COMMENT
A man buys some shoes
by Neal Schuster
I am a straight man. I just want to throw that out there from the outset. Not that there was ever any doubt, but... well, just listen to my tale. And remember, 100% straight...
My journey into the realm of metrosexuality began like so many others -- on an overcast afternoon, outside an Old Navy in Minnesota. I'd been shopping for shorts, which made me slightly uncomfortable in a social-anxiety dressing-room kind of way, but only that. It was summer, and most of the shorts in my possession were no longer screaming "cool hip dude," but something more along the lines of "bought during high school (a long time ago)" and "WEARING OUT," the latter of which at the very least being a perfectly valid 'guy' reason to get new ones. Which I did. That wasn't the problem, however.
The problem began when I left the store, bag of new purchases in hand and beaming with capitalism. Next door to my shorts-shop lurked a shoe store, exuding faint whiffs of pumpkin, coriander, lilac, and any number of other aromas specifically blended by lab technicians in New Jersey with advanced degrees and matching pantsuits to chemically alter normal thought patterns.
For that is the only explanation I can give for what followed: I walked in, wearing my battered black Chuck Taylors. They had a couple of holes in them, but nothing too major. Certainly nothing that warranted replacing them, especially given the extremely limited conditions under which it is okay for guys to buy shoes:
1. If the man's current shoes are literally falling apart. In this case the guy finds a pair identical to the decrepit one he wore into the store, leaves the old pair in the new shoebox for the staff to dispose of, and is out the door in under five minutes, having fulfilled his shoe needs for the next 3-4 years.
2. If the man is attending some sort of formal function for which he does not possess the proper type of shoe. N.b.: "Black," "brown," and "dress" are all types of shoes.
3. If the man is attached to some form of woman. This will make his shoe store presence miserable, but also explicable.
I can't imagine what exactly I was thinking at the time, but my thought processes must have already been altered by an overdose of those estrogen-intensive chemicals (I have an especially sensitive nose). The lack of sunlight that day may also have resulted in a drop in my normally robust testosterone levels, because I walked into that shoestore sans female, sans formal function, and sans falling-off shoes. Maybe it was just an off day.
I had vague ideas of buying some new Chucks, if they were on sale, and then keeping them in reserve for when mine fell apart. But I was having a hard time figuring just when, if I had new shoes, I would throw out the old ones; and why, if I had new shoes, I wouldn't wear them instead of the old ones. Also I could not imagine how I came to be looking for a shoe sale, and was probably standing with my mouth hanging open when the strugglings of my male brain to reassert itself were broken in on by the clerk, who asked if she could help me with anything. I remember watching myself babble something about how I was looking for a shoe kinda in between my Chucks and my running shoes, that I could wear on an everyday basis, but not exactly everyday, more as a change of pace, and then, looking over at the confusion on her face, I quickly added "I'll just look around." She gratefully scuttled away then, and my wisest course would probably have been to just flee the store then and there, but I felt obliged to look at least a little bit, having just said I would.
My brain churned and my stomach fluttered. I looked around. I looked for about three seconds and then clutched at the nearest model shoe with a box in my size. Having got it and myself over to the trying-on bench, I fought back lightheadedness. I felt like a student spray-painting the school wall in a dream. Giddy, I tried one shoe on. It fit. I reached for the other, planning to use the inevitable "ha, only the first one you grabbed was actually laced" shoelace prep time to regather my senses, but, amazingly, it too was already laced and ready. Reeling, I staggered over to a mirror to see how they looked on my feet. They looked, well, they looked like this:
They looked like they fit the bill as far as being something like a Chuck and yet not one, and they were under thirty dollars! I looked around for about three and a half seconds to make sure that they were indeed the coolest shoes in the store, put them back in their box and then had a horrible, horrifying thought: what if these were women's shoes? I'd gotten up to take the shoes to the counter, but now I swerved hurriedly, and wandered back to their place as if I'd leisurely remembered something else. I looked at the box, which fortunately had on it, along with a picture of a gender-neutral terrier, the legend "www.brandnamemens.com," which mollified me momentarily until I realised that it had probably been placed on the box for just this occasion, and that a self-respecting manly man would drop the shoebox and runrunrunrunrun out of the store all the way to a strip club, sporting event, pub, bowling alley, or perhaps all of the above in some order but in any case would rather be anywhere, anywhere but a shoe store clutching a box of women's (yes women's, you had to look!) shoes.
Outwardly calmly, like an inmate walking down Death Row, I strolled up to the counter, where I had to wait in line for one of the two (female) clerks, behind two (all-female) groups of customers, none of whose items were as stylish or sexually ambiguous as mine. I pretended to look at socks, super-casually, all the while trying to interpret my fellow shoppers' glances. I'd been hoping for "he's hot," or ideally "he's hot, and only a man truly comfortable with his own rampant heterosexuality would have come here, alone, and decided to buy those shoes," but the looks I got seemed more along the lines of "what's a guy doing here, alone?" and "I like those shoes. Oh my God, he must be gay! So that's what one looks like!" [Minnesota, dontcha know. --Ed.]
"Drop them and run," said my own fevered male lizard brain, by now horrified at its evident lack of control over the situation and the body it inhabited. Now the only customer left in the store, I placed my box on the counter and awaited judgment. The clerk rang me up. I may have babbled out some small talk; I may have stood ashen-faced and silent. I paid, took my box, and wobbled out of the store on the verge of blacking out. The paramedics who found me in the parking lot, eyes screwed shut and twitching, had seen it before.
To date I have worn my new shoes once, alone in the car where no one could see them. I stopped and took them off because they were digging into my heels. Oh, I've tried to wear them other times. I've probably had them on my feet for half an hour altogether, trying to find the socks, the pants, the something that shows them off as well as they look in my mind's eye. They've made me late. I even took them with me on a trip, even though there was going to be at best one small and meaningless opportunity for wearing them. When that time came, I put them on and... they just didn't look right somehow. Defeated, I asked the people I was with for advice. The non-heterosexual male of the group said that, though he liked them, they just weren't shoes one could wear with shorts. I looked, with new eyes, and he was so right. Everyone in the group agreed, and that was that.
My shoes are in my closet, waiting quietly for the leaves to change so that they may debut in all their fashionable glory. Until then, at least they have company in the form of other shoes I never wear. I'm up to seven pairs now, altogether, but I'm not exactly worried. Yet.
"The Rocket Dog consumer is an independent freethinker who shuns the polished look and materialism of the previous generation. He can be found donning an old flannel shirt, cruising the anti malls, thrift shops, and surfing the net for a good buy and a style as independent as he is. A symbol of individuality and freedom, Rocket Dog has become a top quality brand recognized by trendsetters and style conscious consumers around the world."
http://www.rocketdogmens.com/rocketdog/pc/viewContent.asp?idpage=1
I think I may have a problem.
Editorial response: I couldn't let this pass without overstepping my bounds as an editor and commenting on it. You see, Neal, I've been here, too, and I think I know how to explain your predicament. The answer may surprise you! (But I doubt it.)
We did, after all, come from the same background; our respective comings-of-age happened at the same tiny Minnesota liberal arts school. And you know as well as I do how anti-style it is there. Oh, sure, there's the vocal minority of hipsters who decry its banal emphasis on non-fashion, preferring to focus their own banal emphases on striking good looks in a place where everyone is buried in fabric four months a year anyway. At any rate, most of us were either too poor or too Marxist in our political leanings to think about conspicuous consumption too much. Perhaps it was the spirit of Veblen in the air.
When I left the Carleton Bubble and found myself at a state school for the first time, it was as if the whole game had changed. Now, I don't want to sound like a Private School Asshole, but in Chapel Hill things were different. That town is a veritable witches' brew of cultures, from the Greeks to the indie kids to the Weaver Street hippies, all trying to outdo the others in how they look. And it may have been that this was all going on under the surface in Northfield, but I don't think any of us wore it on our sleeves—so to speak—the way I noticed it in Chapel Hill. At some point it wears off; and even if one shops as I do, one will still find one's self comparing the relative merits of shades of brown in the thrift store sport coats.
So that's it, really. And you've been out of Northfield longer than I have; I'm surprised it took you so long to have this crisis. Perhaps one day you'll come full-circle on this, and get to where I am; namely, that your standards for fashion are so esoteric that nothing pleases you, and you just wear the same American Apparel band t-shirts you always did.