LARGETONY Blog

What is it with fairy tales and shoes? Why are shoes symbols of security and salvation. Look at Cinderella. If she hadn’t dropped that one shoe, Prince Charming would never have pursued her and she would have become a bitter old maid, hanging on to broken pumpkins and broken dreams. Speaking of Prince Charming, what’s his real story? It takes a woman with a great pair of shoes to get his attention. Gay or a foot fetishist? Or both? Then, of course, he had that necrophelia thing with Sleeping Beauty. In all fairness to him, I can’t say that he fucked her in her sleep, but I’ll bet you anything he jigged it a little while looking at her while she slept. (“Honest, officer. I just wanted to watch her breathe.”)

And everybody knows about Dorothy and her shoes. Glinda advises her to “never let them leave your feet,” but somehow fails to tell her that having them on her feet will help her leave. Instead, she made Dorothy figure it it out for herself. One of those tough life lessons. I ain’t the smartest thing on two legs but I guarantee you this…Dorothy gets her hands on another house and it’s got Glind’a name on it. There’s a life lesson: Don’t be so goddamn condescending.

If you believe in fairy tales, then you expect fairy godmothers, good witches, and crooning crickets to appear when you have hit rock bottom. You know…you’re sitting in the corner weeping cause you can’t go to the party thrown by a guy you never met, or you just committed residentular homicide in a foreign country. Suddenly, there is a swell of music and poof! there she is. And she looks like nothing you have ever seen before. You just don’t expect that to happen when life seems to be going okay.

Saturday morning I went down to Knoxville to score a ticket on the street for the football game against Ole Miss (that’s the University of Mississippi, not a drag queen past his–or do you say her?–prime. That would be Ole Miss Thing.) There I was, already on my way to the ball…the ball game, anyway. And I was actually travelling in a pumpkin colored vehicle. Okay, orange. I was on a Knoxville city bus (Some of the buses are orange. In fact a lot of shit in Knoxville is orange. It’s a very sports-minded town and the University of Tennessee’s school colors are orange and white) taking a shuttle from downtown (where I parked) to campus. That’s where I met Kendra.

She got on the bus with a small group in front of one of the hotels. Besides being the only person not wearing any orange, she stood out because she was a very tall (like six feet tall not counting her really high heels….hmm, shoes again) beautiful black woman with hair cut as short as she was tall. It’s not like there are not other tall beautiful black women in Knoxville, but you could just tell that she is from somewhere else. She was one of those “life of the party” types. She already had the group she got on the bus with in stitches, and immediately got big smiles and chuckles out of others as she went down the aisle looking for a seat.

I always sit in the back of buses, mostly because of leg room, but also because it puts me in a place where I am least likely to have to talk to someone. I don’t know if it was because I was the only other person who was alone, or if it was because she has the same needs for leg room, but she picked the back seat with me.

I hate to say this, but when she came back there I felt uncomfortable about a black person sitting at the back of the bus. It’s irrational white guilt. Because civil rights wasn’t about not being forced to sit at the back of thse bus. It was about the right to sit wherever on the bus you want. Nothing wrong with the back when it’s your choice.

Maybe it was destiny that she sat back there because it turned out she was on the wrong bus. This was a shuttle to the game, but she thought it was one of the regular routes. She thought she was on her way to the mall to fulfill a mission to “find her some cute shoes.” Can you believe it? Shoes. No lie. May I lose my dong in an escalator accident, if I’m making this up.

Kendra wasted no time striking up a conversation. It was actually pretty comfortbale for me because she did most of the talking. She managed to get my name and give me hers. It turns out she was from Washington, D.C. and was in town on an extended business thing. She was staying at the hotel where she got on the bus and was bored with downtown Knoxville, so she was looking for a place to shop. So, I told her that she could probably pick up the route to the mall once we got to campus. She said she wasn’t bothered. She didn’t have anything else to do. She was just killing time.

We talked a little bit about football. Turns out she is a N.Y Giants fan. This is kind of weird irony because the Giants’ quarterback Eli Manning played his college career at Ole Miss, and his older brother Peyton (see the sidebar) played his college career at Tennessee. And I meet this woman on the day that those two teams are playing. What’s kind of fateful about all this is that I can talk about football to anybody. Anything else and I probably would have just clammed up like usual. She picked up on the fact that I really like football, and joked that people in Knoxville really must be into football to walk around wearing orange.

In the 15 minutes it took to make two more shuttle stops and get to campus, I had Kendra so charged up about Tennessee football that she was wanting to blow off her shopping trip and wanted directions to the ticket office. I told her that only way to get a ticket at that point was on the street. She figured this must be a big game, which only made her more excited. Ole Miss is not one of our “big” games, but when I explained to her that the 105,000+ seats are sold out every week, she howled “You folks is serious!” God, her smile was brilliant and her laugh was like a virus.

As we were getting off the bus, she asked me if I would help her find a ticket. I told her I had to find one for myself, too. She had assumed that I had one and was meeting people. When I said, “No.” She said, “You ever been on a date with a fine black woman.” I laughed and said I had never been on a date with any kind of a black woman. She capped it off with, “You ain’t gonna be able to say that tomorrow.” We were going to be each other’s “date” for the game.

We found some tickets and still had a little time to kill before heading for the stadium. Her high heels (back to the shoes) were not too good for walking around, especially climbing the bleachers in the stadium, so we went into one of the little campus shops and Kendra got herself some flip-flops. You know, just a week ago, I was saying that I had no female friends, and here I am buying shoes with a woman.

Little did I know that this was just the beginning of my day with a crooning cricket.

—To be continued…

This entry was posted on Monday, October 3rd, 2005 at 12:52 am and is filed under being tony, football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.