My mom would buy me shoes when I needed them, every time. However, I
was the type of kid who never thought about what I needed until it
was too late and then I would get into dire straits. Once we were
having an assembly, which in Santaquin middle school consisted of the
four classes of students coming out and sitting in the wide part of
the hall. There was no room for chairs so we had to sit on the ground
Indian style. Maybe we are not supposed to call it Indian style
anymore but back then in the wild and wooly 80's sitting with your
legs crossed in front of you may have had a racially insensitive
name. I was sitting Indian style at first and I remembered that I had
a hole in the sole of my shoe and tried to tuck it under my leg so no
one else could see. My plan of hiding my shoe hole was working
flawlessly until I got excited about answering some question or
another and popped up to my knees to be a little more visible to the
the raised hand recognizer. When I did the cute and cool girl sitting
right behind me noticed the hole in my shoe and mentioned it to the
girl sitting next to her load enough for me to hear. She said some
thing about her gosh, and how she couldn't believe I would come to
school with holes in my shoe, and then something about how I was a
scrounge and my family was poor. I was humiliated but it was to late
to back up and re-cover my shoe hole, even though the thought crossed
my mind. I decided on a recency gambit and turned and told the girl
that my shoe had ripped a hole in the sole at recess and that I was
going to get new shoes tomorrow. She said I better or else I couldn't
come back to school because you had to have good shoes at school. I
should had known she really didn't have the authority to kick me out
of school for not having good enough shoes but it made me nervous non
the less and I went home and told my mom that I couldn't go back to
school until I had new shoes. She yelled at me for not telling her
before I had a huge hole in the bottom of my shoe and we loaded up
and headed over to Pay-Less to get a pretty sweet new pair of XJ900s.
I went from shoe shame to shoe unreasonable pride in just a few
hours. Being basically fashion retarded I somehow brainwashed myself into thinking that the other kids would be pretty impressed by these cool looking shoes. The next day I was conspicuously showing off my new shoes to
the cute girl who had insulted my holes ones and she said she thought
I said I was going to get some nice shoes and not just XJ900s. Well,
that required another layer of lies that had me claiming that these
were just temporary and I was going to get some Nike Airs just as
soon as we had the time to get up to the mall. This was not true but I was so low below her
interest she never followed up with me to call my bluff.
