The Emperor of Shoes

by Spencer Wise

  I grabbed a seat at a window table and waved to Chao, the bartender. He was wearing a T-shirt, clearly homemade, that said in Magic Marker, Masturbation Is Not A Crime.

  Few minutes later Bernie came in wearing a ridiculous purple beret, jeans and sport coat.

  “Take that off,” I said after he slapped me on the back and scrubbed his hand over my hair.

  “Statement piece,” he said.

  He ordered two Tsingtaos from the waitress, and finished his in a few big gulps before I could take my cash out to pay.

  “One more,” he said. “Fucking hot out there.”

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  “Buddy, good to see you,” he said. The way he said buddy with that thick Boston accent reminded me of snow. Icicles. Those huge gnarled ones hanging from the eaves of his house that we’d break off with a rake and sword fight until someone got hurt.

  “How you been, Alex? You been quiet. It’s a girl, isn’t it?” Bernie wriggled his eyebrows. “Who’s your new pound pet?”

  “Bernie, you’re a pig.”

  “Sure, sure.” He lifted his head and threw his chin at the waitress. “Hey—fire? A lighter.” She shook her head. “Okay, go fuck yourself,” he said, under his breath. “Alex, am I the last person who smokes? I’m weak with them. Who’s the girl?”

  I hadn’t told anyone about Ivy, and that’d been burning me up, I badly wanted to, but I stopped myself. Not Bernie. Didn’t want his judgments, the little snarky asides—all adding up to the fact that I was just the same kid he grew up with and he damn sure wouldn’t let me forget it. I couldn’t escape so easy. A name was enough. Hell, you couldn’t escape that either.

  “Ivy,” I said. Left it there.

  “She one of these Swedish hospitality girls? They’re the best. What hotel you meet her?”

  “Nah. She’s Chinese. It’s more serious than that.”

  “Where she work?”

  “You going to visit her? What the fuck do you care where she works. She works.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll drop it. Jesus, what crawled up your ass and died?”

  I didn’t answer him. Those two worlds shouldn’t ever meet.

  “What is it, Bernie? Why’d you call me here? I know it wasn’t just to bullshit.”

  “What is it? I’ll tell you what it is, okay. I got a proposition for you.”

  “Scrapyarding copper pipes?” I said. “From your neighbor’s house, so we get grounded for six months?”

  “Al, that’s petty. You know not everyone’s ashamed of their past. So you never made your high school advisor proud. Big fucking deal. You rode your father for a few bucks. Who hasn’t? You didn’t get into Yale? Who cares? People with strong opinions at a young age about musical theater go to Yale. The rest of us have a few memories—a band, a girl, a catch. That’s it.”

  “That’s depressing—”

  “Unless we do something about it,” Bernie said, cutting me off. A glint in his eyes. A quiet smile. When I saw this look on his face, every bit of mischief came back. Like the time Rabbi Gelman gave us a hundred and fifty Munchkins to sell for tzedakah, to plant a tree in Jerusalem or some shit, and between bites Bernie kept saying, “The rabbi must be justly recompensed” until two very stoned nights later they were all gone and Bernie stumbled upon the bright idea of selling his sister’s Adderall to cover the losses. It worked. I couldn’t deny that.

  Here I was thinking about Bernie’s crazy side, and I had to remind myself that this guy actually knew what he was doing. He got Blakes’s sandals division to go from plastic hangers to cardboard for only a dime extra along with a campaign for sending a matching pair to needy kids with the slogan It Ain’t Small Change. And little things too. Going after independents. Making them put shoe trees in the store. Hammering them with point-of-purchase. Blakes basically gave him gas station flip-flops and he played them up with a few tricks and did a business.

  He was also one of the first guys to start marketing the factory itself when everyone else was trying to hide it. Bernie built a little showroom factory: air-conditioning, floors you’d eat off, workers in white lab coats and goggles—like it was Los Alamos with real science going on, and not the abattoir of the underaged. Bernie gave tours of the new, fake factory and buyers placed big orders and left happy. So I knew Bernie had the chops. Only sometimes I caught myself underestimating him, and I had to remember.

  “So what do you suggest we do about it? What’s this proposition?”

  “Business, Alex. A business opportunity. Aren’t you tired of making dumb Abelson’s shoes yet? Pulling your codpiece.” He swigged his beer. “I know I’m tired of the Blakes routine. I swear sometimes, I get this feeling, where I stop and think, Am I still here? On this fucking earth? You ever get that?”

  “Yeah, we’re in Foshan. That’s all I feel.”

  “I know you do, pal. Now look, I want to start a brand. A label. Me and you. As we always talked about. Back when we were cutting hearts out of scrap leather from Fedor’s factory to give to Emily Hirsch on Valentine’s. Did it work? Did we get laid? Definitely not, but our best ideas come from the girls we couldn’t screw in high school. The thought was there. To start something. A brand, Alex. Me and you. Call it ‘Bernard and Alex.’ No good? How about ‘Alex and Bernie?’ Better music. We start from a fresh clean sheet of white paper like we always said. I want our faces in Who’s Who of Footwear News. Mr. July. We don’t stop until we’re Mr. July. That’s why we need to do this, Al. The only sin in the West is not being famous.”

  “I’m good, Bernie. Really I am. The Neptune is the magic shoe. We did a million pairs last year. Five constructions. Can’t make them fast enough. And the Polar Blaze was a big seller.”

  I was lying to him. There was no more Polar Blaze. It was gone. Same with the Arcadia, the Skiff Aruba, the Salon Spirit.

  “No one likes a gloater, Alex. It’s bullshit anyway. You’re doing half what you did last year. Next year it’ll be a third. Abelson’s in the tank, you know it, can’t count on them. And Fedor—I love the man, but he’s too loyal. It’ll bite him in the ass one day. I got the next magic shoe. I’m throwing you a rope here.”

  “Give the idea to Blakes.”

  “I don’t want to give it to Blakes.”

  “Why? On track for national sales manager and you want to leave?”

  He rolled his eyes at that. “What’s ours? Ask yourself. I’m a slave to Blakes, you to Fedor. No offense. Or fuck it, take offense. If you get mad maybe you’ll do something. I want this to be ours. I’m talking big money. Much bigger than making cheap shit for private label. All the equity’s in brands. The big bucks are in the brand.”

  “I got a lot of shit going on.”

  “What’s a lot of shit?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Shit.”

  “Don’t with that. Hey, are we light-years apart? We’re brothers, you and me. Not just because we both made out with your cousin Polly. Sick fuck. Does she ask about me? Of course she does. Holy Christ, Cohen, there’s something in our blood. We want immortality. Every path’s too straight and simple. Don’t you have an ounce of aspiration left? A little of your father’s balls? Some chutzpah? Are you done groping? I’m not by a long shot.”

  He angled his head and stared at me.

  “Let me explain something,” he continued. “Before your dad got me in with Blakes, I was trying to get straight. Went to this AA meeting in the South End. Basement of that Church on Boylston. Big ass circle of strung-out people. One empty chair against the wall but it was under this poster, big block letters: Strive To Be Average. That was their fucking slogan. Can you believe it? I turned around and walked right out. No self-respecting Jew sits under that sign. Maybe you could, I don’t know.”

  I didn’t answer him.

  “See,” he said. “You’re no different than me. You aren�
�t happy where you are right now and you know it. So what now? Now we build our own temple. Otherwise what the fuck are we doing with our lives? Even you can see that with your own eyes, beady as they may be. Let’s go to war together, Cohen.”

  He was right about one thing. I didn’t want to mess around with private label anymore. It was just giving our ideas away. Plus the designs themselves were old. Esme said it herself on the phone when she made the last cuts. The looks were stale. I couldn’t bring myself to repeat that to Dad. Would’ve hurt him too bad.

  Bernie snapped his fingers.

  “Earth to Alex. You in there? What’s up? I can’t understand if you don’t talk.”

  “Nothing. I was thinking about Dad. Other night, in the hotel, his room. He tried to clear this hellacious fart he’d let off by opening the window, but it only opened like an inch or two and he got pissed. Yelling that he couldn’t remember the last time he lived in a place where the window opened. Imagine that. His whole life—sealed windows, artificial lights, wake-up calls from some desk clerk. Every morning woken up by someone you’ve never met before.”

  Bernie was staring at me with this puzzled expression on his face. Then he leaned in.

  “So do you want to end up like that? No. Of course not. Here’s your way out. What I’m saying. This brand hits and you buy any kind of window you want, yeah?”

  I expected him to keep going but he stopped short. He bent at the waist and untied his Chuck Taylor and slammed it down on the table.

  “This fucking shoe. Costs ten dollars to make and they do a killing every year. One idea wins. No five-year cycles. Timeless. Hasn’t changed in a hundred years.”

  I picked it up and turned it over in my hand. An old Converse. Canvas. Vulcanized. So simple. A twist on the oxford. Amazing to think that in seven thousand years we’d only come up with seven styles: moccasin, boot, pump, oxford, sandal, clog and mule. Only seven.

  The rubber was ground down to the insole. Bernie had a heel-strike gait.

  Had these forever. Relics. It made my palm warm like it was alive, throwing heat. Some objects had power. Meaning. Ivy’s fake house in her village. Just cheap wood and weird wallpaper. But it was hers. It was her.

  “Okay, Bern,” I said. “I’m listening.”

  “So I keep asking myself, what’s the next big thing? What’s the next Neptune? Something we can ride ten, fifteen years. Something different. Okay, you listening? One word—woven. Woven uppers on a comfort bottom. Leather.”

  I laughed. “We’ll go broke. If we use leather. Prices would be crazy.”

  “Al,” he said, “where’s your father’s audacity?”

  Still a hint of his Boston accent, but he never lost the Yiddish cadence, like he was tasting the words on the back of his soft palate. Don’t talk poor like grandma! You were supposed to slide your words to the front, fire them off the tongue and lower teeth. The back was for losers. It’s good to be out in front. We had to be winners, even in the game of phonetics. That was a lot of fucking pressure.

  Bernie’s hoarse voice: “Fine, fuck it. Use polyurethane.”

  “Won’t stretch. You don’t know shit about making shoes, Bernie. Who’s your customer? Start there.”

  “Schoolteacher. Forty-to sixty-year-old woman. Urban. Works on her feet. Remember those slip-ons our grandmothers used to wear?”

  “The 4 Give?” I said. “They still make them.”

  “Yeah the Aerosoles. The old farts couldn’t get enough. My grandmother had them in every color. Those were leather or nubuck.”

  “With elastic straps,” I said softly, and then this burst goes off in my head like a white klieg light. “You’re a genius, Bernie.”

  “I am?”

  “Every last makes a slightly different shoe. Right? That’s the whole problem. Same shoe, same size, different fit. Feet are different. Your ten and my ten are different. So what if we go with elastic gore? Yeah? All woven upper. It’ll stretch and contour to the foot.”

  “I’m lost,” he said.

  “What we’re talking about is the first shoe with a 100 percent fit. Every time. It won’t matter if our lasts are a little off. It’s always comfortable. The elastic gore conforms. And a woman could hide the things she wanted to hide. Bunions. Hammertoe.” I was flexing the Chuck Taylor in my hand. Stiff as a board. “We don’t want to mess with rubber. EVA bottoms—lightweight, flexible.”

  “So you’re in?”

  “Well, I’m just talking,” I said. “Sounds good in my head but any schmuck can have an idea. Doesn’t mean it belongs on an assembly line.”

  “Hey, listen,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Knock it off with that crap. We’re not just talking. A whole shoe you just dreamed up on the spot. Not everyone can do that. Stop selling yourself short.”

  “The timing isn’t great,” I said, turning my face toward the window.

  “Why? Because the girl?” he asked. “Ivy. You make your own timing, Alex.”

  Two young Chinese women were playing badminton on the sidewalk using their bikes as a net. Both in sleeveless white dresses, their shadows thrown high up on the gray brick wall behind them.

  Bernie grabbed his shoe off the table and started screwing it back on his foot, shaking the table, his beer sloshed over the rim of the pint glass and he wiped the puddle off with his hand onto the floor. He sighed.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Why isn’t there a Ralph Lauren of China?”

  “Chinese won’t buy shit that isn’t Western.”

  “Not at this point,” Bernie said. “You can’t sell them some bullshit local brand. Information gets around the globe instantly. They want Western. They want Gucci. Steve Madden. Gimme, gimme. But what about five years from now? You’re already seeing a few global China brands. Alibaba. Xiaomi. Not many. Not yet. The world doesn’t trust them yet. Doesn’t think the Chinese have the ideas.”

  “But they do.”

  “Of course they fucking do. I know that. You know that.”

  “So we’re the bridge,” I said. “That’s how we position ourselves? A kind of Chinese brand.”

  “Right,” he said. “The middle step. We ain’t Chinese, but we ain’t American. We live here, from there. In-betweeners.”

  I turned my head to the window. There was a blur of a delivery truck battering the road outside, making my teeth rattle, and the badminton girls were sliced off for a second.

  “Okay, look,” he said, “You know what? Bernie’s a stupid fucking name. Let’s call it—‘Alex & Ivy.’ How about that? You said yourself it’s serious.”

  Bracketing his hands, he stretched the name out like he was writing it up on a marquee and repeated the name slow.

  “Got a ring,” I said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “A and I are nice vowels. People respond to long vowels. We run APIs for this sort of shit, believe it or not. People like long fucking vowels. Alex and Ivy. There it is.”

  He plucked a smoke from the pack of King’s nested inside his sport coat and tapped it against the table.

  But I liked that name. I really did. I could see the initials stamped on the outsole. Molded there forever. And not just the name, I liked the whole concept. I was almost sorry for how much I loved it.

  Bernie was right. Why wasn’t there a Ralph Lauren of China? Why couldn’t it be me? The stars weren’t aligned, my chi was off, aliens hadn’t spelled it out in a cornfield. Always an excuse. But I could. Ten minutes ago I didn’t even know I had this shoe in me.

  “I sell, you make,” said Bernie.

  No denying it, Bernie had a genius for marketing. Something I wasn’t so good at. He’d started a footwear-business newsletter on the North Shore while everyone else sat in the dark with their thumbs up their ass. Now he was doing it for Blakes. Campaigns. Facebook, Twitter—all that shit he knew well.

  “You sell,
I make,” I repeated. “At my factory?”

  “Where else? Of course your factory. Owning the factory—that’s our whole competitive edge. Our best chance is to sell it wholesale to the indies and box stores at a lower price than our competitors.”

  “Right,” I said. “Then the stores can sell it at a lower retail price point and generate more sales.”

  We stared at each other. Neither of us saying a word. He set his elbow on the table, forearm up, wriggling his fingers like he wanted to arm wrestle. Leaning forward. His fingers, this silence, kept stretching.

  In a low voice he said, “You know what that means, don’t you?”

  “I know what it means.”

  “Why aren’t you saying it?”

  “I’ll say it. We can’t make any money on this at first.”

  “How long?” he asked.

  “A year. Maybe two years. We got to take bubkes on this if we’re going for branded.”

  “You see a way around this?” Bernie asked.

  “Not at first,” I said. “On a new brand? Why should they buy our cockamamy brand over an established one? We got to tell them clear and simple, ‘Look at the value I can sell you at because we own the factory.’ Make it as attractive as possible. The other guys make it for forty-five dollars, we can do forty dollars. You see? If we don’t lower our price, no one will take a shot on us.”

  “But we could take a profit, Al. The safe play you know is doing it private label—”

  I straightened up. That was Dad’s model. “You know we can’t do that,” I said.

  If I was putting my name on this, I wanted it to count for something. So if we had to take a loss now to make a profit later, fine. An investment. That was how you became Ralph Lauren of China. Not by pushing more cheap private label shit out the door.