After reading the headline, you might be wondering if I am Qanon or believe that certain members of the democratic party were a pedophilia ring back in 2016. Alas no, I hate to tell you this, but I do not believe in the coming of Q — or that Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden like little boys and girls in that sort of icky way.

No, I had my own Pizzagate, and it was right when the world was in the middle of the insanity of the Coronavirus pandemic. I feel like the summer of 2021 was a particularly nutty summer. Being pent up and away from humans for over a year really drew the crazy out of New York City, that already has a high decibel of crazy — so this was a really off the charts insanely wild time. Also, I feel like there were a lot of rats — rats were everywhere. One time my friends Liz and Nick and I were eating outside in Williamsburg, and it felt like a rat ran right into us on purpose. It was terrifying and quite large and brushed my feet. So even the rats were crazier than usual in the summer of 2021. Everything in the world was just a little on edge — and for a very good reason. A fucking global pandemic had ensued.

But I digress. Also during the summer of 2021, I started to notice people hanging out in front of our small five apartment building in Alphabet City. If you’ve ever walked down my block, you would know that there is absolutely no reason to hang out in front of our apartment building. We have three public gardens on the block and an empty lot next to us for your average everyday loitering. No need to do it in front of our building. But for some reason this was happening a lot this summer. So I finally started asking people why they were standing in front of our building. One guy told me he was looking for the Italian restaurant — so I gleefully told him Posto (my favorite Italian in the city) was right down the block and off he went.

A week or so later, I came home one afternoon and there was an old fattish white lady standing against our front door alongside a young black man, probably not even 20. I asked them to move away from the door — and they did. But for the rest of the afternoon, I would look down near the front door of our building- -and I kept seeing them both just standing there. They clearly weren’t together — and they weren’t moving. It was so insane. (Again, summer of 2021 was all about that.)

At about 6, I was heading out to meet my college friends Matt and Christian for dinner and drinks. (We call ourselves the LQ, which is short for Liquor Club if you’re so drunk that you can’t determine that you are actually the L “C” and not the L “Q” But LQ stuck one night, and so that’s what we are — deal with it.)

As I opened the front door, I noticed the old lady and young man were still there. And now there was a third oddball. So I finally asked them what the fuck they were doing in front of our building and the old lady said “We are waiting for a pizza delivery.” WHAT???? I finally just said “you need to go away and not come back.” They ignored me. And then suddenly, a young preppy couple walked up, stopped and starting hanging with them. This was getting really weird. So I pulled a Karen and told them I was calling the police. I don’t think they believed me, but I actually did call the police — who came quickly and this motley group of randos all went running. It was seriously disturbing.

After getting to the restaurant, in near tears and shaken, we ended up having a nice dinner.. and afterward Matt insisted on walking me home. Christian tagged along as well. When we got to my apartment building all was clear, so I went up to my place and all of it was over… so I thought.

A week or so later, on a Saturday night, I went to look down and check outside, and guess what I saw? About 12 people standing outside the building. So I opened the window, got my Karen self on, and screamed “Get the fuck away from here!!!!!” Everyone looked jolted, and then I heard my sweet upstairs neighbor Amber say “Melissa????” I was mortified. Instead of saying something, I closed the shades and jumped into bed and under the covers. But then my phone rang, and sure enough it was Amber. She was like “what is going on??? Why are you yelling at me and my friends? It’s my birthday and we didn’t want to do anything indoors so they came by to say hi to me outside.” So first I apologized (I don’t think her friends will ever forget Amber and Kyle’s crazy old downstairs neighbor who YELLED bloody murder at them.) And then I spilled the beans about the pizza delivery scare. She then said Kyle had also been noticing weird and very random people outside as well. And thus began Pizzagate and our own conspiracy theories on why random people were outside our building waiting for the pizza to be delivered.

For the next few weeks, Amber and I would spend a good portion of our work days looking out onto the street. We noticed the randos — we also noticed a lot of cars double parked on the street. All with New Jersey plates. Every once in a while, people would buzz one of our apartments. They would always say they were here to pick up the pizza. It was insane — and gave me a sense of sincere insecurity about the safety of our home. (I bought pepper spray to carry with me at all times. What?)

Then finally our new neighbors moved in — and just a few days into living here, asked me what was going on with the random people hanging outside – -and why were they buzzing us? I said I don’t know, but I’ve been trying to get a detective in the NYPD to help me. He was nice, but hadn’t really gotten anywhere with the issue. I even got a crime reporter at a local NYC paper to help me since he too is addicted to Posto — so he knows the block well. Nothing was helping. I was terrified.

I was so terrified that one Sunday I just sat in my bed all day writing to local politicians and googling “pizza delivery as a drug code name” and not coming up with much. But then I said in a text to my neighbor that I wondered if it had anything to do with this restaurant called “XXXX Pizza” (not including the actual name) that is two blocks away. But I couldn’t put together the connection since it wasn’t our block. But my neighbor could. He discovered that our building, our cute little five apartment building, had been tagged on Apple Maps as this restaurant…. WTF?

If you google XXXX Pizza, you will see that it is a restaurant in the neighborhood that serves weed infused pizza AND most importantly, services pick ups and deliveries at an “undisclosed” location from New Jersey. Well, that location was our building. And that explained all the cars with New Jersey plates.

So what happened next? We got the building un-tagged right away through my connections, and I called the detective to tell him I had solved his case for him. He was blown away and asked me if I had ever worked for the police in the past. I said, no — I just am good. Really good at this shit. And it doesn’t hurt that I have a connection almost everywhere.

There are definitely more details and fun facts to this insanely crazy story during the summer of 2021. But for now, I will leave it at that. Except to say that I have heard this restaurant is actually quite good — so maybe I’ll try it sometime.

Hasta la Vista….