Barefoot in the past

by David Benjamin 

“You can burn my house, steal my car/ Drink my liquor from an old fruit-jar/ Do anything that you want to do/ But uh-uh baby, lay off of my shoes/ Don’t you step on my blue suede shoes.”

―Carl Perkins

 

MADISON, Wis.— One of my guilty pleasures is Emile Ardolino’s sneaky-smart coming-of-age movie, Dirty Dancing. In an early scene, the character of Lisa, sister of the story’s protagonist, Baby, is defined in a line. Arriving at Kellerman’s resort in the Catskills, she sees a bellhop wobbling under the weight of several dozen shoeboxes, obviously belonging to another girl guest.

Stricken by the realization that she only had ten pairs of shoes in her luggage, Lisa laments, “Oh, I knew I should’ve brought the coral shoes!”

In this viewing of the film, unlike all the other times, I felt Lisa’s pain and, probably for the first time in my life, thought about my history with shoes. 

I mean, shoes? Really?  Until that moment, if you’d asked me whether I think more about shoes or the Battle of the Great Dismal Swamp, I would’ve said it’s a tossup. 

I would have been wrong, because sympathizing with Lisa triggered a sudden flood of footwear memories. First to mind was my great-uncle Bob, town cobbler in Tomah, Wisconsin. He repaired shoes from a basement on Superior Avenue, a sulphur-lit grotto hung with strange cobbler-specific tools, redolent of polished rawhide, shoe polish and saddle soap. This Wild West ambience enveloped me as I set foot inside, followed me around my uncle’s cavern as Bob shmoozed with my grandfather Archie and I examined the medieval mechanisms of shoecraft, among them a sewing-machine needle so sharp and steely it could punch through a quarter-inch of leather like an icepick through an eyeball. My blood ran cold.

Bob Benjamin’s shoe shop was my first acquaintance with an atmosphere—its darkness and pungency, its weird devices and its arcane craft, its warmth and sense of welcoming secrecy—so singular that I would never again see or feel or know such a place again as long as I lived. It was one of its kind and I understood that. I felt a sort of awe, despite my uncle’s gentle manner and spelunker’s pallor. Bob made a modest, manly living half-soling dress shoes, stitching up work boots and nailing clips on schoolboy’s oxfords. 

Clips weren’t about tap-dancing. Boys tend to drag their heels, ruining a good pair of “hard shoes” before their time. So, parents took the boy down to Bob, who nailed a kidney-shaped brass clip on each heel. In those days, the older kids— high school JDs—who wore leather boots (See Rebel Without a Cause), all had clips, so you could hear them swaggering rhythmically, clippety-cool, along the sidewalk (See West Side Story). Inspired by the example of our outlaw elders, little snots like me acquiesced meekly when Mom delivered us to Bob for a touch of brass.

In school, hard shoes—leather, clunky, with shoelaces—were obligatory. But they had their virtues. Buttery smooth, they were perfect for sliding down an icy incline on the playground at recess (but you had to slide on the balls of your feet if you had clips, which tended to dig in and, occasionally, send a kid flying face-first into the basketball stanchion … splat). Ice-sliding led to ice-melting, which soaked your shoes socks-deep and sped the deterioration of the cowhide uppers, resulting in most boys going downtown for a new pair of shoes halfway through the winter.

For the walk to school and back home, we wore boots—also called golashes (although mainly in the movies). The only fashion element associated with boots, for boys, was whether they had zippers or buckles. Buckles were deemed cooler, but only if you didn’t actually buckle the buckles. A kid who walked around clanking like a set of tirechains on gravel was a veritable Jack London.

In the summer, I got one pair of sneakers, either Keds or PF Flyers (the only known brands in Wisconsin). They were not called sneakers. They were tennis shoes. They had high tops and they were black with a white rubber patch over your ankle bone. There was such a thing as all-white low-tops but these were exclusive, according to some unwritten convention, to high-school jocks. Word was that these athlete-grade sneaks might have originated in a third tennis-shoes company, possibly located in California—or Europe. This was an unconfirmed rumor. 

Our tennis shoes were one-ply canvas and crumbly rubber with feeble laces that got shorter and knottier as summer wore on. The shoes themselves would disintegrate in a month if we wore them faithfully. But we stretched their lifespan by going barefoot in the neighborhood, around the block and everyplace that posed no danger of pavement-scorched feet or tetanus (and death by lockjaw) from rusty nails and broken beer bottles. During our regular expeditions to sift for treasure in the Monowau Street dump, we wore our Keds. We were not fools.

I went to high school in Madison and after ninth grade got a summer job at Octopus Car Wash. After that, Mom expected me to finance my own wardrobe, for the whole school year. No more handouts. This meant finding a pair of shoes to last nine months, fall, winter and spring. My first decision was no more boots, zipper or buckles—not a great sacrifice. Almost every boy in my school wore hard shoes all year, penny loafers being all the vogue for a while. But I had issues with hard shoes. When I missed the bus, which I did often, my hike home was more than two miles. I knew already from my grade-school experience that hard shoes, in the winter in Wisconsin, freeze, leading inevitably to cold—then frozen—feet. Strangely enough, this didn’t happen with sneakers. which hugged my feet and partook of whatever body heat managed to trickle to my lower extremities. 

In those days, Madison had a big-box discount store called Treasure Island, where the thrifty shopper could find piles, taller than Lew Alcindor, of store-brand faux Keds for $2.99. These were shoes barely more durable than my black summertime high-tops, but six bucks got my feet through the whole school year, without freezing my dogs on the way home. 

My fake Keds also kept me light on my toes and nimble in the hallways. Recently, a high-school friend, Tomlin, asked me gingerly why I went through four years wearing girls’ shoes.

I admit, of course, that in my teen years, I kept a pair of Thom McAns tucked in my closet for special occasions—mainly dates. My dates were rare enough that these hard shoes looked brand-new when I wore them on my first day of college—where I soon reverted to sneakers and eventually added huaraches to my repertoire. But thinking back and considering Tomlin’s question, I wondered if there were girls who, perhaps at first blush, thought I was cute but then looked at my shoes, gasped gently and said, “Oh! Well, too bad. He must be … well … you know …”

I stumbled into a whole new outlook on shoes, in the mid-1980s, when I interviewed Phil Knight, inventor of Nikes, the man who put highfalutin sneakers on everyone’s radar. I knew, of course, that the “engineer” of the prestige sneak wasn’t Knight at all, but a University of Oregon coach named Bill Bowerman, an amiable, gangly guy who worried about his athletes’ foot health and missed out, for the most part, on the vast fortune that accrued to Knight, his student protégé. 

As I talked to Phil Knight, I struggled not to picture the implications of a $500 pair of Limited Edition Air Jordans, prompting a covetous Blood with a Glock to bushwhack a previously well-shod Crip and leave him bleeding out—in his socks—in the gutter. 

I did my best to block out this scene and remember, instead, when a kid’s only choices—on the day school let out—was between Keds and PF Flyers, or just goin’ barefoot.