My tray-carrying skills improved more quickly than anyone could have anticipated. Within days, I found myself traveling from one end of the restaurant to the other at full speed, feet churning under me, with a drinks-crammed tray borne aloft on my fingertips. Could I pull off a bottle of chablis and four wine glasses? Two bottles of cabernet and eight wine glasses? What about three bottles of zinfandel, eight wine glasses, and three Old Fashioneds? I discovered that I could do all of these things, and more. Even the way the glassware chattered next to my ear as I moved, a sound which had previously always indicated the end of the world, now had the playfulness of musical notes coming from a masterfully-played glockenspiel.

I took pride in being a quick study. I learned how to prepare a latte without permanently scarring my forearms with boiling milk. I learned that most entrees required 8 to 12 minutes of prep time, but that the lamb chop required 18 to 22 minutes. When someone ordered it, I needed to punch it into the Micros terminal right away (Micros was the restaurant’s convoluted computer system for sending orders to the bar and kitchen), even before I inputted in the person’s drink or appetizer order. And I was pretty much the only person who worked there who could reliably locate the “SPICY” input on the Micros confusing sets of menus and sub-menus (hit SPECL, then EXTRA, then MISC, then SPCY).

Reynaldo put a hand on my shoulder after an especially trying dinner shift one night and said, “Congratulations, you’re a semi-competent waiter now. We’re all so proud.” He said that a special ceremony was being held in my honor at a club called Field Day where I would be awarded a medal. Reynaldo and the other gay waiters were forever inviting me out to their gay dance clubs, even though I thought I had made it clear to them, on several occasions, that I was straight, that I liked girls very much, and that I had no interest in joining them. The gays I knew were far more open and persistent in their pursuit of me than I’d ever been in pursuit of any girl. In the three months since I’d arrived in Chicago, I’d barely been able to bring myself to make eye contact with girls.

That had to change.

Through trial and error, I also learned that I could work a double shift—a lunch and a dinner—after consuming 12 beers the night before, but that I could only work a single shift if I drank more than that. I’d done some drinking in college, but the drinking I was doing in Chicago was a whole new kind of drinking for me—a kind that was always done alone, in my claustrophobic apartment, and always while playing video games.

Some nights I would drink so much (more than 12 beers) that I would actually forget where I was in the game and I’d have to start the thing all over again the next night.

Aside from my family’s annual trip into the ruins of Utica for school shoes when I was a kid, I realized that I had no city experience whatsoever prior to moving to Chicago. Still, I was convinced for some inexplicable reason that city life was for me. I was exposed to the whims of crazy homeless people who followed me down the street, and rampant minefields of dog shit on sidewalks, and the police sirens always wailing in the distance. I drank beer, most likely, to numb myself from the shock of it all. And I drank because, for the first time in my life, I was truly lonely. I’d been in Chicago for a couple of months and I still didn’t really know anyone. I had to make friends and meet girls, two things that I’d really only ever done within the structured confines of a school system of some kind.

There was a woman who occupied the apartment in the courtyard across the way from me. She had long, dark hair. She never turned on any lights. I could see her, night after night, sitting in the X-ray glow of her television set, always wearing her ghost-like nightgown. I couldn’t see her face well enough to deduce her age or tell if she was attractive. But I knew this: she was lonely, and I was becoming an expert on that brand of loneliness.

I had designs of rescuing this strange woman, not unlike the way that Mario has designs of rescuing Peach in every Mario Bros. video game. I realized that the woman must see me, too; she must me sitting here, in the X-ray glow of my television, night after night, chipping away at 12-packs. I wondered if we were soul mates, she and I. I wondered if there was some way that I could meet her. I began to take note of her comings and goings. She’d arrive each night at 7 p.m. sharp, set her purse on the kitchen counter, drink a glass of water in her tiny kitchen, then disappear into the back and reappear wearing the nightgown. Then she’d pour herself a glass of wine and switch on the television. My plan was to wait outside of her building, which was one block north of mine, at 6:55 p.m. I would say hello, I would introduce myself, then I would ask her out for coffee. I was confident that she’d say yes, because having a cup of coffee with me had to be better than the nightgown and the TV and the wine.

It took time for me to work up the nerve to pull this off—a few days, a week at the most—because I’d never done anything like this before. It was bold. It was exciting. It was the kind of thing that people did in movies. And while I was in the process of gathering my nerve, and still running through all the possible scenarios for how this thing could play out, one night I came home and saw that her apartment had been stripped clean. The couch, the television—everything was gone. Two painters were there. They had all the lights switched on in the place. They had the windows open. They blasted salsa music from a tiny radio. They painted until midnight. Then they sat on a pair of overturned buckets and drank beer together. Then they gathered their supplies and switched off the lights. I could smell the paint fumes drifting across the courtyard from the apartment’s open windows.

Though I obviously did not know this woman at all, I felt like I’d been abandoned somehow. I was coming for her. I had a plan. All she needed to do was wait a few more days, to hold on for just a few more days. Goddamn it all, why couldn’t you have waited? I thought. Why couldn’t you hold on?

The apartment sat empty for a week. Then a bald man and his books and his cat moved in.

The next day I went to a newsstand and purchased a porno magazine for $3.99. My heart pounded as I paid the newsstand attendant, an Indian man with yellowed fingernails. I kept telling myself that it was my right, goddamn it, that I was a grown man, that I was 18 years old, that I was entitled to buy a porno magazine if I goddamned wanted a porno magazine. Despite my pep talk to myself, my face still went hot with shame. The Indian man slipped the magazine into a paper sack, an act for which, during my three-block walk home, I was most grateful.

I did not purchase this magazine for its award-winning journalism, or its candid interviews with stars and politicians, or the literary fiction it occasionally published. After a few days with the porno magazine, I wondered why on earth I hadn’t purchased one sooner. What a revelation this thing was. What an absolute miracle. It’s not an overstatement to say that I adored the magazine and the women who, to my mind, lived within its pages. I found myself actually looking forward to seeing the magazine when I got home from my shifts at the restaurant. When Mr. Galanti began making plans for a five-day cruise to Bermuda for himself and his collie, he left a trail of vacation brochures around the restaurant. During lulls in my shifts, I’d sometimes unfold the brochures and study the photographs. The never-ending seafood buffets featuring a lobster wearing a top hat and standing upright in a bed of ice; the comfortable-looking deck chairs with complimentary margaritas; the Broadway-caliber shows at night in the ship’s theater—these ships, as advertised, were floating paradises.

Sometimes, during idle moments, I’d imagine the magazine and I, packing our bags and being able to get away from it all.

Just the two of us. Together.