Pizza Cult: Bike Traveling Chicag0-NYC

Chicago, Illinois

For the month of July, me and a handful of teenagers travelled from New York to Chicago, two wheels per person, gear in tow. We thought, since we were traveling from one iconic pizza city to the next, we needed a comparison. But the irony was, it would be an entire month of biking between the two cities. So we jokingly (at first) carried one Chicago pizza slice all the way to NYC on the back of our hot, unrefrigerated bicycles to have a “side-by-side” pizza tasting. 

Daily, we had a designated “pizza carrier,” this person’s role was vital as not only did they make room for a double zip-locked and sealed pizza slice, but nightly they were to dutifully report the state and transformation of the slice before assigning the next carrier. Over time, one of two ziplocks went missing and the vacuum seal conducted day-one was compromised. And as the bag got passed from bicycle to bicycle, losing shape, color, texture and essential characteristics resembling a pizza, this once-funny joke suddenly seemed to have progressed into a serious effort to move this slice from city to city. And as we all took turns, sacrificing the goodwill of our bags to a hazardous object, it was as if a joint pact was unofficially assumed around this final day with our pizza. 

And when our celebratory arrival in NYC came, we were greeted by family members eager to commemorate our 1,000 mile journey at an esteemed NY pizza parlor. It was there we announced the long saga of the Chicago pizza, presented its shapeless, crumbled form to the crowd, and each tore off a piece and counted down.. 3,2,1… The parents closed their eyes as we tossed moldy, paste-like structures onto the back of our tongue and sold lies to our brain to convince it to swallow the musty bread. I held a napkin to my mouth as I feared the pizza would soon return. I looked around, water in my eyes, staring at the same faces I had been looking into for nearly a month. Their eyes wore pain and discomfort just like mine and I wondered if we had suddenly initiated a cult, started a religion or perhaps created some weird irreversible pact that only a moldy Chicago pizza could seal. 

Brooklyn, New York