Gerald's Shoes

Gerald M. Cotton stared at his shoes. He did this a lot now, because there was not much else to do. His shoes were old. They were brown, but not the nice sort of brown you see in shoe commercials; they were a vomit-hued and aged brown that did not in any way flatter him. The laces were worn, frayed and discolored. They were bumpy and twisted, and he thought they must look like the inside of his head. Bumpy and twisted. The soles of his shoes were nearly worn through and so used to the shape of his feet that sometimes he forgot he was wearing any shoes at all. They didn't offer any of the warmth and comfort they used to, though, so he was quickly reminded whenever a breeze rolled by. 

There were always several moments of interest throughout Gerald's day. Four school buses passed under his bridge every school day, and in the third bus, sitting in the fifteenth row was a boy who played a portable video game, but always looked up at Gerald as the bus passed by. There was a lady who drove by in her nice car every day and had nothing in her car except her. She was always glaring. There was a twenty-something girl who jogged on the sidewalk on the other side of the road under the bridge every other day. She visibly sped up when she passed under the bridge, probably for fear of the men living on the other side. 

Gerald saw the same cars every day, the same things repeated over and over in a useless, endless routine that nearly sickened him. If he had enough food, he would have puked it up, but the little food he got needed to be kept down in his stomach. Every night, just before dark, he would walk four blocks to the soup kitchen on the corner of 4th and Jefferson. After eating his meal for the day, he would walk back. He stared at his feet, his two smallest toes on each foot poking out of his shoes through worn holes, sock-less and wrinkled and sad. 

Gerald had optimism, though. It was the uneducated optimism that children and happy people had, and Gerald was therefore not sure why he had it. But he did. He smiled at the school boy and nodded happily to anyone who looked at him from the safety of their glass, metal and rubber cocoons. He was not, however, happy. He felt like he had missed an opportunity sometime around the age of thirty and he could not ever remember what that opportunity had been. Probably something wonderful. It must have been great. He would have been a star or a rich person or an astronaut. He would have had really nice shoes. He laughed whenever he thought of just how many shoes he would have had. Dozens! Hundreds; so many shoes he would have been sick of them. 

A person could get lost in his own mind for hours, just imagining himself in another place. Gerald did this far too often. Most of the time, he thought he was in a glass house with fans blowing nice breezes at his face and a small servant giving him grapes. He rarely slept anymore, or at least not for very long periods of time. His entire life was a dream sequence, sometimes conscious, most times not. 

One day, he began walking to his daily soup kitchen meal and he turned down the wrong corner. He looked at the buildings and the cracks in the road and the fading, peeling paint in a fascination he had not felt for years. He walked and he saw the people, and they were scared of him, but he smiled and told himself that was okay. He watched lovely women prance through the streets, and saw business men watching them just like he was watching them. Gerald saw men like himself, down and ugly, nowhere to go. He motioned to them, to join him in his walk of fascination. They glared and turned away. He kept walking. He didn't stop. He stared at his shoes and he walked until he could walk no more, and he felt a little bit happier.