Flashback 2006: New-shoe purchase laced with ambivalence

     Cary Millstein, shoe salesman extraordinaire, was buried Friday. At his funeral, the rabbi mentioned that I had written a column about him in 2006, and one of the mourners later asked me if she could read it. The column isn't online. But I told her I would dig it up and post it here. The column is long, over 1100 words, filling a page back then, and evokes a lost downtown world, of going to work in suits and ties and wingtip English shoes. 

     I always say that these columns utterly vanish in the howling wordstorm, affecting nothing, without any significance whatsoever. That is partly true, but partly a protective pose, shielding myself from the knowledge that, sometimes, they can be a very big deal, the sort of thing mentioned at somebody's funeral 18 years after they run. "He was so good at being, not just an owner, manager, salesman, he had such contact with people that Neil Steinberg wrote a column about him," the rabbi said at Cary's graveside. I find that very touching, very humbling, and am grateful to do work that is significant not only to myself, but occasionally to others too.  

     As a rule I don't buy shoes. As a rule, I don't buy anything, but merely work away, earning money to pay for the mortgage and the car, the kids and the wife, the grocer's bill and the electric bill, the 401(k) and the insurance, the guy who cleans the gutters and the lady who cleans the house, summer camp for one boy and golf lessons for the other. We rent a viola and a tuba and see to it that two cats get better medical care than 95 percent of the people in Africa. It adds up.
     But an errand took me down Wabash Avenue, past the Palmer House, where the old Church's shoe store was located, where, back when my wife was working, I would buy fine English, bench-made shoes that actually fit my triple-wide duck feet.
     Always the same type of shoe: Oxford wingtips. Heavy and black and shiny, with a thick slab of leather for a sole and an upper of tooled holes.
     Yes, the wingtip is the defining shoe of the uncool. Tom Wolfe calls them "FBI shoes" in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, an outstanding feature of the comatose, marshmallow-headed, work-a-daddy world, the "non-musical shiny-black-shoe multitudes" casting Ken Kesey and his LSD-addled merry pranksters a glance of bovine curiosity as they flash by, jeering, in their rainbow-hued bus.
     When Richard Nixon — poor, doomed, tragic Nixon, a character out of Sophocles — made his stab at popularity, and invited the press to watch him frolic on the beach, as carefree as a Kennedy, it was his black Oxford wingtips that the horrified newsmen focused on as Nixon marched grimly up and down the wet sand.
     I don't care. I like wingtips. They're comfortable. They go with a suit. They are not trendy.
     So I found myself pausing on Wabash, where Church's once was, looking through the window of what is now Cary's Footwear.
     I needed shoes — there are only so many times you can have soles replaced before the uppers start to go. I almost kept walking, out of residual loyalty to Church's — but the new place also sells English shoes, and they are having a sale. I went inside.
     "Hi Neil," said the clerk — and owner — Cary Millstein. Incredibly, he remembered me. "You're still wearing the brogues?"
     "Yes," I said, sheepishly.
     A brogue is another word for a wingtip — the word was first used to describe shoes the Irish wore, and later was applied to their lilting manner of speech.
     "Eight and a half, triple E, right?" he said, ducking into the back. Amazing. I hadn't bought a pair of shoes there in five years. You won't see that happen at a Payless.
     I tried on the shoes and marched around the tiny store — 650 square feet — to see if they fit. Millstein had already worked there for 20 years, he said, when Prada absorbed Church's and he saw his chance and bought the place. That was four years ago. Business is good. "The tourist trade is vital," he said. As if to prove his point, some visitors from Madrid came in and bought shoes, while I pondered, like Saul in his tent, whether to make a purchase.
     Eventually, I bought the shoes — $249, plus tax. It made me feel like Imelda Marcos.
     The transaction was actually much more complex than I've outlined, involving reflection, analysis, sweat and a phone conversation with my wife. But I've boiled it down to its essentials for public consumption. I left there envying the man who can just walk into a store and buy a pair of shoes and not think so goddamn much about it.

THE UNBLINKING EYE

     Anxious guys shouldn't go on television. For one, they put makeup on you, and try as I might to smear it off afterward, it lingers throughout the day, and I feel like Quentin Crisp. I can't help but suspect, washing my hands in the men's room, that the guy next to me is glancing over and thinking, "Hmmm, I wonder if Steinberg's personal life is more, ah, complex than he lets on."
     That said, I will nevertheless be among Antonio Mora's guests on "Eye on Chicago" this Sunday at 10:30 a.m. on CBS Channel 2.
     That's another reason to be nervous: CBS. What if I run into Diann Burns, the TV news diva being pilloried in the press for her unwise lawsuit over crown molding? What if we're in an elevator together?
     In fact, isn't she Mora's co-anchor? What if the whole thing is a trap, and I go to shake Mora's hand, and he grabs it and twists, spinning me around and putting me in a full nelson, and then Burns comes raging out from her hiding place, eyes aflame, a straight razor in her hand . . .
     See, as I said. Anxious guys shouldn't do television.

BABY'S GOT NEW SHOES, PART 2

     As usual, I left out the joyful part. At the end of a long workday, gathering up my stuff to drag home, there it was: the bag with the shoes. My heart swelled, and I thought: new shoes!
     That evening, I showed my new shoes off to my wife.
     "They're a classic form, like an Oreo cookie," I said. "And smell them — the new leather and the polish."
     "Just this once . . ." she said, taking a tentative whiff.
     "And look at the shoe box," I said to her. "It's a great shade of green — and thick cardboard. That's a quality shoe box, and I can keep all sorts of stuff in it."
     Obviously, I had lost my mind.
     But heck, the shoes will be battered and worn and scuffed and ready for the trash heap, just like their owner, soon enough, and the news being what it is, I think it's good to be happy about whatever you can find to be happy about, even something as trivial as new shoes.

TODAY'S CHUCKLE

     State Fair time is almost upon us, and this gem, from Mike Horstman, seems in the right spirit:
     A man and his wife are visiting the bull-breeding exhibit at the State Fair. At the first pen is a sign reading, 'This bull mated 50 times last year."
     The wife pokes her husband in the ribs and says, "Fifty times last year!"
     They walk a little farther and see another pen with a sign that says, "This bull mated 100 times last year."
     The wife socks her husband in the arm and says. "About twice a week! You could learn a lot from him.''
     They walk farther and a third pen has a sign saying "This bull mated 365 times last year.''
     The wife says, "Once a day! You could really learn some . . ."
     The husband cut her off with: "Why don't you go up and ask him if it was all with the same cow."

POST JOKE COMMENTARY

     Of course, no wife in the history of the world ever teased her husband about not having enough sex.

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, July 28, 2006