The Doc Martens

It was the early 1990s. I was in my twenties and not exactly miserable, but not happy either. My world was changing too fast, and the change was precipitated by too much loss for such a young heart. My days were full of routines that felt alien to who I thought I wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to become anyone else or fight the inertia. Get up, go to work, go to night classes at the local City College, after class maybe get a drink with friends, but more often go home and watch television and then bed. That is if no one was in the hospital; otherwise, after work, I would head to the hospital to sit with whichever ailing loved one it was; my uncle (AIDS), my father (AIDS), my best friend (brain aneurism), my aunt (another surgery). Or on the weekend, maybe there was another funeral or memorial to go to or a family friend who needed comfort and company. It was the 1990s, and death was practically de regueur.

There were moments that the most mundane and un-notable thing would grab my attention in a way that I’m convinced, had I been happier and not dealing with so much, never would have caught my attention. In my mind’s eye, these many decades later, they stand out like 3D cut-out images mixed in with the array of moving living memories. Oddly significant in their lack of significance. Abandoned shoes. I saw them everywhere. Sometimes a pair of shoes, but often, just one. A shoe in the middle of the sidewalk, or a gutter, or neatly set atop a garden fence. I saw them in every neighborhood and condition: new, old, functional, or falling apart.

Friends also started giving me shoes. Well, not shoes that you could wear, but ornamental ones. A friend sent me a Christmas ornament that was an elaborately carved wooden one from a Paris museum, meant to replicate an extravagant white heeled shoe Louis XIV wore. On another occasion, a friend put a little plastic ruby red slipper on top of a present in place of a bow. And so on; a pair of miniature kitten heels attached to a hairband, a keychain with a boot on it, and the word Colorado painted along the calf. I had not told anyone about the abandoned shoes, and it struck me as amusing to have them mirrored in these little random gifts.

I started to experience the story of these abandoned shoes when I encountered them. It was as if I was watching a little movie of the events replayed just for me.

When it first happened, I was sitting at a bus stop on a chilly evening, cursing whoever had designed the bus shelter so that one end of it was so narrow it did nothing to protect from the wind blowing down the hill. I got bored of looking for the bus on an empty horizon and looked up to see dark clouds and the threat of rain looming overhead. A streetlamp illuminated the telephone wires across the street, and a pair of doc martens dangling from the wires caught my eye.

I had seen shoes hanging on telephone wires before and thought they were a marker to indicate a drug dealer’s location or that they were to denote someone had died from gun violence there. I didn’t know if either of those were truth or urban myth, but usually, I saw tennis shoes or something more lightweight. These were chunky, heavy, and painted with an elaborate design.

I was still contemplating them a few moments later – after checking for the bus to come again – when I saw a young woman so small that she seemed even younger than she was on the sidewalk near the bus stop across the street from where I stood. She wore a black t-shirt with a band logo splashed violently across the front. She had ripped the sleeves off the t-shirt at the shoulders, and her skinny but muscular arms were exposed to the night air. A young man was standing a few feet away from her, and they were shouting profanities at one another. The venom in his young-man voice flew in her face like a punch in the jaw. She spit the venom back at him, and because it frightened the immature view he had of himself, the young man threw a bottle at her and stormed away. She tried to dodge the bottle, but it grazed her arm anyway. There would be a bruise later, but for now, she was more mad than injured.

She stood just beyond the circle of light from the streetlamp, seething mad. An old lady, who had been watching the argument from behind her lace curtains, eyed the girl suspiciously until she was pulled away from the window by her husband, who wanted nothing to do with the squabble that had just taken place outside their home.

The girl, who needed some kind of release, caught sight of her Doc Martens. The shoes that the two of them had picked out together. The shoes that had made her feel invincible. The shoes that had allowed her to let her inner-self roam free and unafraid, in a life riddled with fear of inner-self. She saw the hole in the toe that had begun to let water into it when it rained. She saw the ugly scuff marks that she had been so rebelliously proud of when she’d worn them to her senior formal, with her long pink prom dress and her freshly shaved hair. Before it had been fashionable and moderately acceptable to do that, she inwardly sneered at the media for making it all popular and trendy when it was supposed to be empowering and non-conforming.

Suddenly she bent down and rapidly and somewhat clumsily removed one and then the other of the boots. She looked for someplace to throw them. She contemplated the window of a nearby house but decided that wouldn’t be satisfying. She looked up and saw the wires. Quickly she tied the laces together and then tossed them up. On her first try, they cleared the wires and the laces caught at just the right angle so that the shoes went loop loop loop until they were securely dangling, stranded overhead.

“AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!” She yelled at the top of her lungs with a freedom she hadn’t felt in a while. And then she walked away in a much better mood, not even noticing the cold cement through her thick wool socks.

I looked back up at those Doc Martens swinging gently back and forth, the overcast sky for a backdrop. As I looked, I noticed the curtains flick shut in a window across the street, disapproval wafting my way as they settled into place. I realized I was standing in the street as if I had moved closer to see the scene. I was certain that what I’d seen had not really happened right then, but for some reason, I was equally sure that it had happened days? weeks? ago. I wondered why I knew what the young woman had felt and why it felt so real. I stepped back onto the curb to continue waiting for the bus and saw my own shoes. Drab, characterless, and sensible black flats.