The Shoes

9:21 pm

YOU LOOK IN the mirror and comb your hair back just so. At least, as just-so as you can get it with your homemade haircut. The face in the mirror stares back at you, thinner and visibly older than it was seven years ago when you moved to Oakland, but happier. No frown lines, no forehead wrinkles. They abated, weathered away by the measures of contentment and unworry you’ve managed to chisel out of the rocky contours of the little slice of life you’ve carved out for yourself. The turntable needle abruptly scratches, lifts off the record, and the arm returns to its neutral position. 

You return the comb to the catch-all on your dresser and flip the record. The brassy report of Miles Davis’ trumpet fills the room, joined after a rambunctious solo by the rest of the ensemble, playing from a record you found in a milk crate earlier today on the side of the street two blocks over. The catch-all holds the sundries of your daily life: lighters, coins, a box of cigarettes, your wallet, tiny baggies, safety pins. Your sister made the catch-all for you, sending it from the East Coast one Christmas, and when you take a tiny container of scent out of it, a small portion of the graffiti-style A of your name, painted in silver by your sister, peeks out through the rest of the items. 

You sit down on your bed and scratch your cat between the ears. She stretches, elongating to the full length of her body and jutting her legs straight out, then relaxes in the same position while you scratch the back of her neck. She swats playfully at your wrist the further down you go, until she springs up and jumps off the bed. She knows this means you’re leaving and she is feigning indifference, maybe even insolence. 

The night sky is a clear, deep blue, dotted with faint pinpricks of stars. The air is cool, hoodie weather, as are the majority of nights in Oakland. You carry your bike down the stairs of your stoop and step across it and pedal out of your driveway and onto 32nd Street, then turn south on San Pablo, heading downtown. 

The wind blows through your hair, and into your half open hoodie, waking you up. Graffitied walls fly by: the facades of liquor stores, Korean and Mexican supermarkets, the laundromat. You wave when you see Jerry pushing a steel shopping cart down the street, but he doesn’t see you. The physical exertion of pedaling your bike starts your stomach rumbling. Good thing there’s food waiting at the Telegraph. And Cora. 

SOMETHING WET AND foul-smelling explodes out of the plastic bag when Jerry rips it open, spilling over his hands and down his pants leg. This is not unusual. He wipes his hand off on the other pant leg, and dumps the contents of the bag into the garbage can he pulled it out of. He rifles through the refuse, looking for recyclables. He finds only the glass bottle of a Mexican Coca-Cola, and gingerly sets it down in his Home Depot shopping cart. Done with this trash can, he pushes his cart south down San Pablo to the next can, on the corner of Grand Avenue, next to a park made by the triangular intersection of three streets that’s filled with homeless people living in tents.

10:01 pm

THE TELEGRAPH IS busy. Too busy for your liking, but you see Cora waving to you from the patio, behind the surrounding high metal fence, painted black and topped with decorative but nonetheless discouraging spikes. You wave back. Thank god she got here in time to get a good spot at one of the long communal picnic tables. 

You pull your bike up onto one wheel and navigate through the crowd in the narrow entryway, past the line of people at the bar, and out to the patio where you stack it on top of Cora’s bike which is stacked on top of three other bikes next to even more stacks of bikes on either side. 

You hate yourself for hating the crowd, but you go on hating anyway. You hate their Allbirds, you hate their crossbody Baggu bags, you hate their AntiSocialSocialClub tees, you hate their avocado tattoos. You hate yourself for hating them because you hate them for doing the same thing to Oakland that you helped do to Oakland yourself, you just got here a few years earlier. You’re a hypocrite and you know it. 

Cora already has a pitcher of beer, and doesn’t want any food. From behind the crowd of people around the bar, you signal to Sandy to put in an order for your usual, mouthing a silent word of thanks. Back at the table, Cora has poured you a glass of beer. You stop behind her and hug her and she squeezes your legs and you kiss her head. Her hair smells like fresh linen and lavender. As you sit, she holds up her beer. 

“Cheers,” she says. 

You clink your glass to hers and say “Cheers, babe.” 

“How are you?” 

With a shrug you say, “I’m okay.” A pause. You look around. “There’s a lot of people here tonight.” 

“Don’t even get started, okay,” Cora says. She stands up and puts a hand to your cheek, and kisses you, then sits back down. “I got here early just to get a good seat for us. I didn’t wait twenty minutes for this table just to listen to you bitch about the crowd for the umpteen-millionth time.” 

“Okay, okay,” you say. “Sorry.” 

She nods. “How was your day? What did you do?” 

“Nothing really,” you say. “Listened to some records. Took a shower. Walked around the neighborhood a little bit looking for junk.” 

“Your house is going to be full of junk if you keep that up,” she says. “Find anything good?”

“A couple of milk crates to put records in.” You take a sip of your beer. “And a couple records.” 

“Don’t your roommates hate the amount of junk you bring home?” 

“They have records too. I gave one to Mindy.” 

Cora’s eyes roll. “Well, I guess that’s a problem for them to worry about, not me.” 

“Yeah.” 

Beside you and Cora sit another couple, the girl beside Cora and the guy beside you. Both wear Warby Parker glasses and have on matching Madewell his and hers tops. You crane your neck a little to try to see what shoes he’s wearing but Cora snaps a finger in front of your face to get your attention. 

“You’re obsessed,” she says, incredulous and bewildered. “What is it with you and brands?” 

You shrug. “You can tell a lot about a person.” 

“Like what? Sometimes I swear you’re delusional.” 

Sandy materializes out of the crowd with a pitcher of beer in one hand and a half sheet pan in his other that holds a sausage, chips, a griddled slab of macaroni and cheese and a pint glass. He sets the tray down in front of you and puts a hand on Cora’s back. 

“Hey Cora. Hey Adrian.” 

“Hey Sandy,” you say, and stand up to embrace him and slap him on the back two times as he does the same to you. “How’s it going tonight?” 

“Cooking ass, as you can see by the crowd,” Sandy says. “I’ve got ten minutes, can I join you guys?” 

“Sure thing,” you say, and as you scoot over to make room for Sandy on the bench you catch a glimpse of the Vans lace-ups on the feet of the guy next to you and the same shoes in a darker shade of green on the feet of the girl across from him. Figures. Next to Allbirds, Vans are your second most hated shoe since every trendy yuppie in Oakland started wearing them. 

Sandy’s adidas Sambas slide in next to your New Balances 405s. 

“Sorry, I probably smell a little bit, it’s hot as fuck in that tiny kitchen,” Sandy says, lifting his arm up and thrusting his bare armpit, showing out of his cutoff Mobb Deep tank top, into your face. You push him back and he almost falls off of the bench. The two of you wrestle for a moment, playfully, laughing, until the girl next to Cora sucks her teeth with a scandalized look on her face. Cora rolls her eyes. 

“Sorry, letting off a little steam mid-shift,” Sandy says by way of apology, and also to let her know he works here and doesn’t have to take her shit if she wants to start giving it. He takes a deep swallow of his beer, and turns to you. “What’s happening?” He looks to Cora and back to me. “What are you two up to tonight?”

You can’t respond through a mouth full of sausage, so Cora says “I don’t know, but no roughhousing for me. I have to be up early for work.” 

“I’m not doing anything,” you say. “I could go for a little roughhousing.” 

“Ruby Room when I get off?” 

“I’ll see you there.” 

Sandy swallows off the rest of his beer and gets up. “Bye Cora, I’ll make sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble.” Cora rolls her eyes again. Sandy turns to you. “See you there, I’m off at 11:30.” 

You hold your glass up to him, and he disappears back into the crowd. 

“You don’t want to hang out tonight?” You take the last bite of your sausage, and start in on the macaroni and cheese.

“You heard me, I have to be up early.” You wait for her to say more, but she waits for what she knows you’re going to say.

“Let’s get out of here and I’ll ride back to your place with you.” 

“Yeah, right,” she says, but you can tell she’s just saying it, and it stirs you. “Why would you want to ride all the way back to my place with me? So you can kiss me goodnight?” 

“Well,” you say. 

“You think you’re getting lucky tonight or something?” she says, with a playful smile on her face. You savor the smile, savor the thought of it more than any bite of the macaroni cheese, which you barely taste as you shovel the rest in your mouth as fast as you can. 

JERRY DOESN’T WALK down Grand Avenue to start the leg of his nightly circuit that lies on Telegraph Avenue, but pushes his cart back up to 27th Street, because there are more trash cans along 27th than there are on Grand. He works his way across 27th, from garbage can to garbage can, sifting through the cast off refuse for recyclables and glass bottles that will fetch back their five cent deposit, so he can eat tomorrow, same as he did last night so he could eat today, and the night before so that he could eat the day before. 

11:33 pm

AFTERWARD, YOU GET up and get dressed and say goodbye to Cora, tucking her into bed and closing her bedroom door behind you and then locking her apartment door behind you. Your bike hasn’t been stolen from where it’s locked to the spiked iron fence that surrounds her building. While you were inside someone has walked by and written “WRNCH” on every iron bar of the fence in white paint using a paint pen. You know this happened while you were inside, because they tagged the top tube of your bike frame while they were at it. 

As you pedal down 27th Street toward downtown, the wind blows into your hoodie and across your face and brings your senses to heightened levels. The smell of jasmine flowers mixed with garbage smells a little more pungent, the streetlights and traffic lights look a little brighter, the cool wind on your skin sends a shiver up your spine. Music would sound good right now. 

Pulled over to the side of the street, in the parking lane behind a big white van, you pull out your headphones and plug them into your phone. The time reads 11:43 when you turn the screen on. Sandy will be at Ruby Room by now. A mild commotion catches your attention, and you look up before pushing play on the music. 

Jerry is on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, one hand on his Home Depot cart and one hand waving around in the air toward a group of young people. He’s saying something, but you can’t hear what it is through the silent earbuds plugged into your ears. You don’t take them out to hear better, but watch and wait to see what happens. 

The young people wear Allbirds and Vans and Blundstones, and are gesturing back, one of them flipping Jerry the bird, their words muffled but aggressive even through your earbuds. They’re not stopping, keep on walking, but some of them turn to continue yelling and gesturing at Jerry, who has already turned back to the garbage can he was in the middle of digging through before the encounter with the young people. 

At the press of your finger “American Psycho” blasts out of the earbuds. Vague thoughts of ear damage cross your mind, unformed and unheeded, and you stand up on your bike pedals and merge back into the trafficless street. You holler and wave at Jerry, who is startled at first, wary after the encounter, but recognizes you from across the street. He waves back as you ride away. 

Ruby Room is packed with people, the narrow alley between the wall and the bar nearly impassable for the crowd waiting for drinks, but you manage to catch the eye of a bartender who knows your face and puts a can of Olympia in your outstretched hands. You tip it toward him and take a sip, mouthing your thanks and a promise to settle up later. A girl in Blundstones gives you a scandalized look, as if you’d just cut the entire line, probably because you did. But you don’t care, it’s your right as a faithful patron of the Ruby Room for the last ten years, and some yuppie who moved here a year ago from SF isn’t going to make you feel bad about it. You step on her shiny, spotless boots as you walk away, and can hear her yelling something at you as you wade into the crowd toward the pool room. 

In the very back of the bar, cigarette smoke wafts out of the pool room. Low chairs are scattered around the front half of the room, and a cushioned wall bench surrounds two pool tables in the back half. Sandy stands at one of the tables, pointing his pool cue at a corner pocket before leaning down to line up a shot, cigarette hanging out of his mouth and flat cap on his head, stll in his Mobb Deep tank top. 

After he shoots and misses, you walk over and embrace Sandy and slap him on the back two times. He bums you a cigarette, and you dig in your pockets for a few quarters to put on the table. You find a place on the bench where you can see almost every pair of shoes in the room. You feel content, and thankful for the sanctuary of Ruby Room’s smoking room—not an Allbird in sight. 

JERRY PARKS HIS cart in Kaiser Memorial Park, under the watchful gazes of the statues of Rosa Parks and Harvey Milk and Maya Angelou. A concert has just let out at the Fox Theater, and people are steaming out of the doors, their faces illuminated red and orange by the theater’s towering neon sign. They are laughing and yelling and crying and wooping, and Jerry walks silently among them, passing unnoticed through the crowd, making himself small and his expression neutral. He stands next to the hot dog cart, waiting for people who buy cans and bottles of soda to drop them in the gutter so he can collect them. 

2:04 am

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT a bar like the Ruby Room that just doesn’t look quite right in regular light: when the overhead lights flip on and off and on and off again to signal last call at the bar, it washes the pool sharks, the amorous couples, the ashtrays, and sticky spots of spilled beer on the ground in a bright light that no one bargained for. Cigarettes are stubbed out, games of pool are finished, and the crowd pushes out through the smoking room’s narrow door to settle up at the bar before clearing out onto the late night downtown streets. You go up and get a beer from the bar and then reclaim your seat in a deep, vinyl-covered armchair, smoking and sipping your last beer until Sandy eases the eight ball into a side pocket with an impressive bank shot. 

Outside, Sandy tells you to wait for a second but you catch his arm and bum a cigarette before he goes. You light it and inhale the first drag and then blow it out upwards, watching the glow of the next-door cornerstore’s neon sign curl around the smoke as it floats off into the sky. 

“Adrian!” It’s Sandy, from across the street, motioning you over to a beat-up gold sedan two girls you’ve never seen before in the front seat. You cross the street and lean down to the driver’s window, looking at Sandy doing the same on the passenger side. “Want to go to a party?” 

“I don’t know,” you say. You look at the girl in the driver seat. “What kind of party?” 

“Nice to meet you too, asshole,” she says. You don’t reply. “Warehouse. East Oakland. Friend of mine.” 

“Come on, Adrian, it’ll be great.” 

You don’t really feel like it, but it takes a few seconds for you to realize this is how you feel, during which all of you are still: the two girls in the front seat, Sandy bent down into the passenger side window and you in the driver’s window. Too Short’s rapping about his favorite word on the radio. The smoke from your cigarette creeps up the side of the door, slowly spilling over the edge of the open window. You look down and see that the driver’s wearing Blundstones, and you think you can see the other girl wearing the same. 

“Nah, not tonight,” you say finally. 

“Suit yourself,” Sandy says. He flips his cigarette into the street and comes around the car and embraces you and gives you two slaps on the back. “See you around.” 

“See you around,” you say. “Good to see you tonight.” 

They drive off and you are happy to not be in the car. But you’re not ready to go home and face an empty room. And there’s really only one place around that’s open at this hour now that the bars are closed. 

The string of lights that illuminate the running path around Lake Merritt leave watery reflections on the still surface of the lake. You walk along it for a while, then peel off to go underneath a highway overpass and up the street past a bakery and a health food store and a shoe store until you see something that stops you in your tracks. 

Mary stands next to a guy, their animated goodbyes bathed in pink and blue neon light from the “Open 24 Hours” sign hanging in the window of a donut and coffee shop. You find this hard to believe, and don’t believe for a second, blinking your eyes hard and peering up the street to make sure you’re seeing something real. 

They embrace each other and Mary rubs her hand across his back two times, and then he sets off up the street in the opposite direction, heading into the hills behind the lake. Mary walks towards you, and then she stops too. 

“Adrian?” 

You’re still standing still. She comes closer, and the first thing you notice is that she’s wearing Allbirds. With a level of self-restraint you didn’t realize you had the power to summon, you decide to say nothing about this fact. 

“Adrian? Is that you?” 

“Yeah, hey Mary.” 

“Hey!” she says. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it.” 

“Yeah, me neither,” you say. 

“It’s been a while,” she says. “The last time I saw you...” She trails off, and you don’t need to ask why she stopped. “You getting a donut?” 

“Yeah, I was thinking about it,” you say. “Maybe some coffee too.” 

“Well they’ve got a few donuts left in there still, but not many.” 

“Okay,” you say. You look around a little bit, shift your weight from one foot to the other. “You bring all your dates here?” 

“Oh god,” she says. “You know, it’s just a donut place. Whether we used to come here or not, it’s just a donut place.” 

“Well, you know.” 

“No, I don’t know, and you know I don’t think like that.” 

“Unsentimental as ever,” you say. 

“Yep, that’s me,” she says, and then shakes her head and smiles at you. “Walk me home? It’s kind of late.” 

“Sure, let me get my donut.” 

Inside two old men are inexplicably playing chess. The overhead halogen lights are bright and bare all the grime and imperfections of the shop’s old interior, some of them flickering in the back hallway where the bathroom is. The donuts are lit by miniature versions of the same lights. You point at one of them, grab a Martinelli’s apple juice out of the drink cooler, pay, and return to the sidewalk. 

“How have you been?” you ask. 

“Great,” Mary says. “I mean, ups and downs but pretty good overall.” 

The two of you walk side by side back to the lake, along the north end back toward downtown. You hold your donut out to her. “Can you hold this for a second?” You pop the top off the Martinelli’s with your lighter, and take the donut back. “Still at Instagram?” you ask. 

“Still riding the bus,” she says. This is a reproach, and it makes you wince, makes you think of all the times she had to listen to you go on and on about those buses and how they were some sign of the times, harbingers of the techies coming in to take over your neighborhood that you took over from the black and brown people who lived there before you. The reproach reminds you you’re a self-righteous hypocrite, and you momentarily hate her for it, but it’s true and you know it. 

“Still riding the bus,” you repeat back to her. “How’s things otherwise?” 

You move to turn on 27th Street, but Mary stops you with a hand on your wrist. She points up Grand Avenue, toward downtown.

“I moved,” she says. “New apartment, new roommate.” 

“Oh thank god,” you say, turning to keep going up Grand Ave. “That’s got to be a relief.” 

“Yes,” she says, reticent as ever to say anything negative about someone else. “A relief is right.” 

You say it for her. “That girl was awful.” 

“Well,” she says, and leaves it at that. 

The sound of two pairs of footsteps are the only noise on the street. The streetlights flash red, functioning as stop signs at this hour, signaling only to the empty streets. You look over at Mary as her face slides into the orange glow of a streetlamp, and she looks stunningly gorgeous in the soft orange glow. You finish your apple juice and slide the bottle in your bag. 

“Ever miss me?” 

“Jesus, Adrian,” she says. “What kind of question is that? Is it not even remotely clear to you how typical of a question that is from an asshole like you?”

“Sorry,” you say. “Don’t know what else to say.” 

“Anything else,” she says, “but to answer your question, no, not anymore.” 

“That’s good I guess.” 

As she turns north on Broadway, you wonder vaguely where her new apartment is and have a bad feeling that you’re going to hate it, which makes you wonder when you started to hate everything so much. The image of the towering apartment building that rose out of the ruins of your favorite pizza joint comes to mind, but you push it down. No way. 

“It’s hard to miss someone when you get the space to finally realize they didn’t even want to date you in the first place.” 

“What?”

“That’s what I think, at least. Or the conclusion I’ve come to, even if you can’t admit it to yourself.” 

“That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“A lot of things don’t make sense,” she says. “Like the fact that we dated for almost two years and still had trouble calling me your girlfriend. Thinking back on it, I’m pretty sure every fight we ever had stemmed from the fact that you were ashamed to be dating someone who, gasp, worked in tech.” She stops talking, and stops walking at the same time. She turns to you, and says, “This is me.” 

You crane your neck to look up at the facade you’re standing in front of. No way, you think to yourself again. “Here?” you ask incredulously. 

She rolls her eyes. “Yes, here.” 

“You know this building right?” 

“How could I forget?” she yells. “I had to listen to you rail about how un-fucking-just it was that they were tearing down your precious fucking pizza place to build this building for six whole months, before I started ‘riding the bus,’ and you had some new high horse to jump on.” 

“I just—” 

“But you know what this building is? You know what it is? It’s a lot of fucking units right next to Bart so that people don’t have to move into your precious neighborhood and displace people like you fucking did.” 

“It’s not—” 

“No, I promise you it is like that, and the sooner you admit to yourself just how big of a hypocritical NIMBY asshole—” 

You draw back, shrinking away from the words. You drop to your knees and put your head in your hands. You don’t cry, but you want to. Who are you if you’re not who you think you are? No one. And that’s exactly how you feel. Like no one. 

Mary puts her hand on your back and rubs it back and forth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I don’t know, I’ve thought about saying that stuff to you for a long time and I, I just didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”

“It’s okay,” you say. “Go on upstairs to your new apartment. The white walls and mid-century furniture and fancy lamps.” You stand up. Your voice is rising in your throat. “Go ahead and be just like everyone else!” 

“Oh, Adrian,” she says. “

“Don’t even ‘Oh Adrian’ me,” you yell. “I wasted my time with you then, and I’m wasting it with you now. You’re just as bad as the rest of the assholes that are taking over. And you’re wearing fucking Allbirds! Allbirds!” 

“Sometimes a pair of shoes is just a pair of shoes,” Mary says. She shakes her head, turns to walk up the three stairs to the building’s door, punches in a code, and disappears inside without turning back. 

You stand there on the sidewalk. You know all of what she says is true, didn’t even need to hear her say it. They’re all thoughts you’ve had yourself. But you don’t have the courage to face them yet. What do you do when you realize you’re wrong, and you’ve been consumed so completely by what you thought was right that it’s become who you are, and now you don’t know who you are except the hate you hold inside you. How do you let go of it? 

You forgot your bike at the Ruby Room. You start walking south on Broadway, lost in your existential stew of emotions and thoughts, until a banging racket from an alleyway snaps your attention back to reality. You peer down the alley and see Jerry trying to wrench his cart free from a pallet that one of the wheel’s is stuck in, the night’s haul of recycling rattling around cacophonously in the cart. 

“Hey, Jerry,” you call, announcing yourself so as not to sneak up on him. He peers back toward the mouth of the alley and recognizes you.

“Hey Adrian,” he says. 

“Need a hand?” 

“Sure, thanks man.” 

You hold the pallet while Jerry yanks the cart side to side to get the wheel unstuck. You stand up and start yanking the pallet too, and when it comes loose you fall hard onto the ground. 

“Whoa there,” Jerry says. “Let me help you up.” He puts out a hand, and helps you to your feet. 

“Thanks,” you say. 

“No, thank you, man,” Jerry says. “Appreciate the help.” 

“Anytime,” you say. “See you around.” The two of you walk side by side to the mouth of the alley and are about to turn in opposite directions when you remember the apple juice bottle in your bag. “Wait, Jerry. One second.” You fish the bottle out and hand it to him. 

“Thanks man,” Jerry says. “You’re alright, you know that?” 

“No problem,” you say. “See you.” 

“See you around,” Jerry says, and pushes his cart off up the sidewalk. 

Maybe you are alright. Maybe you’re not an asshole. At least not through and through. All the superiority, all the self-righteousness, all the piousness of your homegrown religion of hate that you felt like you were ready to let go of comes coursing back through your body. You don’t fight it. 

WHEN YOU GET to the Ruby Room, the only thing left of your bike are the severed remains of the lock that secured it to the bike rack. The techies may be moving in, you think, but at least the thieves are still hanging tough.

Cover photo courtesy of