The Sweatpants
I’m a man who likes sweatpants.
I have more pairs than I need. But I still want more. Every Christmas, I’m bound to get a new pair. They symbolize the spectacular slothfulness of a perfect Sunday. Sometimes when I’m in court, wearing a suit in the middle of a long weekday, I close my eyes and imagine myself on the couch on a Sunday, sweatpants on my legs, Julie on my lap.
You can imagine my reaction in September 2014, when I got these for my birthday:
The reactions they get are fantastic. On the trip to Montauk a few weeks ago, I wore them on the drive down. We stopped at a towny bar in some Suffolk County town for a bite, and a table full of high school boys talked about them for five minutes straight.
“Yo, a cat!” I heard one of them say. The others laugh in the way you do when you’re sixteen, a huh-huh-huh drone. Some people would be embarrassed, but I’m cracking up.
The next morning, I wear them to a coffee shop in Montauk. This is a decidedly more bourgeoise crowd, still young, but much hipper than whatever town we’d been in the previous night.
“Look, cats!” a woman says, pointing at, well, you know.
“Just one cat,” I say. “Mine.”
She looks closer at the sweatpants.
“Oh, I see. It’s just one face. She’s adorable.”
I almost wore the sweatpants to one of her oncologist, then decided against. Had they seen that, I’m sure they would have added another zero to my bill.
But the best Julie sweatpants anecdote I have comes from when we lived in Philadelphia. In 2016, the Dallas Cowboys were good. Really good. They went 13-3 before losing this gut-punch playoff game to the Packers. The Cowboys, of course, are America’s Team — almost all of their games are nationally televised, so I’ve caught the majority of them, despite having not lived in the Dallas/Fort Worth area since I was in high school.
That autumn, the Cowboys were playing the then-terrible Browns, and the game was not nationally televised. (By using Pro Football Reference, I can even pinpoint the exact date: November 6, 2016.) So I went to a local dive bar with multiple TVs to watch them. We lived on a nice street in the Fitler Square neighborhood, but Callahan’s, the bar across the street from us was, um, let’s call it “seedy.” (Somehow, the place has four stars on Yelp, which will make me forever skeptical of Yelp.)
So I’m sitting in this towny bar, alone, drinking a beer and watching the Cowboys, keeping to myself. I’m wearing a Cowboys hoodie, Vans, and the Julie sweatpants. I’d been wearing them at home; I wasn’t going to change clothes to go to Callahan’s. I haven’t said a word to anyone, except for ordering my drink from the bartender.
The game is in a commercial break, and I pass the time on my phone. Suddenly, I can feel someone is staring at me. I look up.
“Hey,” says a guy sitting at the bar, “do you have that little, black-and-white dog?”
“Um, yeah,” I say.
“You're the asshole who throws his dog’s shit in my trash can.”
(Now, what’s my side of the story, you ask? I would put my dog’s shit in someone else’s trash can. But I only did that when their trash can was placed out on the curb on a non-trash day. Some people left their trash cans out on the street every day, which isn’t allowed and made the street look like shit. So I felt no remorse about throwing a used poop bag in there. If they didn’t want me to use them, they should have put them inside like everyone else does.)
“Excuse me?” I look him in the eyes. This guy is nursing a three-day old beard, and looks like he’s been drinking at this shitty bar for days. His eyes are glossy, his hair unwashed. Compared to him, my Julie sweatpants looks like a damn tuxedo.
“You heard me.” He repeats himself: “You're the asshole who throws his dog’s shit in my trash can.”
It’s around this time I wonder if I’m going to have to fight this guy. He’s drunk and deranged and has a score to settle.
“Yeah, I heard you the first time. Leave me alone. I’m watching the game.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
“Okay, good talk.” I look at the bartender. A normal bartender would intervene when one patron is a huge asshole to a total stranger, right? Can’t be good for business, can it? This bartender hears all of this, but he doesn’t seem to care. Maybe the drunken dickhead is a regular.
I manage to defuse the situation, mostly by ignoring the guy and staring at the TV screen. Come halftime, I get the hell out of there. As I leave, I look down at my pants and realize that the closest I’ve ever come to a bar fight occurred when wearing sweatpants with my cat’s face on them.
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