Rags & Italian Shoes
Jon Nicholas

 

Rags & Italian Shoes
Jon Nicholas


When I saw George Lowell meet Kathy Wyeth, I knew there was no chance she'd ever want to go out with someone like him. I used to work with Kathy a few years ago and believe me, she's picky. I hadn't spoken with her since I left that job, but I never expected her to be friendly with someone like me anyway. I'm just not in her league. That reminds me, I had a girlfriend named Kathy when I was a senior in high school. I broke up with her after two dates, though. She just kept talking and talking all the time. Drove me nuts. Anyway, George met the lovely Miss Wyeth in Hal's Cafe. If you've never been in Hal's, you're really missing out on some great food. It's located on the ground floor of the 40-story Scheaffer Building, which makes it the perfect place for a quick bite or a cup of coffee if you happen to work for one of the many companies renting office space there. George and I work for Kinder & Kinder on the 27th floor. It's an ad agency. They're the ones who came up with that space-chimp TV commercial about five years ago. That was before we worked there. You know, the one where the chimpanzee discovers that bananas are actually alien beings but he eats them anyway. That ad campaign put them on the map and they've been struggling to stay on that map ever since. I keep asking George when he's going to create that next big ad campaign, and he never has an answer. He actually has to come up with ideas and present them to Mr. Wexellman, the head honcho. I'm just one of the artists. They throw an idea at me and it's my job to make it come to life. Yeah, it's a pressure job at times, but much better than trying to make it as a freelance artist. Talk about your roller coaster ride. I'll pass.

Now, I've been a regular at Hal's for a few years, but George is a relative newcomer.  He fits right in though. As a bonafide geek, he kind of blends naturally into the mix of unusual characters that frequent the place. Speaking of unusual characters, there's this one guy I call Mr. Stick. He carries a cane, but that's not why I call him that; he's so thin, he looks like a stickman. I try to imagine what his diet must be like. I also fantasize about tackling him, holding him down, and stuffing a Big Mac down his throat. "Eat! Eat something, you son-of-a-bitch!"

Speaking of eating, George was eating nachos the day Kathy Wyeth introduced herself. You know, nachos just aren't very romantic. Think about it. I mean, have you ever seen a movie where the couple falls in love while dipping tortilla chips in cheese sauce? Too messy. Too cheap. Just not quite right for love. I hardly ever eat nachos. I think the last time I ate them was the day I broke it off with that girl Kathy in high school. Did I mention she had red hair? Yep. She sure did. Mom always told me to steer clear of the redheads. Strangely enough though, my mother always dyed her hair red. I asked her why one time and she said because people think blondes are stupid. Then I asked her what people thought of redheads and she just smiled and changed the subject. I asked Kathy the same question. I mean, she was a true redhead so she should know, right? She just slapped me.

"That looks good."
That's what Kathy Wyeth said to Georgie about his nachos. I call him Georgie sometimes. Helps me to keep things in perspective. Anytime you're feeling insignificant, just start calling people by their little-kid names. Works like a charm. Anyway, Georgie was minding his own business, scooping up globs of imitation cheese goo when she approached him. He had cheese smeared all over his right cheek and it made his little-kid name seem perfect. I like the way food can change a person's entire look. Take Hatcher for example. Hatcher is this guy who runs a mortgage company up on the 34th floor. He stops in at Hal's every morning, buys a large coffee, a long john, and reads The New York Times. Always tips the girl behind the counter even though a sign says no tips. He's filthy rich and loves every penny of it. He likes to take ‘hot chicks’ out on dates all the time, then tell me all about it. I don't call them ‘hot chicks’ by the way, that's what he chooses to call them. I think ‘hot chick’ is about the lamest thing to call a woman. The last time I used that term was with Kathy in high school, so that tells you a lot right there. Anyway, he's got this really hot chick and they're eating at Giovani’s down on Fifth Street, right? I just happened to be there with my mother. It was her birthday. I am so glad birthdays are only once a year. She always wants to go to Giovani's. Says it's the only true Italian restaurant in town. I know why she really wants me to take her there though. It's Mr. Giovani himself. He's her idea of the perfect man. Wealthy, respectable, handsome, and available. If there's one thing that upsets my stomach, it's watching my mother flirt. Why should any son ever have to endure this kind of thing? Well, anyway, Hatcher gets to eating this lasagna or some kind of Italian stuff, and a big old flat, wet noodle is draped across his beard. The hot chick doesn't see it because she's too busy looking around the room, trying to find somebody she knows so she can show off. The waiter walks up to their table and presents him with this bottle of wine. Oh yeah, and I don't get it with the wine. Why do waiters insist you read the label before they open the bottle? Do they think it's good reading material or something? Have you ever noticed that they don't really give you enough time to read it anyway? I’d like to just grab it sometime and sit there and read the whole label, front and back, maybe pull out my pocket-dictionary and check a few words to be sure I'm understanding everything perfectly, then hand it back and say, "You know, that label really sucked ass. Bring me something better." So anyway, the waiter sees the big old noodle and makes this little motion with his hand like he was wiping off his chin, but Hatcher isn't paying any attention. No, he's blabbing about his new Beamer and how it's only one of 23 specially built Beamers designed by some fashion guru in Germany. German fashion, by the way, is a subject worth talking about. To Germans, it seems the word fashion means ‘boring.’ The more boring, the more fashionable. I could make it big as a fashion designer in Germany. You could make it big as a fashion designer in Germany. Hatcher could make it … nah, not Hatcher. So, the waiter gives up trying to get his attention and just goes about his business opening the bottle of wine. There he was. Good old Hatcher, just blabbing away with that huge noodle parked right there on his chin. His hot chick finally saw it and started to make these awful faces. I think she was grossing out. She left the table and didn't come back. Across the room, I was laughing hard. At least until my mother punched me in the arm. She has this uncanny ability to find that spot. You know, the one that makes you want to scream, but you can't because it was just a little bitty punch, and it certainly couldn't have hurt that bad.

Yeah, food can really take you down a few notches, and here was Georgie looking like an idiot with that cheese crap all over his face. To be honest, good old George always looked like an idiot anyway. His eyes just had that glassy, vacant thing going on. I've often wondered what it must have been like the day he had his job interview with Mr. Wexellman. What could have been going through Wexellman’s mind? "Hmm. This guy looks like a complete idiot. A bafoon if I ever saw one. But those are swell shoes he's wearing. Maybe I’ll give him the new position opening up in our Concepts department. Yes. That's what I’ll do." Life's weird that way. Idiots get some of the best jobs in the world.

When Kathy spoke, he dropped his little nacho tray and most of it landed on her shoes. Together they cleaned it up and she sat down next to him. I know he was nervous because his lip kept quivering. He'd been watching her for months though. He thought he was being clever by peeking over his magazine each day, but I think she was on to him right from the start. She's a smart lady. Reminds me of Kathy in high school. I never could get anything past her. That was one of the reasons I broke it off with her. That and the talking thing. You never really get to know someone who continually flaps their gums. Kinda works backwards if you think about it. Yeah, she was smart enough to know that the guy reading Vogue magazine was eyeing her. Actually, it was George's choice of reading material that intrigued her. Every day he'd have a different magazine. It might be Cat Fancy one day and then Cosmopolitan the next. Good Housekeeping, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, every day it was something else. She'd never known a person to have such a wide range of interests. The funny thing about it was that Georgie was only checking out the advertisements in all those magazines, looking for ideas and angles he might be able to use at Kinder & Kinder. Once a day all the department heads would meet in the room they called the Garden. I used to get a kick out of watching them through the glass. Wexellman sat at the end of a long table and waited while each department presented its latest ad ideas. Oh, by the way, Wexie didn't know they called his meeting room the Garden. It got that nickname because he was known to treat his subordinates like little children, chastising them when they failed to impress him with their ideas. Kinder-garden. Get it? Anyway, Georgie was really pulling it off well at Kinder & Kinder because he figured out a way to snooker old Wexellman. Every single day, George had yet another good ad concept. He was spitting them out like a machine. Word of his genius had even gotten back to Herman Kinder, III. George didn't even know his name was at the top of the list for Wexie’s successor. I found that out from the old man's secretary, Valerie. She was a knockout, by the way. She was really looped at an office party and I got her to tell me a lot of things about Wexie. The good stuff, you know? He'd die if he ever found out I knew about his leather fetish. Anyway, she told me the old man was planning to retire soon, and he was thrilled to have such a "go-getter" like George Lowell to take the reins. Funny thing was, George didn't really have any special abilities when it came to advertising. He just made it a point to stop by Barnes & Noble every day to buy a magazine. I think he just started at the far left side of the first periodicals rack and had been working his way slowly through every single rag in the store. Oh yeah, that's what they call magazines in the ad biz. Rags. So, he'd look at the ads in his rag-of-the-day, find one he thought was clever, and just modify it ever so slightly. Once at work, he'd throw the concept at us staff artists who would quickly draw it up and voila! Yet another Lowell ad, ready to be consumed and digested by Wexellman. It took me a while to figure out Georgie's little game, but he started leaving his rags on the counter at Hal's. It didn't take me long to find the ads he'd been "borrowing" from. The irony was at its fullest though when it was all those different magazines that attracted the beautiful Miss Kathy Wyeth to this homely little fraud with cheese on his cheek.

Well, I suppose I should tell you Miss Wyeth was attracted to Georgie in one other way. She also had a thing for men who wore expensive shoes. Now, the story behind George's shoes only makes things that much more interesting and I would never have known what I'm about to tell you if it hadn't been for a chance meeting with George's uncle, Lee. The details behind how I met him are boring but the story he shared with me is priceless. You see, George has never cared about what brand of shoes he wears. Not in the least. It's his mother. Well, actually, it's his mother's ability to make shoe store managers do strange things. Come to think of it, my mother had a certain effect on shoe store managers too. The ones that knew her would hide when they heard her piercing voice making its way through the aisles. "Oh myyyy! I just cannot believe they charge these prices! This is ridiculous! And look at these shoes! They're put together like shit! No wonder they look like shit! You don't expect my boy to wear shit to school, do you? Where's the manager!" Now, Georgie's situation on the other hand, was just peachy. You see, his mother, Sadie, had always needed custom made shoes on account of a genetic lump that runs in her family on her mother's side. The lump protrudes on the top of her left foot and makes it impossible to buy regular shoes. Since she frequented all the stores that make their own shoes, she had the chance build up a certain rapport with some of the store managers. Now, stay with me on this. Custom made shoes are very expensive. Georgie's mother was a waitress at the Parkway diner. Parkway didn't pay very well, right? But Georgie's mother knew how to make things happen when it came to lonely shoe store managers. She was the only customer that got to "go behind the curtain" to help find "the right style." Well, she was obviously very handy behind that curtain because the shoe store manager always seemed to find a surplus pair of hand made leather shoes that just happened to accommodate her lump, and sometimes, on those evenings when business was especially slow, she'd come away with a surplus pair of Italian dress shoes for her son, the advertising genius. At least, that's what his uncle Lee told me. Apparently, George had never been without expensive shoes in his life. His mother just wouldn't have it any other way. Wouldn't you know it that Kathy Wyeth had a thing for expensive shoes too? The world is a funny place.

Not to drive the shoe thing into the ground, but you should know that, according to Valerie, those Italian wonders really were the final tip of the scale that made old Wexellman hire George. "Shoes like that never wind up on idiots," he'd said to her. "It just doesn't happen." Now, I’d never owned a pair of shoes that would make someone think I was special. Kathy from high school used to complain about my sneakers. That was before we dated those couple of times. After I broke it off with her, she complained about other things. Not my sneakers.

I watched as Miss Wyeth took a napkin and wiped Georgie's cheek clean. There's something intimate about that sort of thing. You'd never catch a beautiful woman walking up to some bum on the street and wiping food off his face, but here it was. Take Georgie's Italian wonders away, replace them with my old sneakers from high school, then take his Yachting Today magazine and swap it with a bottle wrapped in a paper bag, and that's exactly what you had. A drop-dead gorgeous blonde, wiping food off the face of a bum. And enjoying it! You know, it wouldn't be so bad if the little turd actually understood the scope of the situation. His lip kept on quivering. Jeez. He had her wrapped around his slimy finger. She was putty in his hands. He could have invited her to his place for some serious fun if he had half a brain. No, Mr. Lowell, advertising-wizard-shoe-wearing extraordinaire just smiled nervously until she had to go. Kathy gave one of those little looks before she left George. You know what I'm talking about. Any normal red-blooded American male would have read the signal. It was the "you can have me if you want me" look. The one us guys always dream about. The defining moment when, after flipping her hair around, she looks you right in the eye with a level of resolve that cannot be denied. It sends a jolt of electricity right through your groin and if you're not careful, you'll do something really stupid like slobber on yourself. God I love that moment. When Kathy from high school shot me that look, I walked into a locker door. I had to go to the school nurse for a while until the bleeding stopped. Oh man. Nurse Gaines. Now, there was a real woman. The white uniform dress she wore would be outlawed in schools today. Her breasts just weren't small enough to fit down inside that thing. I think when they designed school nurse uniforms in those days, they just assumed, for some reason, that they'd all be flat-chested. Nurse Gaines was built like a brick house. All the women teachers hated her and all the men drooled over her. The nice thing was, I was prone to bloody noses. There was a god. She and I spent a lot of time together. It got to the point where she would confide in me about her relationship problems. I'm serious. I actually got to hear all about her boyfriends and how all they were interested in was getting some. I just played along like I was on her side. All the while I was imagining myself on her side, on her front, on her back, getting some.

So George got the look. Wouldn't you know it but he didn't seem to get it. How can a man that dense get so many breaks in life? And there she was sitting beside him the very next day. He was still off in la-la-land and so she popped the magic question for him. Can you believe that? She actually asked this guy out on a date! Damn Italian shoes. He was "reading" Popular Science and she just rattled it off like it was no big thing. "Hey, why don't you take me out for dinner tonight?" If I had been drinking my coffee at that moment, I would have spewed it all over myself. That reminds me. Tenth grade, Mr. Wells’s science class. Oh boy was that a gas of a class. One day, Trina Johnson filled her mouth with cherry Kool-Aid and held it there for the first 15 minutes of class. When it was her turn to go up to the front to give a presentation, she faked like she ran into Mr. Wells’s pointer stick which he always carried around and smacked people's heads who fell asleep. Well, when she faked the collision, she let all that cherry Kool-Aid come splurting out like a fountain. Mr. Wells thought she had punctured an artery or something and ran screaming down the halls for help. By the time he returned with Nurse Gaines, there was no evidence of anything. No "blood," no nothing. Nurse Gaines winked at me as she left. The next time she tended my bloody nose, she pulled my arm behind my back and made me tell her what had happened to make poor old Mr. Wells run the halls screaming. That was one time it felt wonderful to have my arm pulled behind my back.

So, Blondie got George to take her out to dinner. I overheard her picking out the restaurant and everything. I wasn't sure why she was making it so easy for him. I mean, every woman I've ever dated insisted I make the restaurant decision. I always saw it as a test. Inside her mind there was this point system and every restaurant within a fifty-mile radius had a certain value. All the women kept score and compared with each other. If there was a wine list though, you were always okay. That was a sure thing. If you took her to one that didn't have a wine list, you'd better at least ask for one and then be agitated when they inform you that only serve beer. Speaking of beer, I have this problem. Beer makes me burp something awful. I learned not to drink beer on a first date when I took Kathy from high school to that football game. Man did I burp. I even burped during our good night kiss. Now that's pretty bad. It reminded me of the first girl I kissed in eighth grade. July Fraley. She wore braces. After lunch one day, we found a deserted stairwell and got into some serious French kissing. She had just eaten spaghetti and there were still quite a few chunks of it stuck in all those little crevasses. She was doing fine but I started to gross out. I could tell she was ready to make this one of the longer kisses in our relationship. You know, like she was going to take us to new heights as a couple. But, man those spices and the little pieces of food made me start to heave. It was just so gross, and when I caught myself short of vomiting, she backed away and got all mad at me. "What! What was that?" I didn't know what to say so I just said I wasn't feeling too well. God how gross. That was the last time we ever kissed. That was also the last time I ever dated a girl with braces. I was worried I would have a relapse if I ever kissed another girl with braces, no matter how clean they were. I mean, wouldn't you be thinking about that moment every time you kissed?

When Kathy got up from the table, she did something that caught me by surprise. It was so unbelievable that I thought I was imagining it. She actually licked her lips at him. Damn. Damn those Italian shoes! I couldn't get to sleep that night imagining her falling all over Mr. Advertisement, offering herself to him in any way he so desired. I found myself looking at a shoe catalog and figuring out if I could afford anything from Italy or some other Mediterranean country. Greece? Spain? Don't they make shoes too? What is it with the Italians anyway? Will somebody tell me why the Italians are so good at making shoes? I found one pair that went for 350 bucks. Cheapest pair in the book. Jeez. Where's my mother when I need her to seduce a shoe store manager? Okay. I wish I hadn't said that. God what a visual. Anyway, I decided I could swing for one pair of genuine Italian leather shoes. I’d just have to give up a few luxuries for a while like buying Penthouses and Wild Turkey 101. Start buying store brand colas. It was going to be tough but I was ready to make the commitment. I dialed the number on the back of the catalog and gave away my 16 precious little credit card numbers. It always feels strange calling out those numbers. It's like giving away an important body part, or something. Anyway, the order was placed and a lady with an Italian accent thanked me. I got some sleep after that.

Days went by and the Kathy-Georgie monster was getting healthier and more disgusting as it was obvious she was giving him reasons to wake up with a smile. One day I had a sandwich I was about to eat and I noticed Georgie had his hand in Kathy's crotch. Losing my appetite, I tossed it to Mr. Stick who happened to be nearby. He said thanks and proceeded to open it and remove all the extras. He took off the lettuce, the tomatoes, even the damn cheese, until it was just meat and bread. He ate three bites and threw it away. Damn him. Oh to have had that Big Mac right there and then! Down the hatch, buddy! Doooooown the hatch!

When my package arrived, there seemed to be a sudden change in the air. I don't know how to describe it, really. Things just started looking up. Those shoes fit like gloves. That analogy doesn't seem right, does it? Anyway, when I dressed that morning, the shoes didn't go with my usual outfit of jeans and a golf shirt, so I had to reach back into the dark recesses of my closet. That sector was sort of like upper Siberia. Nobody ventured into that place without a good reason. It was the land of the forgotten. By the time I had pulled everything out, I had gone down several memory lanes. There was my three-piece suit from when I graduated from college. Five sweaters with coordinated slacks my mother had given me over five consecutive Christmases. The tags were all still in place. And enough dress shirts and ties to keep me guessing for years on which ones were supposed to go with which. I had no idea Siberia had so much to offer.

Now, I don't know how those Italians do it, but my new shoes seemed to go with everything that had a price tag of more than 50 dollars. Amazing. I left my apartment looking like a million bucks. Okay, maybe five-hundred. I got looks from several women on the way to the station. Hello, Italian Stallion! The next week proved to be a revelation as more and more doors seemed to open for me. Should I have been so receptive? I mean, isn't it pretty shallow that clothes can make such a difference? It felt like I was cheating. Would the "Rich Police" catch me, strip me down, and haul me off to a JC Penney dumpster?

The highlight of my first two weeks of dressing up was the day George Lowell was too sick to go to work. Kathy Wyeth sat down right next to me at the counter at Hal's and asked how things were going. I put down my copy of Smithsonian and smiled. "Rather well, Miss Wyeth, rather well." I brushed a little dust off my fine Italian shoes and I could have sworn she started breathing heavier…


End.

Copyright © 2001 Jon Nicholas

 

 

Copyright © 2001 Jon Nicholas
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"