Warning: This is bloody.
I’d
like to use this forum to dispel a number of misconceptions
about shoe hoarding. As a rule, I applaud anyone who
owns a few too many shoes—as long as there’s no straying
into Imelda territory—but a line must be drawn: your
collection should have no more than one dilapidated shoe.
While it is foolish not to have a pair of grungy
tennies for unforeseen painting or muckraking—actual or
journalistic—you need only one pair, stored out of sight
in a low-humidity environment. Save your closet or
shoe tree for stylish shoes, be they pumps, Pumas or patent
leather moccasins. For those of you who hang on to
your shabby shoes, I’ll detail a quartet of common shoe-cache
fallacies, in hopes that you’ll see your folly. First
off, we have:
The
Disposable Footwear Fallacy
As
the son of parents who sort of lived during the Depression,
I was raised on the belief that scuffed, out-of-fashion
or even malodorous shoes have their uses as disposable footwear
for impromptu roof repairs, hikes through bogs, concrete
mixing or costume parties. This is true, but far too
many people take this to an extreme and save all of their
old shoes for doing odd jobs or muddy walks. Both
homeowners and men who are easily coerced into mud football
games are especially susceptible to believing this fallacy—particularly
the homeowners, who never know when a weekend sunrise will
inspire them to change the mustard trim in the kitchen to
a yolkier shade of yellow.
I
have a solution that will free up space in your closet:
use Goodwill as a lending library for shoes. Here’s
how it works. Donate all unneeded shoes to Goodwill,
in order to receive the fair-market tax deduction.
They’ll take them, soles or not, in most cases. Let’s
say you donate six pair and claim $30. I’m not a CPA,
but I believe that will save you about $9 on your taxes,
which will buy you at least four pair of disposable shoes
(if you have the option, buy unmatched single shoes—they’re
a great deal). Just make sure you get a left and a
right and don’t forget to boil the shoes! You don’t
want someone else’s onychomycosis. Of course, if you’re
really lucky or have appalling taste, Goodwill might still
have your own shoes.
By
the time you’ve gone through the four disposable pair, you’re
bound to have worn out some of your good shoes, so the cycle
can continue. The same principle should be applied
to work sweatshirts and overalls (you still need to boil!).
Incidentally, you also can use your neighbors’ house as
a storage site by surreptitiously leaving a box of your
shoes on their doorstep and then buying them back later
for a quarter at their garage sale. At worst, if the
neighbor didn’t hold on to them, you saved yourself a trip
to Goodwill, although it is harder to make a tax deduction,
unless you are brash enough to ask your neighbors for their
Goodwill receipt.
(Incidentally,
this section does not apply to cat burglars, who need to
maintain a constant supply of worn shoes—in order to avoid
leaving a signature footprint—but can’t afford to be noticed
by nosy Goodwill clerks or neighbors.)
The
Red Army Fallacy
Many
bohemian types go for a falsely chic Ché Guevara
look, hiding a t-shirt with CG’s likeness under a sweater
with epaulets. A threadbare tweed blazer tops it off.
Tsk, tsk. A cousin of this debacle is the second-hand
army boot/Catholic school skirt combo.
I
must admit that, in the past, I’ve strayed into this territory
unconsciously, including (unfortunately) on my first date
with my wife. The shoes that I wore that evening were
an ex-roommate’s standard-issue patent leather dress shoes,
from his army days seven years previous. He’d left
them out for a Salvation Army pick-up, but since they were
still fairly shiny, I salvaged them. They had his
name and dog tag number written on the insole, but I figured
that lent them an air of authenticity. By the time
I wore them out on our date, they were undeniably battered,
with heels worn sideways at about a thirty-degree angle,
due to my idiosyncratic gait. The shoes on their own
were bad; I matched them with an oversized navy blue corduroy
jacket that I thought had a nautical flair to it (a topic
for another week).
It’s
amazing that I survived that first date because we ate at
a Thai restaurant that requires patrons to take off their
shoes, giving Lynn a close-up of both my dress shoes and
cheap holey socks. Be careful what you wear on a first
date, because if the two of you become betrothed somewhere
down the line, you may hear about your outfit for a long
time.
The
Signature Model Fallacy
I
know—and am related to—several crazed athletic shoe-hoarders,
who keep boxes of unopened Nikes, Pumas, Converse and Adidas
in their garage, waiting for the day when the children at
the shoe factories rebel, sending the demand for mint-condition
black market high-tops skyrocketing. This is a good
business plan because—mark my word—this will come to pass.
However, the black market value of worn athletic shoes is
fickle, so there is no need to hang on to your old stinky
shoes, even if they are Hakeem Olajuwon-signature Ponys,
or made by the company that bet the farm on Patrick Ewing
and lost.
I
practice what I preach: when the nails that secured
the cleats of my prized pair of Rudi Voeller-signature soccer
shoes poked through into my foot, I replaced them, even
though they were dear to me. Rudi’s silly mustache,
bobble-head, and stiff puppet arms made him a masterful
flop artist, perhaps the greatest in Europe. If you’ve
ever seen a European sporting event, you know that’s high
praise indeed. It was tough to switch to a newer model,
but I did. (One of my psychopathic teammates refused
to change his shoes when he encountered a similar nail problem.
The nail, he said, “fired him up.”)
Another
time, I tried to salvage a pair of high tops that I’d left
in a dank place. They had a rodent smell, but because
they also had sentimental value—they featured the colors
of my favorite basketball team, the Golden State Warriors—I
did my best to rehabilitate them. A trip to the library
netted me several sample perfume packets from glossy magazines,
which I rubbed into the inside fabric before washing.
In retrospect, I should have chosen GQ and Men’s Fitness,
rather than Cosmopolitan and Redbook. The new scent
was still rodent, only prettier. Perhaps Cool Water
Cologne would have been a better choice; the subtle hint
of sandalwood would have dulled the rodent undertones.
Trying
to make the best of the situation, I wore them anyway, hoping
that a basketball game’s collective BO would mask the stench.
Initially, my shoes were an asset, spreading confusion on
the basketball court, while the players on each side tried
to figure out the origins of the funky odor. When
my explanations produced blank stares, I learned my lesson
and threw the shoes out.
The
Just-One-More-Washing Fallacy
When
the smell of your shoes becomes unbearable, you have passed
the stage where washing will fix the problem. Even
if you haven’t foolishly rubbed perfume into them, shoe
odor is systemic and incurable, despite what Odor Eaters
and Dr. Scholl’s may claim. To prove my point, I’ll
provide you with a typical case of shoes gone foul, and
illustrate why no amount of machine or hand washing could
save them.
Before
I start, I need to get one vital fact out in the open.
I have been known to have plantar warts. I’m not proud
of them (and they’re currently in remission!) but I need
to mention them because they are at the crux of this story.
Over the years, I tried countless methods to rid myself
of them, including freezing, lasers, chemicals and letting
a quack doctor cut into them before the local anesthetic
kicked in (the same doctor pulled a similar stunt on a relative;
after the painful procedure, the doc told him to stand up.
Light-headed, my relative passed out, smashing his head
against the door knob).
When
I established that the traditional treatments didn’t work,
I taped banana peels to my feet. Not surprisingly,
this didn’t work either. Nor did duct tape.
I was in the middle of one of these self-ministrations in
my old bedroom at my parents’ house when Lynn arrived to
meet the parents for the first time. My sweet mother
answered the door and, after a warm greeting, told Lynn,
“Jeff will be right out. He’s just in the other room
treating his warts.” Thankfully, I’d already told
Lynn about them—both the warts and the parents, that is.
At
the time of this exchange, I was up in Northern California
during my summer break from graduate school. When
I returned to the university in the fall, I worked as a
teaching assistant, or TA, for a mean-spirited history professor.
He was a nice enough man if you didn’t have to work for
him, but he took a disliking to some of his TAs and would
make their lives miserable.
For
example, he once berated a fellow TA for missing class when
she threw out her back and then explained to the rest of
the TAs in our weekly teachers’ meeting that she was a liar
because she could not produce a note from a doctor.
He also announced at another meeting that Pablo—a middle-aged
man in exceedingly poor health—was a terrible teacher, who
lacked energy and drive. My boss, it seemed, despised
the weak. Because he may be the type to hit me with
a libel suit, I will refer to him as Professor Ajax Fury—pronounced
“Ahhyaaks Furree”—in order to protect myself from litigation.
It is not his real name.
My
TA position gave me free access to the university’s health
center, so I decided to take one more clinical stab at my
plantar warts. After a few painful but ineffective
freezing sessions, a nurse referred me to a doctor who was
developing a new treatment method that combined freezing
and cutting. Fun! Anyway, on our first session,
he was planning on being fairly conservative and, therefore,
asked me to tell him when the pain became “too much.”
He seemed to be more competent than the quack doctor that
I referred to earlier, so I was game.
The
years of treatment gave me a fairly high pain threshold
for both freezing and cutting in the plantar region, but
only a vague idea of the clinical definition of “too much.”
After a while, the doctor emitted a concerned-sounding “Hmmm”
and a “I think I was a little more aggressive than I planned.”
There was a decent bit of blood coming out of the ball of
my left foot and heel of the right, so he applied pressure
and a compound to halt the bleeding. It took a while,
but eventually this worked, so he patched me up with large
fancy band-aids and he sent me on my way, just in time to
teach my 11:00am class.
I
don’t remember the details of the class, other than feeling
a little strange and noticing partway through that my feet
were a little squishy. That made me feel uneasy, especially
when I noticed that my blue suede shoes were now dark purple,
but the professor was known to show up in the last ten minutes
of class, so I didn’t dare end it early. Plus, Professor
Fury required all TAs to attend his lecture, which began
at noon. I didn’t want to land in the doghouse with
my fellow TAs, so I decided to demonstrate that I was legitimately
injured before skipping out of lecture. Anyway, it
wasn’t like blood was gushing out of my shoes; it was only
seeping out slowly.
I
needed to get to the lecture hall before the professor arrived—a
difficult proposition when you have to walk across campus
using only the toes of the right foot and the heel of the
left. I reached the hall just as he entered it and
waved plaintively. I croaked, “Excuse me, Professor
Fury,” while making sure to keep a beleaguered expression
on my face. He halted, turned and cheerfully asked,
“Hello, Jeffrey, how are you today?” I heel-toed up
next to him and said, “Professor Fury. Um. I
had some holes cut in my feet and...” I pointed down
at my shoes and rocked from one foot to another to produce
an audible squish-squish. “...I’m losing a bit of
blood.” Squish-squish.
A
viscous liquid was clearly ebbing and waning through the
suede with each squish. I continued, “I think I should
go to the health center. I’ll try to make it back
if I can.” He looked at me paternally and said, “I’m
very concerned, Jeffrey. What are you doing here?
Go straight to the health center and I’ll have Matthew take
notes for you.” As I heel-toed back towards the health
center, I wondered whether it occurred to him that I’d chosen
to leak a little extra blood because I didn’t want to hassle
with his possible reprisal. Most likely, though, the
professor just thought I was dim.
Squish-squish
played well at the health center too, and two nurses attended
to me in short order. By the way, you’d be surprised
at the carrying capacity of a size-ten suede shoe.
It certainly shocked the nurses, who weren’t ready for the
onslaught when the shoe came off: Buckets of Blood—or
at least a bucket-like plastic trough that one nurse grabbed
so she had somewhere to pour the contents of the shoe.
After
that, they waited to take off my sock while they hurriedly
summoned a couple of doctors. They stripped off my
now-very-heavy Mervyn’s dress sock; I’d worn my synthetic
socks with thick sole padding: very spongy!
While I oozed, the doctors made good time stitching up the
left foot, amusing themselves by ridiculing the last doctor’s
suturing skills. I noticed, though, that they did
appreciate the suturing ability of a tight suede shoe, because
they left on the right one until they were done with the
left foot and ready with the plastic trough for the next
gusher.
After
finishing up both feet, one of the doctors gave me a few
stipulations for my recovery. He said that the feet
would heal in a few days, provided I walked on them as little
as possible and didn’t get my feet wet for the next week.
Wet feet would lead to infection, which could result in
the loss of my plantar warts, along with my feet.
This
meant staying in my apartment for a few days, walking around
on my knees, and washing myself in the kitchen sink.
Before I left the health center, a nurse gave me a stash
of jumbo-sized Ziploc bags that I could wear as booties
on my trips to the bathroom. She thoughtfully placed
my rather stiff, damp socks in one. Since I didn’t
have socks for my heel-toe walk home, I wore two of my new
bags because I preferred the cool plastic to the feel of
the bloody suede. I don’t care much for my blood after
it’s been out of my body for a while, you see.
I
luckily had a three-day weekend ahead of me and plenty of
homework, so staying in my apartment wasn’t a hardship,
although it did keep me from going to the laundromat.
Initially, I left my shoes and socks outside, but worried
that the neighborhood coyotes would tear into them, so I
zipped them inside multiple baggies and left them near a
window. That was a bad decision.
If
your shoes or socks get thoroughly soaked with blood, you
should throw them out immediately. I've found that
the scent of blood never fully washes out of leather, and
synthetic dress socks become stiff, like plaster of Paris,
if you aren’t willing to wring them out immediately.
What’s worse is that the smell of death can transfer to
other clothes or, in my case, a mattress pad. If that
isn’t reason enough, there’s this: blood-soaked shoes
are not as valuable as an icebreaker as you’d think.
Apparently, their novelty is outweighed by the fact that
they are technically a biohazard.
Mr.
Lewis can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.
Copyright
Jeff Lewis, 2004 |
