Sole searching for my next identity

I was leaving the courthouse, daydreaming about my days as a teenager fleeing at the appearance of blue lights, when a breeze slithered across my toes.

An avid advocate for closed-toe shoes — I’m sneering at you, Teva hippies — I ignored the implication, assuming it was just inconvenient timing for diabetic onset. Goodbye appendages.

But no, as I hit the stairs and sauntered back across the Historic Courthouse Square, my right Converse made a noise like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol, where the daring Scientologist scurries up the side of the mostly-glass Burj Khalifa in Dubai using gloves equipped with toilet plungers — more or less.

SCHWOP SCHWOP SCHWOP, said my alligator sneaker.

Time for new shoes and the biannual identity crisis. Let’s dive in.

Boots?

Blue collar is in my blood, but boots never did for me what they do for city boys pretending to be country.

Even when working in manufacturing, where composite and steel toes are mandatory, I found the closest thing to a sneaker and rolled the dice.

Dad used to tell me about friends who had their feet smushed by a forklift and had to have their steel-toed boots surgically removed. Goodbye appendages.

Not. En. Vogue.

Dress shoes?

By jove, the only time I put my nose up is when I’m entering Morganton’s city limits, and it’s usually to apply a clothes pin.

What kind of high-faluting Blake Shelton-wannabe would I be if I showed up in jeans and dress shoes every day to work? Goodbye street cred.

Nix that one. With prejudice.

Skate shoes are really where it’s at.

As a kid, I’d skate a pair of shoes until you could tell what brand of socks I’d mismatched.

Holes in the top from sliding up the grip tape, which is essentially adhesive sandpaper on top of a skateboard. Holes in the bottom from dragging my foot on the pavement to slow down while bombing hills when speed whipped seizures across the deck.

Often, I’d wrap them in duct tape and keep skating until the soles started flapping out of the back as I walked down the halls of East Burke Middle.

Ask any teacher working the school at that time and they’d probably remember me for my shoes, or my saggy jeans, or my bubbly personality.

However, the best pair of shoes I ever wore came from a friend-slash-bully who I hung out with who was almost 20 when I was almost 12.

He beat up on me a lot. Did some drugs while I was around. I’m kind of suspicious of a time or two that he “visited a friend” in the middle of the night while I stood in a street nearby with our skateboards, waiting for his return.

But man, if those shoes weren’t magical.

They were white Adios once upon a time, and they were worn to the nubs, grimy in the creases, and the imprints of someone else’s feet were still marbled into the insoles.

As a mechanic once told me about a set of tires I’d driven to Virginia on: “If these were tennis shoes, you’d be able to put your big toe on a dime and tell me if it were on heads or tails.”

I damn near could have flipped the coin with those shoes on.

They stunk to high heaven, but they turned me into Rodney Mullen, who, for the squares out there, is the skater Tony Hawk wished he could be in his prime.

I’d wear them to skate. I’d wear them to school. I’d wear them on dates. I even snuck them into church once or twice.

I practically kissed them good night before bed each evening, thanking the Gods of Thrash that I had been given such a luxury.

That is, until my mom tossed them out.

As a parent, knowing now what I didn’t then, she was within every right to make that unilateral decision, but I never quite kickflipped the same.

Skate sessions were a little less exciting without my by-then-jailed-friend-slash-bully’s old rotting kicks.

Until Vans, that is.

Vans, while expensive, rip like wet toilet paper when skated, but form perfectly around the foot. Or are those dad shoes now? Not a topic I feel confident enough to breach.

Either way, my days of skulking along the streets of Hildebran on a skateboard are about a decade and a half behind me.

I’m proper now. Professional. Adult. Goodbye running from police without misdemeanor charges.

Instead, I think I’ll go for New Balance and start thinking about retirement and my Roth IRA.