Les temps perdu: My summer of shoes

I had no difficulty finding summer jobs during college, the couple of times I was in the market. Our local public high school acted as a clearing house. You dropped in, told them you wanted a summer job, and they handed you the top card off the pile. When I dropped in, the top card on the pile was a job at a shoe store downtown. I went to the store, demonstrated my nascent skills as a shoe salesman, and the job was mine.

It was the most boring job I ever had.

The store was owned by a guy named Sol, who had owned the store since the invention of feet. He was a fixture in the town of Port Chester, and his shop was filled with fancy feminine footware. He had a secondo who had worked for him for years, whose name I can’t remember, although I could easily pick him out of a police lineup. He and I spent a lot of time together. A whole summer. He taught me everything I know about shoes. My education could not have been complete without him.

To say that the store was quiet would be an exaggeration. It was deader than Jacob Marley, but without the chains. If there were two or three customers a day, and maybe one of them purchased the odd pump, it was front-page news in the Wall Street Journal. According to my mother, who did not shop there, the shoes they sold were fancy and expensive. (I wouldn’t have known the difference between a fancy shoe and a Buster Brown if you had held a gun to my head.) Apparently the margin was so high that you could support two fulltime staffers and a summer helper on the sale of two shoes a day, one per foot.

My job for ninety percent of the summer was to sweep the place up, and when a customer came in and went through a lot of potential shoes, to put the also-rans back on the shelves in the stockroom. (Can shoes be also-rans? Also-walks?) Sometimes I rearranged the stock room. And that was about it. The idea that I would actually sell a woman a shoe—and it was only women who came in for the most part—was ludicrous. Sol and his secondo wouldn’t let me anywhere near the paying customers, any more than a hospital chief of staff would let a first-year medical student perform brain surgery. Selling women shoes was an art, and I was not instructed into the ways of that art. Given the volume of customers, even if my mastering that art were a possibility, it would not have been necessary. There were already enough masters to go around.

So why did they hire me? I spent my entire day reading the newspaper. More specifically, I spent my entire day reading the Daily News, which was the secondo’s newspaper of choice. Reading a book would have been considered goofing off, for some reason. Reading every single word of the News—comics, sports, business, want ads, editorials, the stuff they made up that passed for news—was okay. At some point during the summer Sol had his annual sale, and all the shoes he was trying to get rid of were removed from their boxes and laid on the floor against the wall, and the women would come in—this time in serious numbers—and help themselves, and for a while I thought that my calling was to pitch in during these bargain days, but aside from keeping things straightened, I was mostly kept out of sight in the stockroom.

There is no job so boring as a job where you don’t do anything. I’ve had mind-numbing jobs where at least I did something, however repetitious, and I’ve had this one mind-numbing job where I did nothing at all except sit around and watch a shoe get sold occasionally. There’s no comparison.

So again, why did they hire me? The answer came toward the end of the summer. There were a handful of Catholic grammar schools in our town, and each school required uniforms. Including shoes. Sol’s store had the contract to sell all (as in literally all) the shoes for the Corpus Christi school. Toward the middle of summer the boxes started arriving, and then somehow the starting gun was fired, and the next thing you knew, the place was wall-to-wall grammar school kids, and their mothers, getting shod for the new season. Suddenly I was in demand. I went from expert Daily News reader to expert children’s shoe salesman in seconds flat. I measured their little feet and pretended to thoughtfully analyze the data, deciding not what shoe fitted but what shoe would still fit come the spring. Mothers depended on me to make sure those shoes lasted the entire year. I’d bring out the boxes and we’d slip Junior’s or Juniette’s feet into them, and they’d stand up, and I’d get down and press the toes and the sides, feeling for God only knows what, but then rubbing my chin and sagely pronouncing that it seemed pretty good to me. I’d like to say that while I was pronouncing them a fit made in heaven, the kid would be saying, “But they’re really tight,” and I’d give him a look and make as if to swat him, a la W. C. Fields, but I think that’s probably just in my imagination. What is not in my imagination is that I didn’t know the first thing about what I was doing, and with the exception of a couple of mothers who also pressed the toes and the sides, and probably knew no better than I did what they were feeling for, all the mothers accepted my expertise completely. I was working in the store, wasn’t I? Sol’s had been there forever. I must have known what I was doing.

If there is any great lesson to be learned from this, I didn’t learn it. I spent the rest of the year following the local news, to see if there was an epidemic of disfigured feet in the Corpus Christi school that could be linked back to me, but if there was one, I never saw it. I knew no more about shoes after this summer than I knew before it, and the minute I didn’t have to read the Daily News anymore, I made it a lifetime of not reading the Daily News. On the positive side, I did have a job for the summer, so I made a few bucks and kept off the streets and out of the penitentiary, thus getting from one school year to the next as well as could be expected.

Meanwhile, if you ever need shoe-buying advice, I’m your man.