I could be wrong about this, but I’m guessing that not many readers of this magazine know who Chad Muska is. Let me quickly break the tension by reporting that Chad Muska is a big name in skate boarding — a kid of 22, long turned professional — and, yo, I’m wearing the dude’s shoes. Not his actual shoes, but the shoes he personally helped design for Circa Footwear, Inc., of San Clemente, California; I purchased these shoes this past spring for $ 85, plus tax, from a mild-mannered, lavishly tattooed guy in Petaluma, California, in a shop called Brotherhood of the Board. The shoes are gray and red and white, and made of leather, suede, mesh, plastic, rubber, and, for all I know, plutonium. Like all skate-board shoes, they are heavily padded, to give the feet added protection against scrapes and collisions. I call them my Chads — actually, ma Chads — and I’m entirely nuts about them.
They haven’t been getting much press, ma Chads. I wear them for long walks, and mostly in the neighborhood. A stockboy with a missing tooth in a local supermarket told me he thought they were very cool. A few friends have stared at them, with a look suggesting that this time I may have gone too far and might next show up in a plumed hat. But for the most part, they go unnoticed. People nowadays are very tolerant, at least about one’s clothes, though I recently received an invitation to a cocktail party that noted, Dress: Business Casual: no jeans or tennis shoes. That night ma Chads stayed home.
When R. H. Tawney (1880-1962), the great economic historian, was asked if he noted any progress in his lifetime, he replied, yes, in the deportment of dogs, who seemed better behaved than when he was a boy. My own answer to the question of notable progress in my lifetime is, yes, in the manufacture of gym shoes, as they were called when I was young and as I still think of them, though in a pretentious, slightly preppy phase I used to refer to them as sneakers. When I was a small boy, two gym-shoe manufacturers, U.S. Keds and P. F. Flyers, dominated the market; both turned out ugly pieces of business made of canvas and rubber and sold in black or brown and in white for girls.
By the time of my early adolescence, things began to look up. As a boy tennis player, with strokes more elegant than effective, I would wear only Jack Purcells, a low-cut white canvas shoe with a rounded rubber toe across which ran a blue line. As an aspiring high-school basketball player and general gym rat, I wouldn’t wear anything other than white Chuck Taylor All-Stars, with red and blue trim. Even now, more than forty years later, I can recall buying my first pair, at a walk-down sporting-goods shop in Chicago at the corner of Damon and Foster near Amundsen High School. I wish I could say that they improved my game, but, Chuck Taylors and all, I never went beyond playing on the frosh-soph team.
I put in perhaps twenty years without owning any gym shoes. During this period, which I used to catch up on my reading, I entered no gyms, played no games, had need of none other than street shoes, which in my case meant various kinds of loafers. But around the time when I began playing racquetball, a sporting-goods shop roughly a block from my apartment began selling gym shoes at an annual sidewalk sale at impressively low prices. I bought a pair of Nike high-tops there for ten bucks. The following year I bought another pair, this time low-cut Converse, in purple — purple and white being nearby Northwestern University’s colors — for six bucks. When the salesman asked what activity I intended to use the shoes for, I replied, “Napping.”
Ma Chads are my second pair of skateboard shoes. My first were purchased at another so-called “extreme sports” shop — extreme sports, I gather, include skate boarding, wake boarding, snow boarding, surfing, and roller blading — this one called the Shred Shop in Skokie, Illinois. Every salesman in the place wore a baseball cap on backwards. None seemed close to 30 or even imaginable at 30. I tried on a pair of elegant bone-colored shoes with grey, apricot, and blue trim made by a company called Gravis. Very comfortable kickers, these. As the salesman watched me test them for fit, I told him that I thought they would work well enough for my specialty, which was jumping off buildings of fewer than six stories. For a thirtieth of a nanosecond, he may have believed me.
Which leads smoothly into the question of what sort of shoes one ought to select for one’s own burial. I’m not sure whether one goes to the grave shod. If so, it would be a shame to have to live through eternity with shoes that pinch. But which shoes to choose? Loafers? Plain-toed Cordovans? Well-padded Chads? Nothing, certainly, from the shoe company called Mephisto. The answer is obvious: wing-tips, so that you get the chance to discover if those babies really fly.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
