Selling My Sole

I hate my feet.

Cute shoes have never been something I spend a lot of money on because, well, model-worthy feet were not something my genetics blessed me with. As much as I love the look of some red-soled Louboutins, they simply are way too narrow for my feet. Fashion may be pain, but I’d rather get stuffed into a dress I can barely breathe in, rather than give up my mobility.

But desperate times called for desperate measures.

After a breakup, I was basically forced to attend a black tie wedding in Toledo by myself and I needed a fancy dress and heels. It was for a good friend and I didn’t want to skip the wedding due to a broken heart and not having a backup date on such short notice. But when my financier ex savagely sent me a Venmo request for $394 to repay him for the flight he'd booked to the wedding, it triggered something petty in me to want to look extra good for this event.

When I was telling a colleague about my situation, the first question she asked was “what are you going to wear?" I told her I had my eye on a dress, I was just browsing for some hot shoes but didn’t want to throw down too much money for anything I wouldn’t get much use out of.

She told me not to panic. She had the solution.

Apparently she knew a middle-aged man that was extremely wealthy and liked to buy people expensive items in return for...the soles of their old shoes.

“Wait, why would some guy want my old shoes?” I replied in curiosity.

Her response horrified me: he wanted to eat them.

“Anytime I go home to Nebraska and need a good revenge outfit in case I see my ex, this guy buys it for me” she remarked.

“You mean to tell me, if I give him an old pair of my shoes to eat, he’ll just buy me whatever I need?”

“Well you have to yell at him too and call him names. He’s an eccentric guy, he just likes to be treated like shit because it makes him feel good. It’s actually a medical condition. You'd be doing him a favor” she persuaded.

At the time, I was a bartender in NYC so my colleague made an emergency call to this masochistic shoe gobbler during our shift and invited him to the bar so she could make the introduction.

Let’s call him Dan.

I totally thought I was getting punked until I jokingly asked Dan “so how does a person actually eat a shoe?” and he swiftly opened his iPhone to show me raw footage of the act.

In the video, he barbarically cuts a pair of Jimmy Choo heels into pieces of leather confetti that he then proceeded to ladle into his mouth with a ceramic spoon. I watched in horror as he chewed and chewed and chewed. Then swallowed. I stood equidistant between terrified and impressed.

“Does that do something to your system?!” I asked in shock.

“I haven’t gotten sick in nine years. I ate five cups of dirt from the corner of 35th and 2nd for dinner. And once I was able to detect a woman was pre-diabetic by tasting her urine” he proudly announced.

At this point I was beyond weirded out but my colleague put it in my head that this would be a win-win situation; I needed an outfit and eating women’s shoes made Dan happy. What did I have to lose? But instead of me just handing over some old shoes, Dan proposed a more complex plan.

He wanted me to meet him at Bergdorf Goodman and then we would head over to Bloomingdales together where he would buy me a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes and a designer gown. Under one condition: I would need to let him lick the bottom of my shoes in between stores as he crawled and begged behind me.

While I would be lying if I said I didn’t contemplate this idea for a second, I ultimately told Dan there was no way I could do that.

“What if I just give you all of my old shoes and we call it even?” I suggested.

This didn’t work because apparently he had a taste for high-end shoes which I did not possess.

“If you let me eat your toenail clippings I’ll think about it” he said.

Unable to keep a straight face, I made a beeline for the bathroom and called my brother to get another opinion.

“Hey some guy at the bar said he’d buy me an expensive outfit if I let him eat my toenail clippings. Do I do it?”

“I can’t even listen to this conversation. I’m hanging up” my brother said.

Feeling comically demoralized, I returned behind the bar and my colleague intervened.

“Dan, you’re making this too hard. It shouldn’t be this hard. Come up with something else” she demanded.

And so he proposed a new request.

For each Corona beer he ordered, he wanted me to wipe a lime wedge across the bottom of my filthy Converse All-Star bar shoes, before putting it into his bottle. In return, he would leave me a "generous" tip.

Three limes to the shoe and not-enough-money-later, I ended up just renting a dress from Rent The Runway and buying heels from DSW.

A few months later, my ex and I started dating again.