High Heels

High Heels

            I’m sitting on the carpet, a sort of pre-historic berber installed in all cheapo San Fernando Valley houses in the late 1950s, built by a company called Alden and they all look exactly alike.  I’m watching my mother put on her makeup.  Though she doesn’t do anything but stay at home and take care of kids, she still performs this ritual daily just in case somebody comes over to judge her fitness as an early 60’s suburban housewife.  To my child’s mind makeup a complete waste of time, but another part of me knows that at the age of 4, 5 or whatever I am, I don’t know shit and I’m not going to stay this way forever.  Someday I’m going to have to be a grown up lady and do all kinds of ladylike things that don’t currently make sense to me.  One of these things is painting my face with loads of glop, cursing my lack of eyebrows, rummaging furiously through bathroom drawers, and having spikey curlers all over my head.

            To my left the linen closet is open and on the inside of the door hangs a full length compartmented pouch filled with shoes.  I have previously noted that for some reason, while boys and men have a pair or two of shoes, women, even penniless women like my mother, have dozens of them.  They come in all colors—some are shiny, some not; the shiny kind are called patent leather, though back in those days and up until just now when I’m thinking about it, I would think of them as “patton leather.”  Patton, like the general.  The point is, kids draw conclusions from the limited information they have, filling in the blanks with Captain Crunch crushed into the linoleum of the kitchen floor, bats, aqua-marine  colored crayons and Etch a Sketches.  As my little kid confused eyeballs wander back and forth from my mother and the pouches of shoes hanging from the inside of the linen closet door, I am, of a sudden, visited by a horror.   Someday I’m going to have to wear shoes like that.

            Technically, I’m not allowed to touch those shoes.  My mother is not the kind who enjoys her girls playing dress up with her stuff, primarily because most of the decent stuff she’s got was bought before she got married to a guy who as yet hasn’t been able to find a steady job, and had four kids.  She already has to give up too much these days for the sake of the mouths she must feed.  It’s the same principle throughout the natural world.  A mother bird with a nest full of gaping yellow beaks is not going to get to eat any worms herself and has to rely on fond memories of all the wonderful worms she got to enjoy before she got herself into this ridiculous predicament.  But I’ve just got to get ahold of one of those shoes and examine it for the simple reason that there must be something going on that I’m missing, because as far as I can tell, all these shoes are shaped exactly the opposite of the human foot.  Instead of being wide at the front, they’re pointy, and the heels?  The heels are all spikes and clumps or impossibly high platform type things that look like they’d make walking almost impossible.  I scooch my fanny over-- only see half of my mother now—and as I pull one of those shoes from its pouch, my worst nightmare is realized.  This shiny black leather thing looks like nothing less than a torture device.  If you tried to wear it, it would slide your foot down a hill, scrunch all your toes together and if you attempted to run you’d fall flat on your face and break your neck.  Shit!  Life would be almost as boring as what I’ve learned in church about all the dead people sitting at the right hand of God on clouds day and night and doing absolutely nothing.  Why is it that everything grownups do is so mindbogglingly boring?

            Have you ever noticed that grownups hardly ever run, not for fun anyway.  Oh, they may get up in the morning and after waiting a sufficient amount of time for their disgusting kale, carrot, flax seed oil, banana and more kale smoothie to digest, throw on their running shoes and go pound the pavement for 45 minutes so they won’t get fat and have a heart attack, but they rarely do it for fun.  While walking my dog at the park yesterday, I watched a couple of girls maybe 9 and 10 years old with their little dogs on leashes, burst into sprints any old which way whenever the mood struck them.  The joy of their motion, their little dogs’ tails and ears perked up delighting in the game, was unlike anything I see in adults, especially in my age group.  I can’t remember the last time I broke into a run for any reason.  Oh, wait, there was that one time.  It had something to do with sufficient amounts of alcohol at the USC faculty club and a rare getting-away-with telling reality to go fuck itself.  I ran from the college to the house in South L.A. where I was living, which takes about 15 minutes, and for just that time I felt 25 instead of 55.

The Physical Effects of Wearing High Heels

            According to a bunch of podiatrists on the Internet, (my research methods are exhaustive, consisting mainly of typing the question, “what are the effects of wearing high heels?” into the Google search engine), the habitual wearing of high heels are a nightmare for a human body.  Feet are the platform on which the “corpus woman-us” is built, and the wearing of high heels shifts the weight carried by this platform onto the balls of the feet.  This thrusts the knees and hips forward, requiring the spine to hyperextend backward to maintain balance, sticking the wearers’ butt out a little, which is why it is generally accepted that these shoes make a woman look sexier.  Scientists call this the “red-butted baboon presentation principal.”  This principle makes the male of the species eyes bulge out while it jumps up and down screaming and ordering another round beers for its bros and a sloe gin fizz for that little lady at the end of the bar, even though she’s had a hell of a day at work, is drinking Jameson’s neat, and wishes said male would drop dead, the sooner the better.  If that’s not enough, then comes a load of foot problems like hammertoe (don’t know what it is but it sounds awful), bunions, ingrown toenails, neuromas (a painful crushing of the nerve between the compressed joints at the front of the foot, and shortened Achilles’s tendon, which makes walking more difficult.  Then comes osteoarthritis in the knees, hips, neck, and lower back pain caused by chronic stress on the vertebrae.  This is all so the manarchy might notice your legs and sticky-outy butt.

            But there’s another, more sinister aspect to high heels that even I, as a pre-schooler, could figure out.  I’ve never heard grown women talk about it but we all know it’s there and it passes through our minds like a moth banging against a lightbulb every time we put the damn things on.  You cannot run in high heels.  It simply cannot be done, and if you’re forced to flee something or someone, you’ve got two choices.  Either kick them off or get caught.  Kicking them off is not much of an alternative.  Try running through streets covered in asphalt, cement debris, broken glass, and potholes or even a countryscape of grass, sticks, rocks and varying terrain.  How far are you going to make it before you trip or suffer a disabling injury?  Human beings wear shoes to protect their feet, always have always will, and because of this possess feet wholly unable to resist both man-made and natural obstacles.  They get cut, bruised, broken and damaged beyond usability in a shockingly short period of time.  In trading the usefulness of shoes for the demands of a fashion sensibility crafted by the manarchy, we give up a shocking degree of safety.    I wonder how many violent sexual assaults come down to the fact that the victim simply could not get away.

            Back when I was a kid, relatives used to come stay with us quite often.  There were a few reasons, not the least of which was that my parents had made it to the promised land.  It sounds ridiculous now to refer to Los Angeles, let alone the San Fernando Valley as “the promised land,” so choked with cars and half crazed residents paying half their income just for rent or the mortgage, but that’s what it was back in the day.  It had to be because for malcontents, crooks, queers, creative types and weirdos of all ilks stuck in backwaters of Tennessee or Missouri, tarred and feathered in tradition and boneheaded habitual behavior, the West Coast was as far as you could run to.  People rushed to Los Angeles and vicinity not just to be movie stars, though that was a big thing, but because they wanted to get away from whatever was driving them mad back home.  It’s why even today, God love it, the west coast is full of weirdos so tightly packed they’re literally falling into the sea.  One of the people who used to come visit us was Cousin Ruth.  Nobody was sure whose cousin she was, but she was from Missouri (pronounced “Missoura”) chain smoked Kool cigarettes, had a raspy voice and hairy face-- I recall petting it.  It was very soft.  Anyway, the day of my realization about women’s shoes I ran to her crying, told her I never, ever, wanted to wear those things, and was I going to have to when I grew up?  Was I?  Huh?  Wasn’t there any way I could get out of it?  If there wasn’t I never wanted to grow up, not ever.  She took a drag off her Kool, exhaled slowly while she was thinking and as I stared down at her feet, bulging out the tops of a pair of pumps which actually has quite sensible heels, she told me we were lucky because it was way worse in China.  In China, they wrapped little girls’ feet up in tight bandages to stunt their growth so that when they were adults they just had to stump around while everybody else did stuff for them.  I pictured these delicate and hobbled Chinese girls in their silky robes and chopsticks in their raven black hair, trying to serve tea but spilling it every time because they fell off their mangled feet.

            Somehow, it was small consolation.