Abduction Chic
On buying Hokas.
1.
I’ve got a supinated step which means my feet roll slightly outward. On grocery store days I stand or walk for eight hours and with so much bodyweight squared into the corner of my shoesoles they start to dissolve pretty fast.
I ride the slant for two or three months until my ankles get swollen and I start stumbling. Sometimes I'll collapse on the bed after work and Marie will give my foot a massage but the massages are brief because I make noises like sex and cattle.
A manager once gave me a look like I was drunk, stumbling around at the register, so I explained the issue.
He said, “Then get new shoes.”
I said, “You got the money?”
He clicked his tongue and walked away as if I'd complained he doesn't look at me the way he used to.
The ankle pain climbs the rungs of each leg, knees to glutes to hips, til finally I will come home angry and limping one night as though I've been wronged and I will light a match and tell Marie it is time for new shoes and she will say, “Yes,” supportive when I decide to quit impeding myself, “it is.”
2.
There’s a Skechers on Lincoln Road and they boast that their extra-padded nonslip workshoes are favored by nurses. They cost $109 retail. If I wear my uniform into the store they give me a discount for “working in the neighborhood” but I don’t like shopping in the actual Skechers store because I believe that if a child were given ecstasy and glitterpens the thing it would create is a Skechers store.
Instead I order a pair of padded nonslip workshoes online, and check a box for “local pickup.” If I do this two hours before work I can pick them up en route.
At the “checkout” page on Skechers dot com I will be asked if I have any coupon codes and this is when I remember to Google “skechers coupon codes.”
By the time I’ve scavenged four coupons and winnowed the price from $109 to $79 I am thinking of the shoe as a triumph.
This is before they're even on my feet.
The most sustainable business is one that sells a feeling, then throws in a product to signify that feeling.
3.
The heels on Hoka sneakers will last twice as long as Skechers’, but they're double the price. $150.
I make $23/hr which after taxes and wet willies is more like $19/hr.
There’s a Hoka store on Lincoln Road, just a block down from Skechers. I went there to browse sneakers. The prices are not displayed anywhere. When I asked the price of one shoe or another there was nothing cheaper than double the price of a Skechers sneaker.
If you ask the salesman about coupon codes he will give you the same expression a sex worker gives when you bring out ketchup or so I am told by friends.
4.
Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles founded the Heaven’s Gate cult on a promise that aliens would soon come and rapture them into a higher state of being. Bonnie died of cancer in ‘85 so then it was just Marshall til the end. Followers joined him on a ranch and prepared for the visitation. One day Marshall came home and said, “Hey fellas,” clapping some shopping bags on the kitchen island, “get a loada these:”
Sweatpants and black tees for everyone. But the real highlight was sneakers: Nike Decades.
Soon after they died by mass suicide (applesauce, phenobarbital), Americans saw footage of police walking through a house where thirty-nine corpses lay on bunkbeds, covered in sheets or towels, death-purpled fists and Nike Decades jutting.
Nike stopped making the sneaker soon after that.
This article from Vice shows that some still collect it, and that
Heaven’s Gate founder Marshall Applewhite purchased the sneakers primarily because he liked their look and was “able to get a good deal” on them by buying in bulk[.]
My colleague Brian worked at the Nike store on Lincoln Road for three years before switching over here. When I told him the Heaven's Gate story he said “that's craaayzeee…” eyes wide, “that's saaaaad…” but after sitting with it for a while he balked. “Tell me how thirty-nine grown people fall for that.”
I said I don't know but it still happens.
He was done with his sandwich at that point. Lips puckered as he opened his yogurt. He wears a wooden cross on a long beaded necklace that pools in his lap. “I wouldna bought nunna that.”
5.
The Hoka store is just a block away from the Skechers store on Lincoln Road (which is a block away from the Nike store) and its design style is abduction chic, with sneakers mounted on floating shelves, but there are no pairs in sight, just singular shoes that can be taken down and modeled like a single gorgeous unit. The lighting is weirdly celestial and the floors are post-murder spotless and when I walked inside there were zero customers but five employees standing just inside the door as if waiting for me, hands clasped, positioned in a deliberate-seeming formation that was not unlike a pentagram and they were smiling like those people on sidewalks who ask if you’d like a movie ticket for your blood.
A man led me to a wall with shoes on it. He picked up a sneaker and explained: “This line has multiple layers in the sole and heel, and is specially designed to alleviate pronation and super-pronation.”
I said, “Well,” not realizing he had misheard the script he was told to recite, “I’ve got pretty bad soup-ination…” sounding sad like I’d been left out of a club.
He blinked and looked at the shoe and wagged it and nodded. He said, “This line has multiple layers in the sole and heel,” gesturing with the toe at his own chest and then mine, “and is specially designed to alleviate pronation and super-pronation.” Confident.
I asked a question about the shoe. He nodded. He looked over his shoulder at a poster on the wall that showed the multiple layers comprising the sole and heel. He blinked like he was paging through mental notes. He said something about “foam technologies.”
It occurred to me that the worst thing I could do to this man was ask him more questions about shoes but if I stayed quiet he started to riff. Clicking into salesman mode he told me some common misconceptions about footwear, touching his chest with the sneaker, “I was a professional triathlete, thirty years,” drawing three hashes in the air with the sneakertoe, “pro,” and he said, “what happens to your feet over time…” and he said, “what people don't realize…” gesticulating, rolling his shoulders, poor-yoricking with a sky-blue sneaker that is ugly, very ugly, but reader, Brian:
I bought it.
I can’t explain how fun it is to be reading about overly expensive shoes and then whipped around to the Heavens Gate cult, knowing that we will be back to the shoes somehow. I love it. Thoughts and prayers for your ankles.
I love that last line, wherein you swiped from Hamlet and made a denominal verb that's missing a k — it's these Tom Wolfe-isms of yours that add to the charm of reading you. Soon, I'll dive into Cubafruit — it's in the queue, I promise.