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The Duration: Conclusion
I got a call from my shoe guy today. He’d done what he could with an old pair of Chucks. Hard to stitch, had to patch. I’m going to pick them up on Monday, and I expect they will shine brighter than the day I took them out of the box. This guy is a wizard: you could drop off shoes from someone in Napoleon’s army who retreated from Moscow, and they’d look like they belonged in a Gucci store window.
He just reopened his shop after the long lockdown. It’s a good location, in the skyway, located in a hotel that used to be a bank. The main banking lobby is the lobby / bar, with magnificent stylized light fixtures, gorgeous wood, a late 40s vibe unmatched downtown. In the pre-pandemic days, it was next to a Starbucks, between two office towers. He had clients who came in for a shine and some clever palaver, or just to drop off dead leather, knowing he’d lazurus them back to life.
I met him when he showed up at one of my State Fair shows with his wife and kids. She was a fan, which meant I was okay in his book. Two young kids. He invited me to drop by his shop one day. I did, and I did again, and over time he told me his story. Former stand-up comic and crack addict. In recovery a man taught him the trade of glorifying footwear, and he took to it. Had a stand in California. Moved here, rented this small place in the skyway: his dream. First dollar he made framed on the wall. An elegant throne where customers could get a shine, a cabinet full of potions and glues and cleaners and dyes that could take the most battered brogans and make them fit for an emperor.
Over the next year or so I gave him my shoes to fix, as well as my wife’s. I should note that my wife . . . has shoes. Like Carter’s has little pills, she has shoes. She was always put together, as they say, and every time she came home from work is was like watching a combination of Leslie Caron and Audrey Hepburn turn the corner into the kitchen, always a different outfit. This meant she needed matching shoes, of course. Well. They would suffer from wear, and my friend would perform his magic. Nothing he couldn’t fix.
He called me up the other day and asked if my wife had any shoes in need of repair, and alas: no. Her company went full remote, all the time. She wears out a pair of tennis shoes every other week; maybe we can work with that? Thing is, the shoe-repair trade is dead. The office workers haven’t returned in sufficient numbers. The number of men who suit up, cinch the tie, poke the dimple, run a hand down their front to smooth themselves, check their shine – it’s off, ninety percent. There used to be a population of grown-ups downtown, kitted out in corporate battle gear. They went away. A lot of the young people who’ve come back – well, Nikes, or maybe Target dress shoes. The kind you touch up with a Kiwi bottle with a sponge on the end.
I remember my dad sitting at the bottom of the stairs to the basement, polishing his church shoes. He wore work shoes all week, but church – or perhaps a lodge meeting – required a high shine. He had a stiff brush, tins of Panama or Kiwi polish, and he attacked the shoes with the brush, as if they needed to be taught a lesson. Nowadays I use a different method that requires less work. The effect is the same, but I suspect it doesn’t last as long.
To be honest, I’m part of the problem. I rarely wore dress shoes to the office. I have a dozen pairs of Chuck Taylors in various hues, and they match my shirts. Hey, it’s a look. But I always wore a tie, because I worked downtown. In the depths of the pandemic I would put on a tie to go sit in an empty office tower, for the same reason Charlton Heston played chess alone while the zombies howled outside in “The Omega Man.”
In the summer, no. But when fall gets chilled, yes: the ties will return. The office is still empty. Well, as they say, character is what you do when no one’s looking. Perhaps style is the same.
There’s one place downtown left where a man can buy a good tie, a good shirt. All the department stores are gone. The small shops that catered to niche interests like “dressing reasonably well” were slaughtered by the lockdown. This shop is open by appointment only; I pass it on the way to the hot dog stand, the only food vendor that survived the lockdown. Sometimes I see the owner in the back, and wonder who comes to see him.
Probably not Charlie.
Ah, Charlie. He was my banker. He knew everyone downtown. We’d walk through the skyways, and he’d hail-fellow-well-met every other person, it seemed. I’d go to his office to get something notarized, he’d wink and say “want to see something?” The next thing I knew we were in a skyscraper a few blocks away, he was charming the receptionist at the desk at the top floor – she knew Charlie, everyone knew Charlie – and we’d pick a wrapped Dove chocolate from the dish on the desk and go to a conference room and look down upon the city. He loved this place. I loved this place. It was a good place. Then we’d take the elevator back to the skyways, back in the stream of people, and say goodbye in the lobby under the great old light fixtures salvaged from the old building. It was lost to arson in ’82. Some of us remembered that. It made you sick, to see the walls fall. It made you glad, to see the things they saved.
One day he was gone. They said he was sick. When he came back, in early 2020, he said he’d had the worst flu he’d ever had. Nearly carried him off. I suspect now it was COVID. Well, he was back, but he’d gotten . . . signals that it was time to retire. I suspected it wasn’t entirely voluntary. I wondered how he would do without access to the marvelous lattice of downtown, the way you walk around and everything gives you a static-electricity spark. He said he’d be fine, and he’d travel. I made a note of the date of his goodbye party.
It never happened. The lockdown came, and Charlie never got his party.
A few weeks ago I found myself in a room in a downtown steakhouse with a group of local guys who got together to talk, and eat. A remarkable assembly. I can only guess at the breadth of their accomplishments; no one boasted. I mentioned Charlie. Of course, some of them knew Charlie. Hell, everyone knew Charlie.
If you can imagine a spectrum of downtown citizens, you might place Charlie up here, perhaps on the public side of a great unseen group of men and women who inhabit the empyrean realm of Money and Influence. At the absolute bottom, the layabouts who throng the street around the Target store, shouting and drinking. In the vast middle, the workers and clerks and residents, the Hmong farmers who bring in the produce for the public market, and the particular people like my friend the Shoe Whisperer, who crawled out of the crack-clutch and moved to a peaceable place and got his own store, and now stands behind the counter, the boombox playing a cool soul tune, waiting.
I don’t know if Charlie and Napoleon – yes, that’s the shoe man’s trade name – ever met, but I know they would have been fast friends.
That was the world before the lockdown.
It’s getting better. Really. A restaurant just opened in my office tower’s lobby. There are more people downtown; the hot dog stand has to move to another location because they’re rehabbing the damned and haunted food court, reviving the hotel above, in hopes that it will all come back. The last beam was hoisted into place in downtown’s newest skyscraper, and it’s mostly leased. A massive project is remaking the entertainment district’s main street; a side street has been upgraded with trees and bushes. Every day I walk past projects that will replace parking lots with new apartments. At the very edge of downtown stands a gorgeous new 40-story tower, ready for its residents. In ten years, I think, we will be okay.
But right now I have a business card for Charlie that goes to a dead number, and I don’t have enough shoes for Napoleon. I knot my tie and look in the mirror and see my Grandfather staring back. He didn’t see how it all ended up, either. None of us ever do.
Life in Minneapolis over the last year has diminished my capacity for hope. But life in Minneapolis over the last forty years built a great stock of optimism.
Whether it was hard coal that burns long, or grain-mill dust that ignites in an instance, I don’t know. I do know that my favorite shoes could not be stitched. But they were patched. That’s probably good enough.
Son of a gun probably bleached the laces, too. On the house.
Published in General
In 2008 I would occasionally walk over to the small strip mall where I could get a good falafel wrap or a better than average lentil soup. After I retired, I didn’t get much opportunity to to there. A friend needed to get something related to taxes in the mail by sunset, and since there was almost no parking at the post office, I offered to pick her up and drop her off at the post office and wait around until she got things attended to. I parked at the strip mall waiting for her to call and tell me to get my a$$ over to pick her up. I noticed that every business in the strip mall was closed. Every last one. The place that served a decent Brazilian feijoada, the hipster café, all of it. A small thing, I guess, but it still depressed me.
Poetry, as usual.
(That’s for James, not Django.)
Man. I read your COVID life-under-lockdown pieces and they tear my heart out — with a kind of Rambo-suiting-up-for-a-day-at-the-office kind of grief. I don’t like seeing my country revealed as a nation of pansies. It makes me want to hurt people, and I never want to hurt people.
We have a shoe repair shop in this little town on the outskirts of which I live. I’ve had numerous friends, all women, take shoes in for repair. The answer is always the same: sorry, I can’t fix that.
The shop is owned by the son, or the son of the son, of the founder. Near as I can tell, nothing ever gets done there. We all agree that the shop is a front for something, but we can’t agree on what.
Well let’s see. If their names are “Southern” like Bubba or something, they’re making moonshine in the back… If their names are Italian, it’s a Mafia front… :-)
@jameslileks – again, thank you for a wonderful piece of writing. I hear your voice-over as I’m reading it, no doubt because of your fine work on the Ricochet flagship podcast. I do sincerely wish that you would resume “The Ramble”; your COVID-themed essays would be a rich vein of ore to be mined.
“Life in Minneapolis over the last year has diminished my capacity for hope. But life in Minneapolis over the last forty years built a great stock of optimism.”
I still have hope for Minneapolis. I think back to my childhood and my family’s annual Christmas trip Downtown. My dad and brothers sat and shined their shoes, (I suspect they were a little resentful I skipped the messiness, as I had patent leather Mary Janes) and off we went in our Sunday Best. And it was magic. The glittering window displays, the lights, the decorations. We always stopped at the IDS for the poinsettia display, the Automat for a bite – Dayton’s Auditorium and impatiently waiting through the serpentine line to finally tell Santa what I want (please and thank you!). Now one has to go to The Mall for Santa and mill about like ants in an ant farm under the glass canopy, dodging strollers and the guy selling cheap cellphone cases at the pagoda. Downtown will never be the same – and hasn’t been. Now that I have a son, I think we’ll skip the mall and head downtown, even just to teach him how to navigate the skyways. And someday his grandpa will show him the proper way to shine his shoes.
Thanks for the memories, @jameslileks – something even a pandemic can’t take away.
I listen to some talk radio people from Indianapolis (though I’m in Texas), and they have noted that pre-lockdowns the daytime population of downtown Indianapolis was 150,000, but dropped to a mere 15,000 during lockdown, and still hasn’t come back up. The numbers really struck me. There’s no way downtown businesses can survive on one tenth the customer base.
This is just beautiful writing. As noted in another comment, it tears my heart out. I wish I could send my shoes to Napoleon and I’d pay him double. I wish Charlie could get his party. There has been cruelty throughout this whole situation, and it is seen in big and small ways. A shoe-shine shop, missed birthdays and anniversaries and retirements. My back-to-the-office schedule was halted because of the Delta thing (not that I’m dying to go back) but the local bakery I’d go to so often is now closed. They always knew what I’d order. The bar that everyone went to as part of your Interning in DC on the Hill for years has closed, too. They even closed one of the two Starbucks that was down the street from my apartment. I did find a small cafe that made a dang good bagel sandwich last weekend, and I intend to go as often as I can. Any place that can survive this last year and a half is scrappy, and I like to support scrappy.
Each story is like a lifetime. It starts in the middle or end of other stories, and it dies as others are in the middle or begin.
James, you do have a gift, and I very much appreciate your weaving your tales for us.
I wish you had something beautiful to write about instead of this decay, desolation and depression brought about by the charlatans of panic. I fear we have a few more years of this insanity, and suspect we may never fully get back to “normal”. I weep for my grandchildren, and the millions of Charlies and Napoleons, who have all had their dreams snuffed out by both the Whoo Hoo Flu and the despotic actions of those who wield power.
There was a local shoe repair guy in our city. He lived next to my grandparents.
It seems that the key was that he inherited a bunch of equipment from the old shoe factory. This shoe factory once made shoes for Robert Wadlow, the tallest man ever.
After that shoe repairman died, there was a shoe repair guy in a local city or two. I think they made their money repairing things like saddles and leather goods and perhaps doing some blacksmith work.
Liver pills?
Both:
Through the sixties and seventies they were advertised as Carter’s Little Pills.
Probably had the FDA on their backs or something, so had to stop using “liver.”
I submit that the shoe repair business was doomed long before lockdown, in the same way that the public library business is doomed. Where I live, there is one cobbler that I know of. A Russian guy in the mall who runs the business now with his son. When I started taking my shoes to him, it was just him, but that was more than 20 years ago, and his son has done what sons do: grown up. I tend to wear out the heels of my nice shoes, specifically the outside of the heel. which then causes my knees and ankles to hurt. So I spend $150 on a pair of nice shoes, keep them polished (or used to), then when it’s time to get a new heel, down to the mall I would go. Then every couple of years, replace the whole sole. And eventually the uppers wear out and I buy a new pair of shoes.
I’m the only person in my personal sphere of influence that does that. Well, not true. My wife had him fix a pair of birks once.
I think the guy had just enough business to keep him earning a living. And probably only him. If another cobbler opened, I suspect they’d have both failed. I suspect some people are still going to him, but not many. My “dress” shoes have been under the bed for nearly two years.
Getting your shoes fixed, like going to the public library, is a thing some people do, but most don’t. A decent pair of dress shoes isn’t worth the drive to the one guy in the mall, and waiting a week, then going back. It is to me, because again, I wear them out too fast.
I suspect that a big part of what your lamenting is the death of craftsmanship. There’s a lot of that going around, in our throw away society. Weedwhacker broke? Throw it away and get a new one. Heel worn out? Throw it away and get a new one. Jeans got a hole? Don’t patch it, that’s the look! Darn a sock? I don’t think so, Tim.
Does the place have any windows? Or are they all bricked up from the street. When I was in Vegas, all the Italian restaurants, didnt have any windows for some reason…
Yeah, I was back in the Village yesterday, and the local shoe business was gone.
Yes they did. I dimly remember the change. And the old pre-change advertisements, so Wiki might be wrong about the effective date.
(It is surely only coincidence that my family lived in California at the time.)
Good boots are worth it. But I had my weed eater fixed just last year – you’re right: Not worth it.
There’s a shoe repair place about a block from the house-that-used-to-be-a-church I live in. I wondered how the guy was hanging on, then I realized it was probably due to the Air Force Base that keeps the rest of this town alive.
And they were little, not much larger than a BB as I recall from my childhood; and they worked as a laxative. I think they were probably left over from the days of patent medicines.
In Baltimore, the shoe repair guy is legit.
But the greengrocer, who do a roaring trade, is clearly a Russian Laundry. I still shop there, because the produce and prices are good.
How would the charter change to place police staffing under the City Council affect your optimism? When we moved away from the Twin Cities 5 years ago we were very glad to escape that bunch of nuts bent on destroying what was once a nice town.
Been there many times. It’s the old Farmers and Mechanic’s Bank and now the Westin. ESPN used to put us up there for events in the Metrodome. I remember going to the elevators and there sits the vault with the door open. It is now the wine cellar for the bar. Engraved on the door: Diebold Safe & Lock Co. Canton, O
“Cool,” I think. My hometown. Some of my neighbor’s grandfathers may have had a hand in that. That could be Timken steel. MY grandfather may have had a hand in that.
Once every few years I need a cobbler. I have to research where I can find one because the last one I patronized is no longer in business. This morning’s TV news said half of California’s small business did not survive the Covid. Very sad.
Agreed.
Since the Italian mafia was muscled out by even more violent sorts from all around the world, from Russia, to Jamaica, to points south of the border, there are many possibilities. The comment may have been in jest, but front businesses have long been a very real thing, likely expanding beyond the stereotypes of coin operated places. I know a restaurant that should not be in business, based on long time observable low volume (few cars ever in the parking lot), yet they remain fully staffed and the lights are on. Not a flashy place that might attract the feds attention.
I have the same experience with good leather shoes, replacing heels and half soles where concrete grinds through the leather under the balls of my feet. A good pair of leather shoes costs significantly more than the repair cost, unlike most small appliances these days. As to the lack of foot traffic into these small shops, I suspect the ones that survive will have a small internet store front, maybe in locally focused social media, with a mail-in option. Send a couple photos, get a quote, toss the shoes in a standard delivery box. Get renewed shoes back on your doorstep. This, however, is beyond the scope of some number of truly small business/ craftsmen and artisans.
My wife says Napoleon should move to Clawson, Michigan or the area. She just returned from the shoe repair place and there was a line out the door.