I had a friend who moved in down the street from me when I was in
seventh grade that was a pretty cool guy but had that new kid from
somewhere else problem where he seemed a little weird. It actually
turned out that he was just a little weird but still cool. He had a
hair cut that made him look ever so slightly like 1950's Elvis and
was ever so slightly diminutive so he was nicknamed 'Little Elvis'. I
didn't have many friends and he didn't have many friends so out of a
certain necessity we began hanging out and became friends. I did like him and we did have fun so I don't want
to make it sound like it was all barrel scraping and just the dregs of the
friend barrel. I mean to say I was scraping the barrel at the time but he was not barrel scrapings He was not into outside play to much so most of what
we did was play video games which was right in my wheelhouse. He also
liked to draw and was decent at it so we spent a good deal of time
drawing stuff. I was not good at drawing but I did want to learn so I
put in the time and got exactly no better. The one most common thing
we drew was shoes. I know that sounds a little odd but once again
Michael Jordan pops into the narrative of my life to explain my
motivations. Tennis shoe culture was getting big and the newest and
best basketball shoes were Nike Air Jordans and every boy who knew
what was cool wanted some or if he was so lucky, had some. Lil' E and
I were not so fortunate so what we got was the fantastic obsession
with drawing them and literally hundreds of our own subtle variants.
We would draw and color in one after another. Mine were usually very
near ripoff's of the real thing almost always colored the Jordan red
and black. As with any monomania that strikes me I got really and
deeply involved for about three weeks and then in a matter of days I
quit and have never drawn a shoe for a shoes sake in all the time
since.
