It's amazing what you can find just by cleaning out your closet.
I came across a bunch of random floppy disks the other night, and discovered some pictures I had taken at Hometown the summer after I graduated college.
I've often told myself that I couldn't write about my time at Hometown - about seven or eight years all-together - because the experience was too weird and too awesome to put into words.
Me and all my friends, we pretty much grew up there. Harry got me a job, my first, when I turned 15, and I got Josh and PJ and Don and a bunch of other friends jobs there, and soon it turned into one big hangout session when we weren't in school.
That's Brian, the owner, on the left. He fostered an atmosphere of organized chaos, with crazy bets and challenges and all kinds of high hilarity.
I always thought that little pizza joint in Brooklyn would make a great TV show. We had all the great characters, and all these great situations. Perfect for television.
Any attempt to take pictures of the place failed. I took a disposable camera into work for the sole purpose of taking pictures, but I lost the damn thing. Finally, after college, I brought home my cheap little digital from my graphic design class and snapped some pictures. Then they, too, disappeared.
Only to reappear, years later, in a shoebox in my closet.
It's the kind of thing that makes you kind of glad to be scatter-brained, because otherwise some curse would've lost the pictures down some black hole.
The funny thing is, the characters are all there - they're just different now. Don still delivers, and I stop in every once in a while to grab a pizza.
But the Hometown I remember is the fuzzy, hazy one - lost to memory and stories told after the fact. You can't really write anything meaningful about Hometown; it takes a group of us, all together, to tell the story, because laughter is always involved.
