The thing about Chuck Taylor's is that they were originally introduced in 1917. They were designed for the growing basketball market at the time and were just called All-Stars, until they caught the attention of the Highschool Basketball Superstar of the day, Charles Hollis Taylor. After suggesting some design changes, Taylor signed the shoe and it was a hit throughout the twenties and thirties.
Then it fell out of favor. Until Rock-a-billy came around in the fifties and the greasers took it up. Ever after that, The Chuck Taylor All Stars would be associated with a kind of underground identity.
Rock-a-billy became Punk Rock in the seventies. Then it was all about Joey Ramone up at the front of the stage, the toe of his black sneakers hanging off the front, shouting "Blitzkrieg Bop" so loud that even the underage kids that couldn't get into CBGBs and were relegated to smoking out front, even they could here the lyric. All of them wearing the same black Chucks that Joey was. Then it was the eighties and the skaters were all about the Vans and the Hip-Hop kids had their Nikes. You'd see All-Stars every once in a while, usually on the underdog getting the crap kicked out of him by the jock in a John Hughes movies.
And that was why they were special. They were always an identity thing. You'd see them on John Cryer in Pretty In Pink, and you knew, he was one of yours. It was important, the way that those signifiers are always important, especially when you're young and out of place in school, in your family, in your own body. They were a way of grounding yourself. And what is more appropriate than shoes for that job? You knew something had happened when you saw Kurt Cobain wearing them in heavy rotation on MTV. You knew the wheel of fortune, the cosmic wheel of fortune, not Pat Sajak's, had turned and you and your kind, all you outcast kids, were now on the high side. You were kings and queens of the media driven, pop culture world. At least for a little while, that wheel does turn fast. But in the meantime, in that moment, you were standing on top of the world and you were standing in your Chuck Taylor All-Stars.
Then it was just a competition with all of the other newly minted cool kids for colors and styles. Zelda was a genius. She had taken her unbleached whites out to the alley and applied a coat of lightening yellow paint so electric that when you looked at them, you tasted Ozone.
Or maybe Louis tasted Ozone because of the Mescaline. Where did Dana even get Mescaline?
Where did she get Zelda's sneakers? Her Day Glo, teeth grinding Yellow Chuck's. He had seen them. Where? Outside, on a telephone wire. Which means something, sneakers on a wire, that has some significance in street symbolism that he used to know, but now can't place. Did it mean the one time wearer is dead?
Someone head threatened him with death. Who and where...it was recent, someone giving him the slashing motion across the throat, the one truly universal gesture. When he saw the sneakers. That was it. He had seen them on the wire and tried to knock them down and hit a limo with a brick. Mescaline makes things fuzzy, but it occurred to Louis that Michael Bloomberg had threatened him from a stretch limo.
It is hard to hold on to things, hard to remember why you are lying on a floor. Easy to focus on basketball shoes so bright and familiar as Zelda's Chuck's. Now on Dana.
It is a little known fact that there had been a tennis version. They were called Jack Purcell's after a Canadian Badminton player. No shit, Badminton. They had one fatal flaw, at least in the original design, which was when you got them wet, they smelled like death.
Death. Shoes on a wire means death. Shoes on a girl means...what? Shoes on a girl, padding slowly towards you wearing only a slightly oversized T-Shirt and maybe nothing else. What does that mean on the street? Maybe Bloomberg knows. He must have his ear to the ground.
Then Dana is pushing Louis over on his back. She straddles his belly. His shirt has ridden up and he can feel her pubic hair, under her shirt, tickling his exposed navel. She doesn't shave. At least, not completely. She is leaning close and talking. She is showing him something. It is a Star of David. Yellow. A tamer shade of yellow. An ominous shade of yellow. As if you could take a color, burn it, rub it is ash, and leave it to the dry wind.
Dana says, "These were made in China. Along with the ones that Zelda and her friends put in the Holocaust Museum. The originals are gone and now Zelda is looking to absolve herself. She thinks that she can cleanse her soul in some Vikram Yoga studio down an alley in God knows what part of town. Not Park Slope, that's for sure."
Louis is virtually certain he should know what that collection of syllables is supposed to mean. But Dana's pubic hair, and her drugs, are making things hard to sort through.
Pubic hair.
Chinese factory workers making fake Holocaust relics. With probably no more thought than they give making sneakers. That is the work order. Star of David badge of death. Sneakers. But only in the standard catalogue colors. You want some crazy shade of yellow, you gotta do that yourself, Whitey.
Pubic hair.
Meaning.
Meaning is so hard to figure out. But it seems so important.
Sneakers on a wire.
Dana takes off the shirt. And now she is just wearing the Chuck Taylor's. Zelda's Chuck Taylor's. Chuck Taylor All Stars, which are always about identity, especially when you hand paint yours a color that can be seen from space. Or from China. Always about identity. If Dana puts on Zelda's All-Stars does she assume Zelda's identity, Does she become Zelda? Is Louis's arousal incestuous when Dana is wearing Zelda's Chuck's, when she is Zelda? Is that what all of this means? And does it mean that if Dana never takes the sneakers off, if she is always Zelda, does it mean that Louis has found her and now he can stop, now he can sleep, now he can stop trying to figure out what all of it means?
Sneakers on a wire.
Or. Maybe, he is wrong.
Maybe, sneakers on a wire...
Maybe, it just means you've lost your shoes.
