by Julia Kent
My legs began to move of their own accord, willed forward just as a rough hand whacked the back of my head, hard. A familiar scent filled my nostrils.
“What in the everloving fuck do you think you’re doing, Trevor?” Darla shouted.
She came to comfort me, I see.
I ignored her and kept walking.
“Silent treatment? That’s it? You’re gonna give me the fucking silent treatment? Oh, ho, no sir. No way, Ass. You ain’t going silent on me. I’ll pin you to the ground and give you a blow job right here in front of this check cashing store to make you groan if that’s how I get a sound out of you, you motherfucking idiot.”
We’d walked past a bus stop loaded with people waiting. They all gaped.
“If he don’t say yes, I’ll take that blow job,” someone called out.
Darla gave the crowd the finger and huffed to keep up with me. She reached for my arm. I kept going.
She went deadweight.
I’m a strong guy. But dragging a full-figured woman with the stubbornness of a dead donkey is beyond my feats of strength. I pulled her about ten feet before I stopped.
I shook my arm. She wouldn’t let go.
I started nudging her with the toe of my shoe.
“You’re kicking me?” she screamed, head down and muffled by all that hair. The crowd stirred, a few guys stepping forward and peering.
“You hurting her?” one of them asked in a menacing voice.
“Let go of me!” I hissed. “Stand up!” I didn’t feel like getting the shit kicked out of me by a bunch of guys on their way to work construction at a high riser. The hard hats outweighed the briefcases in this crowd.
“Not until you see reason.”
“I’m being reasonable,” I shouted. “You’re the one who’s hanging on me like a cornerback trying to tackle Rob Gronkowski.”
“And you both have deflated balls, so that’s a good analogy.”
The crowd turned on her, the guys stepping back. I heard someone mutter, “bitch.” The best way to get a group of Bostonians not to come to your aid is to bust their deflated balls.
Bending down, I got my mouth right up against her ear. She smelled different. Like sweat and fear, a metallic scent that had a tang I couldn’t quite place. “Get up.”
“Make me.”
“No.”
“Then you’re stuck here.”
“Fuck off, Darla.”
“That doesn’t work with me.”
Even I knew her fingers had to give out eventually. So I waited. People walked by, curious about the tall blonde dude with a woman lying on the ground, arms wrapped around his forearm, but no one said a word.
It only took a minute. Her hands began to ache, I imagined, and she loosened them. I shook her off and stormed away.
“Hey!” she scrambled to stand. “Get back here. We’re not done talking.”
“Yes, we are.”
“No, we’re not. See? I got you to break your silent treatment.”
I spun around. “You’re not making me sign that contract.”
She sighed, shoulders slumping. “That’s not why I’m here.”
I snorted. “Sure.”
“It’s not. Really. I just want to talk.”
“You want to convince.”
“I want to be here.”
That made me slowly stop, the pain of blind chaos too much. “I can’t.”
“I know.”
“Not yet.”
“I can see that. But honey, I can’t be here for you if you keep walking away. And I can’t listen if you don’t open your mouth and say words that help me to understand.”
I sighed. She caught up to me. I wouldn’t look at her. She looked at me.
“This is just like the time old Doc Oglethorpe back home got his cock stuck in the pastor’s wife’s shoe.”
Huh?
That made me turn and look at her. The neon lights made her hair glow, her face drawn in concentration, lines grooved into her skin from worry and angst. I put those lines there. Me.
“My not wanting to sign the contract is like a man fucking a shoe?”
“Yes.”
“Explain.”
“Old Doc Oglethorpe has this fetish thing for women’s shoes. When the internet came around to Peters, he started going online and finding pictures of other men who search for the perfect penis shoe.”
“Penis shoe?”
“Penis shoe.” She had the exact same affect as my human rights law professor might say the words “inadequate sanitation”. It was like she was giving a lecture on UN policy. “And so he went to church one day and found a pair of Pastor Johns’s wife’s shoes in the man’s office.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. Dare I ask? “Why were her shoes in the pastor’s office?”
Darla held up one finger. “Just wait. I’ll get to that.”
“I’m waiting with bated breath.”
She gave me a sour look. “And so old Doc Oglethorpe got himself the shoe, which was a strappy little thing with lots of laces, and he went home and got naked as a jaybird.”
I’ve never seen a naked jaybird, but Darla talks about them a lot.
“And he put his cock in there, just so. Settled it in, making it look all pretty like a Martha Stewart centerpiece on a table at Christmastime.”
“And?”
“And then he watched his erection balloon up and get all nice and big, and he thought it would be a good idea to take some pictures with his new camera, back when you still had to develop film. A long time ago. The ’90s.”
“Where is this going?”
The finger. I got the finger again. Not the middle one, though.
“He took these pictures. No video, mercifully. And then he did whatever men with penis shoe fetishes do, and went on with his life.” She gave me a smug satisfied look.
“That’s it?” I asked, incredulous. “That story is exactly like me not wanting to quit Harvard Law and sign a concert tour contract? What the fuck, Darla? That’s nothing like this! Your analogies are getting worse and worse.”
“Let me finish.”
“There’s more?”
“Here’s the thing: Old Doc had spent his entire life wanting to fuck shoes. It’s all he thought about when he was a teen. It consumed him. He got married and had sex and had babies and all that, but the scent of a woman’s fine sole against the soft leather insert of her shoe mingled together to create an aphrodisiac.”
She had this weird, slightly hypnotic look on her face.
“And then he did it all in secret. That man fucked his own wife’s shoes in their tiny little bedroom closet in the dark, his suit jackets and her party dresses all shimmering up against his naked, sweaty back all those years.”
I was afraid to say a word.
“But that wasn’t enough.”
I jolted. “Huh?”
“After a coupla decades, he needed more.”
How did she know this?
“He started needing other women’s shoes. Now, Peters ain’t no metropolitan city like Boston.”
“That’s an understatement.”
She glared at me. “You wanna hear the story or you wanna be a smartass?”
I sighed. Damn her. I actually wanted to hear the fucking story.
I gave her a look that managed to be half encouraging, half smartass.
“We didn’t have all these thrift stores and vintage clothing stores like you have in Boston and Cambridge until fairly recently in and near Peters. Shit, if Old Doc’d had those back then, I wouldn’t be telling this story and the pastor wouldn’a done a stint in the drunk tank for trying to strangle the poor doc.”
She made a scrunched up face. “And Old Doc would still have his foreskin.”
I curled into myself a little at that. I didn’t have one, either, and I had no memory of its removal, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t involve ladies’ footwear.
“Old Doc wouldn’t just go out into the world and get what h
e needed. His restricted little world of his wife’s shoes—and that woman was nice, but only wore maybe five pairs of shoes—needed to be expanded. No thrift shops, so he resorted to stealing.”
“Why didn’t he buy them on eBay?” Trevor asked.
“Wasn’t no eBay back then. And did you know you can sell used panties on Craigslist for a lot of money?” she added in a non sequitur. “And breast milk.”
“I’ll keep that in mind if the band doesn’t work out and my law career falls through.”
She whapped me.
“So Old Doc,” she continued, “started stealing the shoes of the wives of his friends.”
“How am I like a shoe stealer?”
She held up her palm. Now it was the palm. “I’m getting to that part.”
I started to get cold. “Hurry it up.”
“I’ll let you get back to your self-righteous outrage in just a second, Trevor Connor. I got me a fetish story to tell.”
I started to walk away, even though I really did want to hear the rest of Old Doc’s story. Darla rushed to catch up to me.
“Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. We got to a favorite coffeehouse and I held the door open for her. She was shaking, too. April in Boston was a fickle beast. Could have been seventy, could have been thirty degrees. Tonight it was on the colder side.
We ordered our respective coffees, mine a triple Americano and hers a macchiato, and found a tiny two-person table crammed in the front of the store, right up against the cold window.
“Continue,” I said as I took a sip. She gave me a lopsided grin.
“He started off by stealing one of the nurse’s shoes at his practice. She had a spare there in the winter when she’d wear her boots. But the boring white nurse shoes were too sterile. Made him feel all shame-filled and like he was doing something wrong.”
“I wonder why.”
“Smartass or story?”
I didn’t answer. Just gave her a hard look.
“Then, he realized it was high heels that got him off. He waited until his wife had Bridge Club night. Doc Oglethorpe and his family were some of the richest in town, on account of his being a doctor and all. Those wives all did bridge and the men did poker. But the men met at Jerry’s Bar, in one of the back rooms, so he couldn’t steal a pair of ladies shoes then.”
She took an infuriatingly long sip of her drink before continuing.
“He appeared about halfway through the bridge games and begged everyone’s pardon. Pulled his wife aside and made up something. A reason you find your wife. Then he pretended he needed to use the bathroom, snuck in and stole a pair of the hostess’s high heels.”
“Jesus,” I muttered. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Darla shrugged. “No one guessed it was him. The lady just thought she misplaced them, I guess. And Old Doc humped those shoes like nobody’s business.” She sat back with a smile.
“What the fuck does that have to do with me?” I asked.
“It wasn’t enough, secretly shoe fucking. He needed more. It was too constraining. He kept stealing more and more shoes, hiding them in a secret stash eventually. He couldn’t return them, you see. And then one day he stole the pastor’s wife’s high heels from the church office. She’d come to church to do some yard work, changed into sneakers, and left them.”
I grunted. What else are you supposed to say to a story like this?
“Old Doc was so jazzed he couldn’t help himself. He went too far. He took the shoes and went and hid in the craft supply closet at the church right then and there. When he fucked a shoe, he did it like he was making love. Long and slow, like a seduction. Not up hard against a wall in an alley where you just want a quickie.”
God help me, I was getting hard.
“Hold on. Back up. Let me understand this,” I said, needing a break from the relentless onslaught of her layered story. “He actually put his limp penis into the straps of a high heel shoe and fucked it?”
“Yes.” Someone at the table next to us shifted meaningfully. I was not about to turn around and make eye contact.
“And he stripped completely naked to do this?”
“Sure. Because that’s what you do when you have soul-crushing sex with the person—or persons—you love most, right?”
The person behind me began whispering to someone else.
“He objectified a woman’s high heel shoe—”
“Nuh uh. He loved that shoe. That shoe became this object of lust and desire, just like a human being. To him, in that moment, the shoe became his wife. The sole of the shoe was her vagina. The shoe was transformed into a sexual partner.”
The scrape of chairs behind me told me more people were listening.
“Is this some grad school project?” someone muttered to a friend.
“And that’s why he stripped naked when he humped the shoe?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t he just take it home?”
“You ever loved and lusted after someone so much you couldn’t bear the thought of being separate from their skin for even one more second? Had to have that person instantaneously with all your sole, with every cell of your body, the impulse control shot because you became a singular pulse of need?”
Oh, I was definitely hard now.
“Yeah,” I choked. You. Right now.
People behind me began to breathe a little quicker.
“That’s how Old Doc felt. He got into that craft closet and squeezed in between the boxes of Christmas decorations. Stripped down to his birthday suit. Pulled out the sleek, black pump with modest heels—this was the pastor’s wife, after all, so we weren’t talking about come-fuck-me pumps, though they sure were for old Oglethorpe,” she snorted. “He starts by licking the shoe—”
“Excuse me?”
She smirked. “That’s right. Shoes don’t have lips. Gotta first lick them.”
“Why?”
“You start having sex with a kiss and a lick, right?”
I shut up.
“And then he gets into the preliminaries, settling his limp self right in, and starts up. Gets nice and hard, the shoe all sweet and a little lubed up by his pre-cum.”
Someone behind me stifled a groan.
“And then BAM! The closet door flies open, and there’s the pastor’s wife, the sexton, and the pastor, all wearing yard clothes and come to look for the spring festival signs to put out on the church lawn.”
A collective gasp arose from behind me. I gasped, too, heart pounding, cock throbbing in my pants.
“Oglethorpe froze. The sexton turned away and started laughing, practically sprinting out the door. The pastor’s wife and the pastor stood there, all agog, because that’s what you do when you find the doctor who delivered your babies, tended to your strep throat, gave you a vasectomy and gives you annual pap smears, right? You stand there with your bottom jaw on the floor and your eyes widening as you take in the sight.”
“Mrs. Johns—that’s the pastor’s wife—screams, ‘That’s my nice shoe!’ and snatches it out of Oglethorpe’s hands. Except the problem was those little straps.”
“Straps?”
“She’d gotten a little fancy and bought those Mary Janes high heels. The ones with the strap across the top of the foot.”
I cringed. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. Old Doc’s cock had swollen up so much it was really in that shoe, and when Mrs. Johns tried to take it away his penis was trapped. So she pulled on the shoe, which yanked his root, which made him come tumbling out attached, and his nakedness stumbled and fell on her, pinning her to the ground.”
“Oh, shit!” I shouted. Several heads turned.
“Right. Pastor Johns started pulling on Old Doc’s naked body and screaming, ‘You can’t defile my wife,’ and meanwhile, Old Doc is mortified, naked, and has his manroot caught in a shoe strap, attached to a shoe the pastor’s wife is yanking on.”
She paused and took a long, dramatic drink of her coffee. And smirked.
“What happened?” I asked, exasperated she’d stop there.
She looked pointedly behind me. I heard people move with the swiftness of someone caught staring.
“So,” she said, lowering her voice, “the pastor grabbed the first thing he could find in that closet and started beating Old Doc with it.”
Her eyes widened but she went silent.
“What was it?”
“The baby Jesus.”
Someone behind me started choking.
“The baby what?”
“The baby Jesus. Remember how this was the closet with lotsa stuff and Christmas decorations in it? Old Doc had picked him a place where the nativity scene was stored. Pastor Johns starts whapping old naked Doc Oglethorpe all over with the Lord to get him to stop being lewd with his poor, trapped wife. Who, at that point, was screaming, ‘I got these on sale at Halle’s and you ruined them.’”
Darla shrugged and tipped her cup up.
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the story?”
“No. There’s more.”
“Then why’d you stop again?”
She held up her empty coffee cup and shook it slightly. I rolled my eyes, grabbed it, and got to the coffee counter to order two more.
“Are you a writer?” I heard someone say, then turned to look. The people behind me consisted of three guys and a woman a little younger than us. One guy was wearing a skirt. The other two wore jeans and had long, lumberjack beards that were just scraggly enough to be their first time growing a beard.
“No,” Darla said. “I’m just from Ohio.”
One of them nodded sagely, as if that explained anything.
“Do you think that Old Doc’s unconventional sexuality has a core theme of transcendence?” the woman asked. She had long, greasy hair, eye glasses like someone from the 1950s, and her nose was pierced with a hoop down the septum.
“Transcendence?”
“Was his objectification of the shoe a symbol for something beyond the vagina? More of a pansexualization of a kind of one-world, all-connection that ties into Buddhist themes? Like finding the divine in every animate and even inanimate creature?” she pressed, shoving her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
