An Element of Style
I unexpectedly became a sneakerhead a few years ago. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, I realize it sounds like a lesser-known Dick Tracy villain, but it’s serious shoe collector slang for a serious shoe collector. It started at Carolines on Broadway, the Manhattan comedy club where I was opening for my friend Ron Funches. He and Yassir Lester,1 the other comic on the bill, had such good sneakers. They were clean and bright and coordinated with their outfits. And I, wearing the last of my long line of identical pairs of Saucony Jazz running shoes, felt jealous.
I wasn’t jealous of Yassir’s and Ron’s specific shoes, so much as the idea of having a distinctive personal style. Working with them made me realize, “Oh yeah. You can wear shoes for other reasons than ‘they don’t hurt my feet’ or ‘they were on sale.’” Maybe I can be that kind of person, I thought. I dress fine, not great. Nobody would copy my look, but I am also unlikely to be ambushed by five benevolent gay men ready to make me over on television. Maybe from the ankles down I can get comfortable being noticed, I thought, excited but anxious as being seen as a late adopter or, more bluntly, a tool.2
I’ve always worn sneakers, but for most of my life my rotation stayed between one and three pairs. The shoes I wore most of the time, the older beat-up pair that I’d wear in inclement weather or to a park, and the ones I’d pretend I was going to work out in. But as the weekend wrapped up, I decided that the next occasion I had to celebrate, I’d buy my own pair of statement sneakers.
The following week I had the silly good fortune to be nominated for an Emmy.3 I went out and bought a pair of forest green–neon pink Jordan 1s (the model that Michael Jordan wore during his rookie season in the NBA). They were not especially comfortable, but I liked wearing them just the same. They felt bold and out of character, and as I walked around in the stiff, un-broken-in retros, they served as a tactile reminder that I was an Emmy nominee.
Since then, I’ve marked basically every major life milestone with a new pair of shoes. I bought myself a pair when my most recent stand-up album came out. I’ve purchased sneakers to wear for TV appearances and to award shows. I got a fresh pair of black-and-red floral-patterned Kevin Durant signature low-tops to wear with my tuxedo for my wedding reception.
It happened slowly, but wearing flashy sneakers stopped feeling out of character for me and started feeling like “a thing I do.” It was a big change. The only real standout clothes I’d worn before were ironic (the gawky plastic glasses frames I wore when I played JV basketball) or legitimately hideous (the baggy green sweater I wore through high school and into college that various girlfriends tried in vain to get me to throw out). Thinking about my shoes made me think more about the rest of my clothes. I started wearing what one might call outfits. I was not, as I feared I might be, ridiculed by teenagers in the streets. Admittedly, though, I do benefit from working in a field where casual shoes are the norm, and I’m being graded on the Jewish-guy curve that allowed Jerry Seinfeld to become a low-key sneaker icon.
I also developed what you could consider taste. It wasn’t good taste necessarily, but it was mine. I prefer shoes with at least a pop of bright, audacious color. I am aware that sometimes I’ll purchase high-tops, even though I know that I don’t love the feeling of the tongues hugging my lower shins, so I’ll lace them up three times a year, maximum. Most days I opt for a pair of low-cut Adidas running shoes, preferably the kind with the upper part made from a knit, sock-like material. I like the style, but also they’re incredibly easy to put on, and it feels like wearing slippers outside, which I recommend.
I also started purchasing sneakers as gifts for my loved ones. A pair of sneakers is a great gift4 for people who think of tennis shoes as the least important items in their footwear rotation. You can show them a whole new world (again, from the ankles down). For my mom’s cough-th birthday, I bought her a pair of my favorite Adidas runners. She liked them so much that she made a bunch of her mom friends try them on, and they bought pairs of their own, which is very precious, and makes me feel like I made a good choice. When my sister won an award at her hospital the same month I won an Emmy,5 I bought matching pairs of gold Air Force 1s for the two of us. When I wear mine (which is rare because they are incredibly gaudy, even by my tacky standards) I feel proud of her, too.6
But in addition to the celebratory and gifted purchases, I also started buying shoes for no good reason at all. I picked up a pair of mismatched Kyrie 4 high-tops for my thirty-third birthday, which was, like every nondecade birthday after age twenty-one, a nonevent. I ordered myself a pair of rare Nike Air Max 1s because it was my wife’s birthday (and I was drunk). I bought a pair of Adidas running shoes that say BOSTON SUPER on the side because . . . well, I just wanted them.
By any objective measure, I now own too many pairs of sneakers. It’s not like they’re made under especially ethical conditions, even after the big sweatshop backlash of the 1990s. More immediately, the space my ever-expanding collection takes up in our apartment is excessive and has required an evolving storage setup over the past few years. At first I lined them up in a tidy row between my bedside table and the closet. Soon, though, the row became unwieldy; it started to look as if a basketball team had arranged themselves for a photograph only to be raptured out of their shoes. So I upgraded to a little rack, enough to hold ten or twelve pairs. And then when that became insufficient, I bought two dozen stackable clear plastic cubes, each with a door on the front that allows you to remove a pair of shoes without disturbing the stack.
The cubes worked well for a while, but now I have more sneakers than cubes, and so on top of the stacks are additional stacks of cardboard shoeboxes, ascending to a height that borders on precarious. A few prized pairs sit atop the cardboard boxes. Some others clutter the floor nearby.
I’m afraid to count, but I must have between thirty-five and forty pairs at this point. My habit isn’t ruining my life, and I’m definitely not the most frequent or compulsive collector that I know. And no, it is not lost on me that that’s exactly what an alcoholic would say in defense of his alcoholism. (“Josh, we need to talk,” I imagine my friends sitting down to tell me. “Your ballin’ out of control has gotten, well, out of control.”)
When I come home late from a stand-up show, I’ll leave the lights off as I navigate to my side of the bed on the far end of the room so I don’t wake up my wife. I know, I know. Not all heroes wear capes. Sometimes, as I tiptoe through the dark, I will step on a stray sneaker. My ankle will buckle and I’ll bang my shin on my bed frame.
Ouch! Shit! I’ll think. My life is pretty good.
Bizzy
I wasn’t quite ready to have a dog, and neither was my wife, but we adopted one anyway, which normally isn’t how that works. A dog isn’t like a mouse or a baby; you rarely wind up with one living in your house by accident. What happened was, I had promised my then-girlfriend Maris I’d get her a dog when we moved in together. I’d actually promised her a dog as a gift before we worked out the details of our impending cohabitation, but she decided her previous apartment, a quirky one-bedroom in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, that she called “Elf House,” was too cramped to share with a pet. The dog search, we decided, would wait until we had moved into our new apartment.
This wrinkle in the plan made me a little uneasy. The timing of my original offer was meant to fulfill Maris’s long-standing and oft-stated desire for a dog while making it clear that it was her dog. I didn’t even live in the apartment. How could the dog belong to me? By forestalling the acquisition until we shared a home, though, any pet would definitively be our dog. And I didn’t know if I was up to the task.
Moving in together felt like enough of a change to take on without introducing a new species into our relationship. I worried that if we got a dog right away, I might conflate the dog-related stress with the move itself, and that I’d feel like we’d rushed into living together. Having a pet felt the same to me as astrological charts: other people love them, and I unde
rstand the appeal, but I’d never felt compelled to modify my own lifestyle to accommodate one. Also, much like inviting an animal to live in your home, diving into astrology is an efficient way to give your life over to a force you can never fully understand or control.
And the one pet I did have extensive experience with had not given me a favorable impression of animal companionship.
Until I was about four years old, my family had a cat named Barney. “Had” might even be a generous term for our relationship. It was more like we were haunted by a living creature. Barney stalked our home, vomiting in shoes and on bedsheets. In his late life, he often got stuck on a single step between rooms, front paws on the stair, back paws on the floor. In these instances, he would moan like Robert Plant screeching the bridge of a Led Zeppelin song until one of my parents helped him the rest of the way down. Once, I tried to pick him up around the middle to make the groaning stop. My father quickly stepped in and warned me against trying to heft the cranky tangle of bones and fur.
And, moreover, he cautioned me against petting the cat at all. Barney tended to lash out with his claws when touched for any reason. Years later, a friend of the family told me that my dad used to refer to the cat as “UPS” because he didn’t want to call him “Useless Piece of Shit” in front of me and my sister. When the vet finally put Barney to sleep at age eighteen, it wasn’t euthanasia, it was an exorcism. My mom will hate that last sentence, but I stand by it.
The idea of bringing a pet into my own life stressed me out. What if we ended up with the dog equivalent of Barney? Stephen King wrote novels about such scenarios. But Maris really wanted a dog. So to prove to her—and to myself—that I was a good and committed partner, I brought up the idea of getting a dog all the time.
“The apartment is starting to come together enough it might be ready for a dog soon,” I’d offer, after we figured out the perfect spot for the couches we inherited from my grandmother.
“Ooo, there’s a dog adoption fair in Union Square,” I’d say, noticing a friend’s post on Instagram.
“Ahh, a dog, like we will soon have, whenever you say the word, my love,” I’d proclaim when a pet food ad showed up on TV.
Maris, reasonably assuming that I must have wanted a pet with every cell in my body, since I was talking about it so damn much, began to browse listings online. She started with Petfinder, which is basically Tinder for pets.1 She browsed the Petfinder website at work, sending me listings for her favorite dogs. She perused it while we watched TV. We scrolled idly through the app when we were lying in bed at night.
Thanks to the app’s search functions, we could seek out exactly the pet we wanted: one to two years old, pug or shih tzu mix, sleepy disposition, good with people. But most of the available dogs fell well outside our parameters. All the good ones, as they say, are either taken or pit bulls. I am not anti–pit bull, but we lived in a seven-hundred-square-foot apartment and both worked full time, leaving us unable to give a large dog the daily SoulCycle class’s worth of exercise it would have required. Our lifestyle necessitated a pet with the energy level of yogurt: technically alive, but not especially vigorous. Unfortunately, because every New York City apartment is so cramped you’d expect David Blaine to escape from it as a stunt, small, inert dogs are in high demand. We eventually found the dog of our dreams, but it turned out that a lot of people in New York have the same dream dog.
Much like nuclear proliferation, any search for a dog continues escalating until it reaches its natural conclusion. After Petfinder failed us, Maris moved on to combing the websites of individual shelters. Every few days, she would fall in love with a new dog, all of them pug, shih tzu, and Havanese mixes with names like Ewok and Bartleby. Each dog, I’d have to admit, looked very cute and friendly, an enticing addition to our household. Maris churned out application after application and received rejection after rejection, explaining that the shelter appreciated her interest in adopting Marbles the chug or Bella the Pom-tzu-nese, but alas, one hundred–plus other people shared her enthusiasm, so the pairing was not to be.
After weeks of disappointment, a shelter took pity on Maris and moved her application for a ball of fluff named Gus Gus to the next phase. Since the shelter trying to place Gus Gus was too far away to make a home visit and inspect our apartment up close, they scheduled a sixty-minute phone interview, to make sure we were ready to be adoptive dog parents.
Sixty minutes. On the phone. Talking about a dog. What do you say for an hour about a dog you’ve never even met before? “We promise we’ll feed him and walk him and never dress him in any especially humiliating Halloween costumes for our own amusement”? The shelter also made it clear that we were granted the interview because of Maris’s acquaintanceship with Mr. Frito, a French bulldog they had placed with a friend of Maris’s in the past. Our adoption liaison described Mr. Frito as “the worst dog they’d ever had” thanks to a combination of physical ailments and personality tics that lent him the bearing of an inbred seventeenth-century Spanish king. He was adorable, but he could barely walk and for much of his life required a diaper, which is a description that you usually anticipate your loved ones growing out of, or dread their growing into. If we had met Mr. Frito and still wanted to adopt, the shelter surmised, we must be decent people.
Still, Maris had been burned too many times and worried about the psychic toll if Gus Gus didn’t end up ours after a sixty-minute phone interview. So, a few nights before the call, she asked me to post on Twitter about our search and ask for any leads. Maybe someone who followed me on social media knew of a pup who needed a home and didn’t require an hour’s worth of convincing that we would make capable guardians. I posted a tweet mentioning our desire to adopt a small, smushy-faced dog and inquiring after any leads. Minutes later, an internet acquaintance from Los Angeles replied that a guy she’d met once or twice was looking for a home for a pug that he couldn’t take care of.
My acquaintance set us up with her acquaintance and two days later he brought the pug (whom he had been calling Beyoncé, but whose original name had been Suzie) to Brooklyn for us to meet. As soon as they came inside, the dog began wheezing and scrambling in circles. She would pant and stomp for several seconds, and then flop onto her stomach, exhausted, before springing back to her feet.
I fell for her right away.
I loved her squashy little body, like a loaf of white bread with a face smushed onto the front slice and a butt smushed onto the back slice. I was also smitten with her frantic personality. I could tell right away that she was an anxious little weirdo with a lot of baggage—in other words, exactly the kind of traits I gravitate to in a new human or animal friend. Maris often calls me the Kook Whisperer for my ability to remain calm around wacky strangers, relatives, and friends, even in the face of their most unnerving eccentricities. This dog, I knew from the start, was a kook.
We spent a half hour chatting with Mike, the second-degree acquaintance, and as we talked, Beyoncé (née Suzie) grew slightly calmer, or I imagined she did. Through our conversation, Maris and I were told the following things about the guy and the dog:
Guy: Moved to New York from LA, where he had worked on the social media for a famous comedian’s TV show; was about to go on tour opening for aforementioned famous comedian; just broke up with his girlfriend.
Dog: Six years old, used to live in Vermont with friends of family; couldn’t stay with guy, because he already owned a big dog who liked to play rough; had a crate but was slightly reluctant to sleep in it.
Nearly all these facts were inaccurate, but we didn’t know it at the time. And why would we have distrusted them? For one thing, you don’t look a gift pug in the mouth. And for another, who would lie about those kind of details? It turned out, Mike would, but we wouldn’t figure that out for months. Mike left our apartment with Beyoncé/Suzie, and we promised to be in touch ASAP with a decision.
“I love her,” Maris said as soon as the door closed.
“I love her, too,” I said.<
br />
I texted Mike immediately. We would be thrilled to take Suzie/Beyoncé off his hands. Maris canceled the call with Mr. Frito’s old shelter. Mike came back two days later with the dog, her paperwork, and her belongings: a few cans of food, a large wireframe crate, some soft toys, and a blanket. Mike’s new girlfriend, Kelly, had come along for the ride. Way to bounce back from that breakup, dude, I thought. Mike refused to take money for the dog, but we gave him sixty bucks to cover the gas and tolls from the two trips to Brooklyn, and a bottle of bourbon as a gift. We felt certain we had made new great friends, and after Mike and Kelly left, we all followed each other on social media, so we knew it was real.
Maris chased the dog around the apartment, scooping her up in her arms and rolling her velvety pug ears between her fingertips. I watched, beaming. The hugging appeared to soothe the antsy little dog, but when Maris put her down, she went back to wheezing and flopping. After a brief discussion, we decided to change her name once more to Bizzy (in part because her hyperventilating sounded like the beatboxing of the rapper Biz Markie). It did feel a little rude to rename a middle-aged dog, but she was ours now, and besides, her new name wasn’t even that different, phonetically speaking, from the old one. By adopting her, Maris and I were each convinced that we had made the other’s dream come true, and we were both correct.
Nice Try Page 17