Why do we hang old shoes from wires? To hear some tell it, it means there are drugs for sale not far off. Some say it stands for the death of a friend or loved one, or for a child from the block gone off to war. The Scots take it to mean a lad has at last had a lass punch his V-card, as the kids say. And then it could just mean some soul has tired of his shoes, and bought new ones.
Last week, a pair of Day-Glo Flip-Side All-Stars--or Chucks, as the kids call them--hung from a thick black wire on a calm, tree-lined block of Queens. The shoes swayed from time to time in the breeze, glowed gold in the sun, and irked birds who touched down to peck at a lace in search of some new breed of worm.
But why all the fuss for these shoes, and not for the mud-stained mules that haunt a putt-putt course in Bay Ridge, or those light brown wing tips slung up high and dry near a Bronx beer hall since May? May as well ask the band of cads and cards who came in spades to gawk at the Day-Glo Chucks. Most showed up at night and tried to bring them down to earth, as though they held some kind of dark dirt deep in their soles.
Ask, for one, a high-strung young man who gave his name as Lou, who caught the ire of a Queens don when he hurled a brick that missed the shoes and came down with a crash through the glass of a town car that had not moved in days. A man in the back seat peered out and air-sliced his throat three times--forth and back and forth--with half a gloved hand. Lou turned the same shade as the shoes, sped off to a door near the end of the block, and shrunk out of sight.
Or ask Jeff, a man with a trim silk tie and a half-smoked Pall Mall, who looked on as a girl of eight or nine tried and failed to fell the Chucks with a sling and a bald doll. "Those shoes are bad news," he said. He tapped a hair's breadth of ash to the curb and rolled up his left sleeve to show a pale code inked on his arm. "All-Stars have five points, but some stars have six. If you know what I mean."
What goes up must come down, though, and sure as death the Chucks came down that same night. Where they went is not clear--no more so than who strung them up in the first place--but a few souls still lurk, out of sight, rolled-up mats in their bags and cheap gold stars on their heels. "They'll move on soon," Jeff said. "We've not heard the last of those shoes."
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