Nights in White Castle by Steve Rushin

Author:Steve Rushin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

I make friends named Mike, Mike, Steve, and Steve. These were, respectively, the first and thirteenth most popular baby boy names of 1966. To distinguish the two Mikes on our floor, they’re renamed Hodes and Vill. The three Steves become Steve, Steph, and Stever, like the conjugation of some Old English verb (presumably meaning “to remain recumbent until the noon hour”). I’m Steph, and I cleave to the kids on my floor—from Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Chicago—who like sports. I am already contracting my horizons, narrowing my gaze.

On a gorgeous blue-skied day in early autumn, we drive to Wrigley Field to watch the Cubs play the Phillies. The home team has a 7-game lead on the Mets in the National League East. We walk up to the bleacher box office and ask for four seats and pay three bucks apiece for the tickets. There are 28,964 of us in the Friendly Confines, leaving 10,000 empty seats. We sit in left field and chant, “Right field sucks!” The right field bleacher bums chant in reply, “Left field sucks!” This goes on for many minutes until we finally agree to disagree. We are drinking beer at noon on Tuesday: tube-topped women, tube-socked men in jorts, pot smokers, eschewers of shirts, sunscreen agnostics, the whole shower-sandaled rabble of North Side truants and deadbeats and day drinkers, the unemployed and the unemployable.

Just last season, Cubs manager Lee Elia called those of us sitting out here “the fuckin’ nickel-and-dime people who turn up. The motherfuckers don’t even work. That’s why they’re out at the fuckin’ game. They oughta go out and get a fuckin’ job and find out what it’s like to go out and earn a fuckin’ living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin’ world is working. The other fifteen percent come out here—a fuckin’ playground for the cocksuckers.” It should perhaps go without saying that Lee Elia is no longer the manager of the Cubs, but still, we embrace his depiction and—looking around—struggle to refute its central points.

Midway through the game, Phillies left fielder Jeff Stone loses a shoe while chasing down a drive to the gap. He simply runs right out of one half of his pair of spikes—the left one—and when the play is dead and he returns to retrieve it, a selfless shit-faced spectator seated near us removes his own left shoe and throws it toward Stone as a remedy. Quickly, the bleachers cough up another shoe, and then another, and within a minute, single shoes are raining down on the Wrigley sod, a hailstorm of unmatched sneakers, Sperrys, flip-flops, and wafflestompers. It’s like the freshman mixer all over again, except that the groundskeepers picking up the footwear have no intention of returning anything to their rightful owners.

After the game—a 6–3 Cubs loss, Lee Smith giving up 4 runs in the ninth, blowing the save to cost Dennis Eckersley the win—a half-shod crowd of happy inebriates limps away from Wrigley. They board the elevated train at Addison, stand in line at McDonald’s,

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