My worst habit has been wearing shoes that don’t fit. My second worst habit, ketamine, conveniently has a numbing effect. The last time I went to Unter, Brooklyn’s Berlin-coded rave that lasts all night long, I wore a pair of shoes two sizes too small: Diesel booties, with a low heel, peep toe, and an exposed zip. I was being vain, and before I left the house, I was already in pain.
To rank my pain according to the Wong-Baker Faces scale, I’d say the feeling at the start of the night was a two, “hurts little bit,” the face a pinched smile. On the Uber back home the pain was an eight, “hurts whole lot,” the face lacerated by a big frown. I didn’t make it to ten, “hurts most,” with tears. As soon as I collapsed into the backseat, I took the shoes off, and from the car to my apartment front door, I let my fishnet-body-stockinged feet touch cement.
In the dark of a party like that, I’m not sure anyone was paying attention to what I had on my feet. The shoes weren’t for compliments, they were for me: a uniform I suffered to get in the mindset of the fantasy.
Or, I just didn’t realize how bad it would be.
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Why do I even have shoes that don’t fit?
The Diesel booties were a steal, thrifted for $45 and when I tried them on in-store, I thought they felt fine even though I wear 41 and their hardly-touched bottoms were etched with the number 39. The shopping endorphin high must have dulled the pain. Had I even walked around?
I held onto a pair of satin pink strappy platforms for years even though they caused great discomfort because a friend had remembered I’d thought they were pretty in the middle of an overdose and on the way to the hospital she’d told her roommate: give these to Whitney. (Don’t worry, she survived.) This made me sentimental for shoes that pinched in ways that almost caused me to pass out. I wore them to a gala where the clasp of my rhinestone ball evening bag broke and a friend tied it together with a cell phone charger cord, before I spent most of the night leaning against things to put less weight on my pained feet.
I inherited another pair of shoes that were also too small because my boss swiped these Maryam Nassir Zadeh slides from his doorman’s front desk. They were dropped off for a stylist in his building but it’d been irritating him how they’d been sitting there for the better part of a year. Beggars can’t be choosers and they were again the wrong size, but it wasn’t such a problem that my heel hung over the back a bit. The pain came from the single band strap not being wide enough for my foot. Still I wore them until the patent leather looked like shit.
