Daniel would die if he knew this, but the other day I actually almost — I swear, they were right in my hand — bought a pair of moccasins. I was in damn Miami during spring break, but not to bare my tits and have anonymous sex like any sensible person who braves Miami this time of year, but rather to work like the responsible ball of bunk I’ve become since motherhood (anonymous sex, therefore, would have to serve as a possible side purpose).
About the most I could let loose was the fact that I was driving a convertible, and even back when I was a wild-haired partier I had a thing against convertibles, seeing as how when I was 18 I came across that accident with a girl my age lying along the Santa Monica Freeway like she was catnapping, only she had a hole in her skull with steam coming out. A sight like that will stick with you. She’d been driving a convertible and been ejected, but not in a lucky way.
Today I’ll occasionally get into a convertible, but usually it’s some vintage jalopy of Grant’s, like “Joan Collins,” which was the name of his 1985 Chrysler LeBaron convertible before he totaled her on the corner of one of Atlanta’s most visible residential neighborhoods. He’ll tell you his head went through the windshield, but don’t believe him. It didn’t go all they way through. He just got some glass in his hair, that’s all. No steamy head-hole, no catnap of death. Thank God. Now he drives an Outback with a roof rack he named “Ellen DeGeneres.”
And I would not have been driving a convertible in Miami, either, if it didn’t happen to be the only thing available to me. Convertibles are different these days, anyway. (Aren’t they?) This one, a Volkswagen Eos, had a hard top and all kinds of features to keep it from flipping and me from getting ejected and taking the catnap of death with a steamy head-hole on the side of the road. In Miami during spring break, the traffic moves about as fast as a herd of diseased cattle, anyway, so if it did flip I doubt this thing would have continued without me upside down for a quarter-mile, which created an odd comfort, as well as an opportunity to look around and notice things, one of them being a long-haired girl in the crosswalk wearing moccasins.
They weren’t the kind of moccasins with real soles and two tassels tagged by a designer and built with the bloodied fingers of 5-year-olds in a Third World factory. No, they were the real kind with nothing but a piece of leather between your feet and the concrete — the kind that are hardly more than leather socks, really, folded around your foot and secured by a lace threaded through a folded-over flap above your ankle.
I haven’t seen those kind in a hundred years, it seems like, not since I wore them myself when I lived in Florida when I was 9. I had two choices of foot fashion back then; the moccasins and barefoot. I opted for the moccasins a lot when it was time to delve deep into the tropical underbrush behind our house and light fires. Considering my adolescent pyro leanings, I probably would have burned down a few towns back then if not for the fact that the entire state of Florida comes equipped with its own sprinkler system.
“I need to get me some of those moccasins,” I thought to myself, because it would probably do me good to remember more often what it was like to be an adolescent with hardly anything between the earth and my feet, emerging from the underbrush smelling like smoke and dampness. I need to think about that a lot more. I remember I could feel the clumps of crushed shells mixed in with the asphalt as I walked along the road, a long-haired girl with a pack of Marlboros in her back pocket stolen from the carton her father kept on top of the refrigerator.
Or maybe I shouldn’t think about it too much, because those days are past and that girl is gone and what the hell am I doing standing here at the register of a roadside citrus stand with a pair of moccasins in my hand? Jesus God, 48 bucks for the same moccasins I bought back in grade school with money I made selling pilfered cigarettes for 25 cents a pop.
So I put them back, and Daniel would have died if he knew this. Daniel is always trying to get me to remember the long-haired girl. He constantly updates me on new QVC products to this end. “Bitch, you gotta get you some of them tanning towelettes! Just wipe and toss, wipe and toss! Easy as a faceless fuck in a bus-stop bathroom stall!” Just yesterday he sent me a link to the “Suzanne Somers Leopard Print Stretch Skinny Jeans,” made from fabric as attractive as old car upholstery. But I didn’t buy it.
I ain’t buying any of it lately, I thought as I drove away. The top was up.
“Bitch, I swear to God,” I could hear Daniel plead. “Go back. Buy it.”
Hollis Gillespie is an NPR commentator and author of two acclaimed memoirs.
This article appears in Apr 4-10, 2007.
