This is not the Mark I am looking for. I am looking for the Mark who owns Mark’s Pizzeria, which is where I had come to see where Red Hook comes for a slice and some conversation.  

“Can I have the slice with the big bubble? … No … no … yeah, that one,” the woman says with a smile that turns up sharply at the edges. Her language is straightforward, like a child, and she has the tottering movements of a string-puppet. She bends down stiffly to pick up a dollar bill that falls to the floor. It is 3 o’clock. 

Business is beginning to slow since the noon-start of the lunch-hour rush. There is another pizzeria in Red Hook but it is far away from this place. It also hasn’t been around for twenty-five years. 

The early rush starts slowly. Two Latinos in Nikes and paint-splattered jeans sit at one of the three tables and talk in Spanish about their hometowns. They drink Pomegranate Snapple and wait, placidly, for their lasagna to get warm. There are no other customers in the shop. 

A man suddenly dashes in to grab a takeout order. “Ese es mia,” he says in Spanish: “That’s mine.” He takes the hand-off. He is wearing a white “United We Stand” 9/11 commemorative shirt emblazoned with a bald eagle and unfurled banners. He rushes outside with no apparent exchange of cash and slides the box into the catering truck he has double-parked on Van Brunt Street. 

Then the truck drivers come in. One wears camouflage pants, is short and speaks in a nasal voice. “I want the Sicilian from the corner,” he says. He sits with his friend Angel, a big guy, near the glass window at the front. Angel talks into the phone to his girlfriend. “Hurry up, I gotta go, I gotta go. I’ve only got a half-hour for lunch,” he tells her. 

Now the customers come in a flurry. 

“Next please, next please,” says Tony, who works the counter and the oven. He gets his customers in and out quickly and the line is never more than two or three deep. The phone rings with orders to go. “Hello, Mark’s Pizza. Hold on please,” says Tony. He has worked this rush for the last eight years. He is a short and squat Albanian who grew up thirty miles from the Italian border. Mark is not here. 

Workers in paint and grease-splattered pants place orders, talk on yellow Nextel phones and, when Tony gives them their slices, eat silently. One of them has been on his back. His shirt is covered in dirt and debris that no one has tried to wipe off. It says “Brooklyn” in classic white script. 

Just as quickly as it fills up the place empties. A Latino busboy wipes the tables clean for a second time. But soon it starts again. The housing coordinator from the local Red Hook Community Justice Center asks for a spinach roll. A pregnant woman waits for her slice with her toothy and smiling young daughter. The sharply dressed head of the Ikea furniture store’s employment initiative walks in looking for a “fresh pie.” At a table, an old lady watches the young girl seated in front of her eat a cheese slice. The old lady doesn’t take her eyes off her. 

Faridun Tabarov was supposed to be helping Tony at the counter but is late for work. Three years ago he came from Tajikistan. Now, finally, he is coming from his English classes in Manhattan. The 23 year-old takes pizza orders. Tony isn’t angry. He greets Faridun with a high five and then barks out delivery instructions to Mario Silva. 

Mario is 49 and delivers pizzas on a bicycle. The bicycle is gray and hard to ride. The tray is heavy and is welded to the handlebars. The tires are under-inflated and worn. The pedals rattle and the cranks creak. 

Mario rides easily and can maintain a running conversation and salute the people he passes. He knows people. A tall black man calls out hello in Spanish. 

“He married a Dominican girl and learned some Spanish from her,” Mario says. 

Mario used to be afraid of black people when he first arrived. He prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe to give him strength to pedal on. Then he was attacked and a black man saved him. Mario decided he could be friends with black people. 

On the street people may not know Mario’s name but they do recognize him. They call out “Pizza Man,” or “Mexico.” Mario may not know their names, but he knows where they work. He pointed to the long warehouse that juts out into the Atlantic Basin. 

“I know all these places,” he said. “Upstairs, downstairs, all the way down there.” 

At 2 o’clock the kids start coming in to the shop. They are followed by a short man Tony calls, “big boss man.” The big boss man is the head of Added Value, a farm on the edge of Red Hook. He is relocating his office down the street. Tony teases him about being the big boss man. 

“You’re the big boss,” the big boss man says to Tony. 

“No, you’re the boss, man,” says Tony. They do this for a while longer. Then they talk about growing peppers and tomatoes. The big boss man orders a roll with anchovies, ricotta, spinach and tomato. Tony offers to have it delivered. 

The man from the garage around the corner comes in. He wears a navy blue baseball cap with a smudged gold braid on the brim. He is in a lousy mood. “Things are slow,” he tells Tony. “I used to do 10 cars, and now its three, four cars, that’s it.” 

He sits down alone reading a magazine and begins to talk as if he were having a conversation. “Black fish are out there,” he says. “They got lucky, they ran into a school of Bonita. Wow, look at that … ” He has no one to answer him. 

It is getting late. The young men with the green Fairway hats come in. So does the woman with the tattoo on her hand and the dead brother named Mark. 

She has eyes that smile and sometimes roll back. Her head nods and she does not seem to be able to control it. 

“Mark got killed when he was 19,” she says. He got shot with stray gunfire on Wall Street. He was running away when he got shot in the back. Their mother died of grief several days later, the woman says. 

Tony knew the woman. He knew that she got treatment around the corner at the methadone clinic. “She comes in all the time,” he says. She is not the only outpatient who comes for pizza at Mark’s. 

“I see crazy stuff I don’t see in my neighborhood,” says Tony. He lives in Bensonhurst, but spends most of his time here. “It’s like a family, you work with these people for years and years and years, and you know what they want to eat, not just how they are.” 

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