My friend Julio wears many faces. He can be elusive, and sometimes disappears for months at a time. But I always find him in the end.
We first met while working at a slowly failing startup. I was drawn to his earnest helpfulness, his puns and wordplay, and his affable cynicism about our company’s sacred calves. He maintained a firm barrier between work and private life — we never hung out on weekends, and I never met any of his friends — yet our relationship was still warm and trusting. Between lunches, post-work happy hours, and the occasional bus ride home, I’d wager I saw Julio more frequently than my girlfriend at the time, or most of my closest friends.
Eventually he moved to Austin, and we fell out of touch. So it often goes in a city as transient as San Francisco. But no matter — I met him again later in a yoga studio in Lower Haight.
He looked different, and had a different name, but after a short conversation I realized he was Julio all the same. He was the only other student who chuckled at the elderly instructor’s unintentional innuendo. And he gave me solid, unpretentious advice on certain difficult poses.
From then on, we often lingered after those classes to chat, and sometimes got coffee or breakfast at a nearby cafe. He never offered to hang out entirely independently of class, though, and I never asked. Just like when we worked together — see what I mean?
He stopped coming to class after a few months, but I knew by then what was happening. And, sure enough, I’ve met him in seven other guises since then. Or eight, if you count the time he dated my friend Alexandra for a few rocky months. I never saw him in person then, but I recognized him from Alexandra’s stories. His tendency to compartmentalize — that emotional distance — was tough in a romantic context.
I knew that because I’d had an ongoing flirtation with him in a dog park the year before. He was a woman then, and I didn’t recognize him at first, but the telltale signs became clear as I got to know him better. I’m not surprised things between us never panned out. I should have known we were better as friends.
I last saw him just a few weeks ago, actually. He was an old, old man this time — careworn and shaky-handed, perched precariously on a bar stool in a sleepy Outer Sunset tavern. And yet for all his age, he was still keen-eyed and subtly hilarious, telling outrageous stories and dispensing homespun advice rich with empathy and understanding. He cheerfully skewered my generation’s mores but was equally unsparing about his own. The bartenders clearly loved him, and didn’t seem to mind him nursing a single glass of cheap white wine. I think they only kept the bottle around for him.
I sat there with him for hours, listening contentedly as he held court. Eventually night gathered over the ocean and swept in to cover the land. The tavern’s lamps grew brighter, and I realized Julio was watching me sadly. When I asked what was wrong he sighed and said, “Oh, nothing. You just remind me of someone I used to know.”
Martin Reid Sanchez was born in northern California. His fiction has appeared in Maudlin House, Flash Fiction Magazine, Scaffold, and The San Franciscan, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.
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