of things though. There are many types, and many styles. If you just want to grab a slice (or two) on the go—you can do worse than Abo’s. A lot of people will tell you that Cosmos is better. It isn’t, but a lot of people will tell you that anyway. A lot of people will tell you that some other place is better. It probably is. This isn’t gourmet, high quality shit we’re talking about here. It’s fucking pizza, in the most basic form. Served by the slice and re-heated when you order it. Mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. You can add toppings if you want, but I never do.
There are nine Abo’s locations in operation, or at least that’s the theory. In reality there may be nine Abo’s locations, but only 7 were in operation. Riding to all nine locations, plus eating a slice at all 7 locations which were up and running looks something like this:
In total, this was 108 miles and took me a bit over 10 hours (only moving for a bit over 8 hours). So, in rough numbers I was moving at around 13.5 mph and ordering + eating each slice in about 15-20 minutes. According to cyclinglevel.com this is an elite pace for a 70 year old man. I was unable to confirm that my pizza eating pace was elite too, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.
The right bike is essential for an endurance challenge of this nature. You need a proper marriage of function and form, beauty and strength. You also need to select from among your bikes the one that isn’t in multiple pieces and hopelessly entangled in the learning curve of bike maintenance and repair. For this adventure, I selected El Bee.
While teaching me how to change the oil in my first car, my Dad told me that I should name my car. He gestured over toward a white board he had up in the garage which displayed the name of his van alongside the milage at which he had last changed the oil. The Grey Ghost. I found this to be an uncharacteristically dorky thing for my Dad to do, and was somewhat surprised by it. As an aside, the Grey Ghost would play a pivotal role in the continuation of his family line years later because I used it to impress my future wife by showing off a stray dog I had found in the woods. “Hey, do you want to check out a dog I have in the back of a sketchy looking van over there in that dark ally?” She did. The dog ran away eventually, as was it’s nature. The girl stuck around though. She was even there the night that dog ran away, at some party where a pack of us morons decided that the best thing we could do with all the dog food I no longer needed was to eat it ourselves. I’m tempted to blame liquor, but I can still remember when Mike B woke up the next morning and poured himself a bowl of dog food cereal without comment. Much as the great philosopher Wayne Campbell described, she didn’t bolt and so it was meant to be.
Anyway, as was my nature, I didn’t listen to my Dad’s advice and I have never named any of my cars. I name my bikes, sort of. El Bee is just a lengthened spelling of L-B which are the initials for the Lightening Bolt frame. That name comes from the manufacturer, Crust. Bikes are generally named for their frames I suppose, so that we can have conversations about them with people not fully privy to our pathetic attempts to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the people that have purchased our exact same bike. To further exemplify my sad and useless struggle to see myself as a unique and special snowflake it should be noted that this bike was not purchased at Walmart, or even at a bike shop. This frame is bespoke and rare and cool and special. I’m basically the only person that has this frame except for my friend Tony who had it before I did and who I definitely copied wholesale in my effort to be the only person with this bike.
The frame is ‘Randonneur style’. This is a French word which means “hiker” or “rambler”. Any person that likes to go on long countryside voyages, I guess. It is a style of bike, and it is also a style of riding a bike. These bikes are built to go very far distances (across continents) in relative comfort. The geometry is suited to carrying weight on the front tire, like a sleeping kit or extravagant coffee supplies. Like most things French, these bikes are made to turn the screws of the romantic within. To look upon one of these bikes is to dream of riding one from sunrise and long past sunset. I find this type of bike to be the most beautiful, because when I see one I think of where I might go on it. The irony is that I own one of these bikes, but when I look at it I never think about where I can go on it. I only think about where I can’t go on it. I have saddled it with single speed technology. In fact, this specific frame is only meant to be built single speed. That is the source of it’s power and it is also a glowing green hunk of kryptonite which clunks around in the vicinity of the bottom bracket. Incidentally, I maybe didn’t install the bottom bracket correctly. There were a few parts left over…
Here are some things about this bike which will either mean nothing or everything:
The tires are 48mm x 650b. I paid extra to have tires which might signal that I care about how my bike looks, or maybe that I support small business, or a culture, or something anyway. The act of signaling is often more important than what is being signaled with bikes. I did not pay extra for the cranks or chain ring, which were the cheapest combo I could get and which are a source of great shame and embarrassment. I’m so sorry for my cranks. Please know that I am at least aware they aren’t cool. Rim brakes, which I hate because they’re center pull and they rub on my tires if I don’t install everything with the precision of a surgeon and then never ride it or touch it or even look at it again. C17 Brooks saddle, that lesser cousin to the B17 which probably still has a great life and successful career in finance but just isn’t as put together as the original and never will be. This bike is also equipped with a dynamo hub, which powers an Edelux ii light up front. I would trade all the boutique tires, saddles and cranks in the world to keep this single feature going. It would be an even trade, monetarily speaking.
All of those words—many of which are negative—to say that I love this bike. It rides like a dream. It isn’t everything I want, but it is everything I’ve got right now. One of the problems I have found, after diving deeply into the rabbit hole with bikes, is that they are endlessly customizable. There are way too many variables in the equation, and each variable cost a pretty penny to solve. Plus, the honest truth is that it will never be solved. Eventually I will revise my stance on something and want to change it again. Nothing else in my life so easily tempts me into rampant consumerism. The gods have created the perfect intersect for my engineering brain, my low level mechanical chops, my otherwise closed artistic eye, and my athletic pursuits. I resolve to challenge my nature in this arena, because nothing bugs me more than buying shit I don’t really need. I also can’t stop looking at web sites which want to sell me gorgeously featured brakes, or stems, or tires or God help me even frames.
The first Abo’s I want to visit is in Arvada, and doesn’t open until 11:30am. Not exactly an alpine start. I start rolling at 10:15am at an elite 70 year old pace, managing to arrive on location at 11:25am. Like, goddamn if that isn’t a sign for things to come, eh? They’re closed of course. I wait around for a while but by 11:45 it’s clear they won’t be opening any time soon, and this wasn’t an error on my part as the door has the hours clearly indicated as I understood them to be. This is not wholly unexpected or strange to me.
In high school, my brother worked at the local pizza place in Nederland (Backcountry Pizza). One week he managed to work more than 40 hours, and he asked his boss what would happen if he crossed the threshold into ‘overtime’. A blank look. “I don’t know… that’s never happened before”. These places are all run by stoners. 11:30am is more of a suggestion, really. Just so I don’t appear too critical here, I want to point out I have known and loved a great many hardworking stoners in my lifetime. Not a one slung pizza though. There is a Venn diagram intersection here, and where stoners meet pizza shops an ambition black hole exists. Which is fine. Not every job or task hangs lives in the balance.
I was hungry by the time I got to the second Abo’s in Northglenn. I remained hungry all the way though the next 3 Abo’s in Broomfield, South Boulder and North Boulder. By the fifth slice (in Longmont) I had achieved a tipping point, and no longer felt like eating pizza. I polished this one off on the strength of it being the best tasting slice I would have all day. I had to choke down the remaining two slices in Erie and Louisville. At every location I ordered a single slice of cheese pizza. I weighed the pizza on my kitchen scale too, for scientific purposes. Originally I planned to track the cost of each slice across every location but quickly lost track of that data by conflating it with a tip and having poor organizational skills. The slices ranged from 123g (in Erie) to 220g (in Louisville).
I have no doubt that the ingredients are the same at every location, but the taste is not. The Erie slice was the worst by far, and nearly inedible for a guy that wasn’t even hungry anymore. Nearly. Papa John has famously sold many pizzas with the assertion that better ingredients will yield a better pizza. He’s not wrong, of course. He’s not entirely right though either, because identical ingredients across 7 Abo’s locations did not make for 7 identical slices of pizza. There’s another element at play here.
The first pizza chef I knew was my mom. She used to bake bread when I was young enough to have the smell of it implanted permanently into my brain. I can smell it now, just thinking about it. On Sundays, when the Broncos played, she would roll the bread dough onto a cookie sheet and top it with marinera and whatever toppings we had around the house. The whole pizza—and each individual slice—was rectangular. The dough was unusual, a dense and wheaty crust. The toppings were not central to the design of it all, but the dough was. Man, that was good pizza. I have never had another like it.
Regional pizzas are born like this. Pizza ingredients are fairly simple, but small tweaks to them can yield wildly different styles and tastes. In New York, we have the most popular version of the pizza slice here in America. This is the slice that Abo’s attempts to re-create. Basic, thin. A great New York crust folds and cracks, but never breaks. In New Haven they cook the pizza in a coal fired oven, with temperatures up to 1000 degrees or higher. They use a dry mozzarella and the effect is a crispy pie, scorched up top and often garnished with freshly shucked clams. In New Jersey special emphasis is placed on the tomato. In Detroit, the pizza is baked in a pan. Legend has it that the original pan was a thick blue-steel pan used to clean the oil from tools in high pressure gas ovens set up in auto factories. In true midwestern fashion the dough is cooked in butter. St. Louis adds sugar to their pizza sauce, and Provel cheese which is a regional mixture of provolone, swiss and cheddar. This pizza is on a cracker thin crust and cut into squares. The inventor was said to have been a linoleum tile cutter and so he understood squares and preferred the shape. The variations go on ad-infinitum. Chicago, California, and of course the rest of the world and especially Italy.
Whatever style you prefer, it should be noted that it can be made to taste like shit. Or not. The type of pizza, and the ingredients are irrelevant without the final essential ingredient: respect for the craft. Making a pizza is just like building up a bike. Or Engineering a bridge. Or climbing a mountain. In the end, it is a craft. It requires care, attention to detail, and an element of artistry. Completion of every craft should induce pride, and also some small element of shame. If you cannot find pride in your work, you shouldn’t be doing it. If you cannot find fault, you will never improve.
A life well lived, in my opinion, places the mind into a state of duality. It should be understood that nothing is meant to be taken too seriously. Even very serious things. Death, love, finances, careers, car troubles, illness and aging. After you have lived long enough to establish some guiding principles, your concerns around such topics have little effect on them and so you can only make things worse by wishing that you could change them. Were such a thing even possible, it would only be by compromising on the principals which define you. On the other hand you should understand that it is ok to take something seriously, even if it is not a serious endeavor. You should find the things you wish to craft. It takes courage to engage with both sides of this coin. To relinquish your concerns, and to cultivate them, requires accepting the possibility of a meaningful failure and determining exactly how you might combat this possibility—or if you even can.
You can craft a relationship, a line up a swath of stone, a career, a child into an adult, a home, or a simple pizza.
Whatever it is, respect the craft.
"Completion of every craft should induce pride, and also some small element of shame. If you cannot find pride in your work, you shouldn’t be doing it. If you cannot find fault, you will never improve."
I really liked this line. Great piece, as usual!
Nice ride! I enjoyed the escort through town and through the inner workings of your bike brain.