It’s not quite winter but I’m in my winter boots and after threading down the not-so-accessible u-turn ramps from the main clinic to the specialists’ offices in the basement I see the sign that says “Remove Wet Shoes Before Entering” and realize my boots are totally dry and the snow has been gone a week already. If I hadn’t had to attend the medical appointment I might not have been able to tell you what day of the week it is.
The utterly ancient East-Indian ultrasound tech telling me his mother doesn’t want to retire either, looking through the dark room’s unfamiliar cupboards for more paper towel, as the gut goop which made visible the impossible dense fur pelt of my stomach for the first time (at least to me) is a real surge, a surf and twice thimbled belly button cork.
At the beginning, he cycles through the same instruction over and over: “Breathe in, and hold it. Big big breath in.” When the wand elicits pain from me I cough out my ballast, away from my post-Covid puffer for the time and the tickle still killing me. He pats my gut and tells me “you can let it out when you need, but try.”
He calls his work focus (my stomach) your tummy and does not alternate it with any other term, steadfast as the Dictaphone. He promises I will grow up to be a strong man, and wonders why I am not married, why I do not have children. The name he gives, clarifying and pointing to his chest, is different than his “Jim” name-tag, but lying on my right—and deaf in the left ear (yet another medical embarrassment I need to reconcile in my 30s)—I cannot tell you what name it is he tells me to call him by, and after the first embarrassed “pardon?” and a quick “one more time please” I nod and relax my neck, accept today is one of those many days of humility to come.
And the liver, “oh the liver,” he tut tuts under his breath. “Roll over again, I’m going to try to get you a real glamour shot of the liver now.” Sometimes it beeps and he types a lot of information, and other times it does not beep but he still types a lot of information. He never gets goop on the wand holster somehow, when setting wand down to one-finger peck the diagnostic of my terrible no-good tummy with two hands. “Something you could autograph and mail to your poetry fans.”
Who was telling me Peter Steele, of Type-O-Negative, died of sepsis from diverticulitis, because he was running hospice for his elderly cat and refused to go to the hospital, because he loved his cat and he fucking hated other people? I almost died of sepsis from diverticulitis too, before I was diagnosed, because I couldn’t bear to leave my dog with a stranger over a tummyache, not during Covid when his routine was already so upended and he needed me and I need him and we didn’t need to be apart ever again no not at all. It was the not being able to drink water without doubling over that finally got me to go in, 4 days off of food and not recovering. Poor Peter. And now a new, ‘nother thing wrong in my beloved bread-basket.
“Oh I think I love my cat this much as well,” my tech not named Jim agrees with Peter’s path. “And what of your cat?”
Our shop-cat, George, visited the vet for the second time in her life last month, a stray who’d wandered down to southern Alberta from north of Edmonton when she would’ve been four or five months old, according to her chip. Our vet called the original owner who’d gotten her chipped, and he tells us he doesn’t remember getting a cat chipped just over three years ago. The vet listed in the chip cannot find her records. The guy doesn’t want her back, and our vet tells him “yeah that wasn’t on the table, this was a courtesy call,” and hangs up, as offended as we are.
With no appetite, and little energy, it’s been weeks of video-calls, catching up on editing gigs and writing query letters for presses that I can’t wait to hear think my writing is singular and so important and they are just so excited to see what some other publisher is able to do to market something like that for me, because as one of any number of straight white cis women in a marketing position, or working in a literary agency, or an acquiring editor position, or—we just don’t think we’re the right people to speak to and vouch for your unique experiences. Ah, that explains so much about what they have been publishing.
A good week for gossip, these video calls. Thinking of the un-diagnosed Celiac who wouldn’t let the diagnosed Crohns bring the one gut-safe brand of goldfish on the upstate sheep and wool festival road trip, and my friend (Crohns in this case) finding language with me on a four hour co-crafting call, coming to the conclusion we love haters, but cannot abide by schemers; Celiac claiming to have been “glutened” the night previous, on their own turn to cook for the group, and claiming Goldfish will litch’rally kill they/them (sometimes it’s other queers who’re the reason you aren’t taken seriously these days, who denude the political valence of your experiences in-advance).
Not-Jim aroar at that hater-schemer binary, thinking of Martin’s spymaster eunuch, and Tolkien’s Wormtongue, a bit of a fantasy-head I guess. Not the TV show, or the films, he insists. “It rots your head.” Not-Jim a more patient reader than me, by leagues, though I prefer Gormenghast and better fantasy, and maybe I can trade on taste where I lack in energy, attention-span.
“Do you like your Blundstones?” Not-Jim asks, less animated now and quite focused on the screen.
No, no I fucking hate Blundstones. Sober and group-mom, party-crashing NYE at an Allan Hawco event in his bourgeois heritage home in St. John’s, NL, years ago before Covid even, there was nothing but Blundstones in the foyer, though many of the women were attending in heels (they just wore them inside was all). I was pleased my Palladiums stuck out so well, seemed to stand taller even, though the pylon orange ice-cleats bands rotated up onto the base of the tongues also helped with visibility I suppose. Three times I saw people come back in after their many champagne-whelmed goodbyes, inspect another pair, and stare at their feet with hopelessness, no idea how to decipher the labyrinth of homogeneity. Very few left with their own shoes, I imagine, and the silver tinsel Christmas tree shaved a little skinny, so many antique baubles secreted into the huge puffy winter coats of fellow party-crashers under my inattentive watch.
“Yeah, they’re easy to pull on” I told him. Which is true. What I thought was pending gallbladder explosion is actually something in the liver, and the swelling so severe that bending over to lace up real boots is now untenable, and the discomfort has been years in the making.
His wand a ferry through the goopy Styx, and my gut, Not-Jim’s tummy, so fucked and sensitive. “Yes, I don’t think they are for me. And the cost?”
I hear the exam table’s long paper bib rip a little, down by the boots, as I kick my left leg straight out in another shock of pain.
The Blundstones are now a winter concession. I have a lot of shoes, my own whole rack by the front door, which my parents cannot understand. A lot of pairs of Vans slip-ons, and a rotten old set of Asics I wear to mow and whip with.
I own exactly two pairs of nice shoes. One I’ve never worn after trying them on and buying them (an unfortunate timing, with the release of new Yeezys and then a few weeks later unwell Twitter moments that led to the dissolution of the Adidas partnership), and another that last peeled back my big toe’s cuticle about a half-inch, exercising in them without socks because the washer was out of commission at the time (Onitsuka Tigers, a gift, and which have never met outdoor conditions).
Shoe culture is kinda confusing to me. I am not of means to engage with it other than my one-time impulse purchase of the gray dumpling X xenomorph insane and Cindy’s-glass-slipper-some perfect fit, in the back of the store with yellow lighting and ochre velvet rope and gold gilt mirror, so you didn’t try them on with just anyone around you, so they could film you and put it on social media, as the shoe Wormtongued its way from your want to your need; I was on vacation, the first in six years, and what is travel for if not buying shit you don’t need and eating out three times a day like you wish you could the rest of the year.
So shoes, as a point of interest, don’t usually come up for me. I hide my one pair away as though they were a swastika, and I keep the others, the Tigers, nearby the elliptical and always think better of wearing them these days.
But the shoe has really been cropping up lately for me in literature. Take for example Samuel R. Delany’s dhalgren, likely the best book ever written. The Kid walks around in just one shoe pretty well the entire book1. One foot on the earth, and one shoe between him and the garbled agora, the post-city, that dystopic walkabout that is that most effective and enduring schizo sci-fi of all time.
The other pull I’ve stumbled upon recently, is in re-reading another sci-fi staple, albeit a more popular one than dhalgren. I picked it back up when a partner was asking why I called a bed a coffin in a hopeless novel I’ve been working on, and I pointed to the fat green mass-market on my collapsed z-shaped bookcase and told her I simply stole it, as pretty well everything else in that particular sub-genre does to this day.
William Gibson wasn’t born in Canada but has lived much of his life here after immigrating in 1969. This landmark novel of his, Neuromancer, is 40 years old as of 2024.
In the opening of Neuromancer, Case’s first love interest, Linda Lee, a fellow addict and doomed soul, is denoted first and foremost by her fatigues and her shoes.2 You can pull these three iterations of her white sneakers out to form a three-act structure, three beats to tell you all about those white kicks of hers.
“He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick. She was wearing faded French orbital fatigues and new white sneakers.”
“Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran.”
“He found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner’s name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.”
Linda’s death is pretty upsetting. And it’s her shoe that tells us she’s gone, really. The shoe came off to lay beside her head, and yet that motion charges the possibility that it could have easily been her head that came off to meet her shoe instead, that the violence was force enough to dislocate that marker Gibson invested her with when we met her.3
In contrast, though similarly off-screen, Molly Millions’ dispatch of the goons who executed Linda and attempted to do the same to Case, is delivered flatly: “Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her…Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.” Gibson rocks back a little into specificity, from something to someone, but it’s really muted. These aren’t people we need to care about. These people didn’t have shoes that were somehow still white in a place as impossible for that to be the case as in Chiba City.
Paul Pope transmits a very similarly charged, single-shoed dead-dame motif into his really rather mundane (at least for its cyberpunk setting4) offering, 100%, my second favourite comic of all time. The comic opens on a leg, with a sneaker, of a dead club dancer in an alley.
This leg pans to the club, and therein one club worker tells another about what happened. And the club becomes a central site for the many characters to weave in and out of one another’s lives. This maguffin is resolved partway into the book, then falls away without having much effect on the characters’ lives, but that the graphic novel opens this way, even if it abandons that image’s potency, it is a curiousity barbed deep in the wet bagged battery that is my unwrinkled brain.
I couldn’t tell you what it is that enthralls me so much about the sequence below, from a few chapters later in the book (actually the last page of chapter 4, checking again just now), but I can tell you I have felt very little extreme gender-yearning and/or sneakerphilic sentiment ever in my life, until I felt a desire to get tattooed5 with Pope’s extremely stylized black and white scene of a young woman sitting in bed, staring down her own legs to her feet, mourning a woman she never really knew well at all.
The hand and the feet nearly indistinguishable in this final panel, so articulated and bony and ugly and real (at least, if you work with your hands and on your feet, like me and many others do). And for the trans crowd, its easy to read into this twinned foot-size as true kinship signifier, shoes (as with all other clothes) so narrowly prescribed in gender-generics and bad patterning scale-ups, unavailability for most styles the second you outpace the center-gut of the normal curve.
I really can’t look away from this. I keep scrolling back up as I write all this. And I feel the same sort of inappropriate, appropriating grief for the dead gold-sneakered maguffin here as a reader as our character does above. I can’t look away because I feel that overlay happening between me and the image, in a way even the sensory bombardment of cinema doesn’t achieve for me anymore.
Several years ago, talking to one close friend about my sex dream with a then-immediate ex: their tattooed feet spindly spider legs groping me as they sat behind me and braided my hair so tight I took a migraine, and they made me cum again and again and again with those tattooed feet (HEAVY / CREAM). My first ever wet-dream, in my 30s, and with the only ‘serious relationship’ ex I wouldn’t really stay in touch with.
And in turn, friend I was sharing this embarassing dream with, their dyke/enby wife sending me a very long video of their feet in seaweed on a rocky Cape Breton beach, to make fun of me, but, you know, also for a certain kind of attention, consummated when last we met, because lesbian-ish rural witches like a cross-country visit from an ex now and then, to gather goops and whiskers for potion supplies.
And it was enthralling in the way it is any time someone you care about sends you something made just for you, to titillate you, but I kept asking myself if it wouldn’t be more interesting if they were wearing a cool shoe for the bit.
I remember rubbing the feet of my close friend in the car before the Sussex Flea Market, while they had a fever but insisted we go out anyhow. I thought I could feel the fever through the arch of their feet, so warm in my cold hands.
I’m too antipathetic to porn-as-is to see if I might really be into anything new anyhow, to dip my toes, you might say. And even if I wanted to drill down into it, to see if it’s just something my brain can’t not notice in certain art, but not something really charged with eros, when would I have the time? Collapsing after work with spasming liver and napping until dinner, winter daylight gone. And four hours before bed I’m killing my screen time anyhow, so that I can get up to go to work at 3:45am and actually stand a chance at rest, so I can keep crushing my glamourous tummy; I should’ve been born an otter, I think.
And I flip thru 100% a little more again, remember the strippers, and the boxers, that they’re hooked up with sensors that show a psychedelic rendering of your innards while you’re performing for others (“MRI-TEK” brands such as “Gastro, Peno, and Fight”). My fucked up guts would probably keep me off the pole, wouldn’t they? What’s sexy about a puckered gallbladder? A pocked and pocketed colon?
But maybe someone would pay to watch my liver shut down in real-time, socked over and over in the ring? I could take out a discrete life-insurance policy, leave it all to my dog. Or maybe that southpaw charm of mine would give me the edge I need, the opportunity to punish someone else’s tummy for once.
I imagine Not-Jim going home, picking up a fat fantasy book, and calling his even ancient-er mother, insisting once again that she retire.
And I day-dream quitting my shitty job where I rest 30-40 pound cases of books on my ‘berg gut to move them to conveyor for others down that line to then open and eventually sell all those books that those white cis lady gatekeepers can truly identify with and champion; day-dream walking out and flipping Fürher Reisman’s genocidal mug the bird, and staying home all day and rotting my brain again, surrendering that dumb farmer discipline that never paid out; staying up as late as I want with all the screen time I could ask for, directors’ cut LotR marathons on the T.V. and foot-fucker porn on the phone at the same time6, rot-garble in the mouth and down to the toes, flush gush to fill the form, gut-safe cognito-hazard slurry the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Two things to say on dhalgren, insights from pals on my most recent trip. 1. Part of why dhalgren is enduring is it doesn’t endorse anything but actually conceives what sex, or life (hard to distinguish for The Kid sometimes), looks like untethered to power or hegemonic assumptions, the usual repression (that’s from Chariot). 2. The one shoe thing is a Bodidharma bit. They go to exhume the guy and there’s nothing left in the tomb but one shoe, I’m paraphrasing but you get it. That insight is from Hugh. Not sure I get positive karma looping Bodidharma into a “am I too spiritually exhausted to get into foot fetishism” loosely CanLit literary essay, but here we are anyhow.
Though he does hit us with other visual markers along the way, too, some of them seared into my brain since I last read the book in high school. See:
Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline...And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon. He was riding high that night, with a brick of Wage's ketamine on its way to Yokohama and the money already in his pocket. He'd come in out of the warm rain that sizzled across the Ninsei pavement and somehow she'd been singled out for him, one face out of the dozens who stood at the consoles, lost in the game she played. The expression on her face, then, had been the one he'd seen, hours later, on her sleeping face in a portside coffin, her upper lip like the line children draw to represent a bird in flight.
Germane to this write-up, from the opening of 2nd in the trilogy, Count Zero: “He nodded. Her hand, in his, was warm and dry. He was watching the spread of her toes with each step, the nails painted with chipped pink gloss.”
It’s a lot better than Heavy Liquid, his other work from the same world; HL is filled with many of the same genre markers, but is ultimately hokey and dumb and paced funny and full of all the usual problems comics these days are full of.
I haven’t gotten the tattoo. I’m underwaged and underemployed and too busy taking care of other people, too busy working bad jobs for evil people. But I think about it all the time.
Even in my dreams of gluttony, I can’t picture doing this with much volume on the T.V., or without headphones for the porn. I’ll never make it into Hell at this rate.