One night, Julie left St. Virgil’s and instead of transferring, she walked off the L platform, crossed the river, and proceeded to get gin-drunk for three hours at the Hotel Fernandito bar until some guy who looked kind of like Dave Grohl came up and asked to buy her next drink.
“Oh SURE,” she said, with an exaggerated wink. Sometimes when she got drunk her flirting took a turn toward the vaudevillian.
She started doing this every few shifts, taking the train downtown to drink negronis until her tongue felt like a salted slug, fooling around with guys who didn’t live here. Since none of them were long-term things, there were no feelings involved.
“Well,” she told me later, “there were lots of feelings involved, but they only involved you.”
Julie was good at this, channeling one thing into another. Once, she used an argument we were having about how to correctly use the windshield wiper to charm her way out of a speeding ticket.
I fixate on things. Julie used to like that about me. Her walking, talking mood ring. Now, she’d started calling me out on it, labeling it.
“You’re ruminating again,” she’d say, another clinical term for my shortcomings slipping into her back pocket. The hallmark of one of Julie’s PICU coworkers, a handsome child psychiatrist I’d met once, a work happy hour thing at a bowling alley.
“Hey,” he said to me, lifting an empty pitcher and cocking his head toward the bar. I followed him over as Julie threw a clunking gutterball.
“For what it’s worth? I took a year off before my residency to figure my shit out,” he said, as if he were an old pal letting me in on a secret. “I thought I needed space to sort out what I wanted to do, but what I really needed was structure. Somewhere to go in the morning, ya know?”
I nodded, unsure how to respond or if I was meant to. The eighteen-year-old shoe sprayer behind the bar let foam flow down the side of the pitcher as he listened in.
“Anyways, what I’m saying is…” He put his hand on my shoulder, hitting me with the smell of hot leather and McDonald’s french fries. “Sometimes you—and I’m talking from experience here—sometimes you need to stop waiting around for the universe to give you a sign, and go down to the store to pick up a can of paint and a piece of posterboard yourself.”
There was a burst of cheering and high-fives. I turned. Julie had hit the hard spare.
That was a few weeks after I had started taking my little mental health walks, the ones that Julie correctly pointed out only ever made me feel more neurotic and worthless afterward.
I’d think the same thought over and over: Suck it up, loser! It was a shitty job anyway! Get over it!
By the time I’d hit five miles, I’d get tired and stop at this Polish dive bar that didn’t have a name out front, just an Old Style sign that said ZIMNE PIWO. Cold beer.
Julie only hooked up with one guy more than once. He was a third baseman for the Cubs’ AA affiliate down in Tennessee who, as I read on baseballprospectus.com later, had a .294 batting average and .400 OBP.
He grew up in the suburbs and was crashing with his parents until spring training and did she happen to know of any good shawarma places nearby?
Nothing happened between them that first night, other than getting drunk together and sharing a late-night pita at Beirut Chicken & Lotto. But they kept texting, and she wasn’t about to take the Metra out to Buffalo Grove to hook up in his parents’ basement, so eventually he started coming to our apartment while I was out getting buzzed with perfect strangers who told me that the best pierogi I’d ever had were shit compared to the ones their babcia made.
Julie moved out not long after. I stuck around until the end of the lease, then moved in with a guy I used to work with who built Lego models of classic Hollywood monsters.
“I’m only 48 bricks away from finishing Van Helsing’s cravat,” he would say as if it were an acceptable thing to tell someone walking back from their midnight piss.
Later on, over coffee, Julie told me she and the third baseman had tried long distance for a few weeks after he left for spring training but they both lost interest pretty quickly.
Funnily enough, I had been to that ballpark in Tennessee when I was a kid. Smokies Stadium in Kodak. Me and my dad had a plan to visit all of the Cubs’ minor league stadiums but we only ever made it to that one and the one out in Peoria.
Not long after the seventh-inning stretch, a foul ball came our way, right to me.
I could say the sun got in my eyes, or that I didn’t really care, or that it’s crazy that we expect kids to be able to catch a projectile with an exit velocity of 100 miles per hour, which it is, but the truth is, even though I was ready for the ball, wanted it, had my arms outstretched, I just dropped it.
It flew through my hands, bounced off my chest, and knocked my full Mountain Dew out of its cupholder. I had a nasty purple bruise below my collarbone for weeks.
On the ride back to the motel that night, my dad asked if I’d had a good time. If I was excited about any of the prospects, if the centerfielder Augie Walker seemed like he had it in him to make the jump.
I nodded, half-listening, turning the foul ball over in my hands, plotting out how to drop it again, how to leave it behind without anyone seeing.
