Three Left Shoes

It was late and Milo was driving Horner home in the ancient van, after the first live performance of the Alice Project. Had it gone well? Horner couldn’t say. Did it matter? Tomorrow was “big garbage pickup day” in the neighborhood, and they arrived to the junk of a thousand garages clogging the street, scavengers already roving in trucks to pick through the piles. They spotted a couple of women setting a fold-out bed on the sidewalk.

“Hey, are you throwing that away?” Milo called to them.

“Yes, yes…”

He roared into the driveway, calculating that the mattress might fit on the narrow plywood bed he’d built in the back of the van — which had, for the time being, become his new apartment. He took it and hefted it into the van, while one of the women laughed that they might as well take the frame as well. Milo ignored her and announced, “Fits perfect!”

They found all kinds of things on the street. Old record players, TVs, radios, cabinets. Most they simply marveled at, some they lingered over, trying to decide whether to keep them. Then they found the Big Wheels. Just like they used to ride as kids: the huge plastic wheel in front, two smaller ones in back, and a scoop seat so low that your ass was an inch above the ground. Milo hopped on one and went screaming down the hill, while Horner unearthed another from the heap and followed him, resting precariously on the seat with his legs thrust out on either side.

They raced over and over down the hill, laughing, using their shoes on the pavement as brakes, and finally careening straight into another pile of junk. The flap of Horner’s trench coat got caught under a wheel, leaving a long black streak and a good-sized tear.

It was in these piles of junk at the bottom of the hill they made a curious find: three left shoes, each one nicer than the last, fine leather shoes, wingtips, just the right size for each of them. Yet nowhere could they locate their right-foot partners. They overturned groaning cabinets, opened dresser drawers, even poked around in garbage bags full of slimy coffee grounds. Nothing.

“Sometimes,” Milo pronounced with a wry grin, “the universe rhymes.”

They lined up the left shoes on the curb and left them there.

Feeling free and relieved as he hadn’t in a long time, Horner joined Milo for a late drink at Clooney’s. They hunkered down at the bar over their beers, rolling cigarettes from a pack of Drum. They hadn’t seen each other in a while, and had a lot to talk about. Milo told him about his new job at the Roxie, thanks to the woman they’d met the night of La Strada, whose name, it turned out, was Nicole. He’d invited her to the beach, they’d fooled around, begun dating, and she’d helped set him up with a job as a projectionist at the theater. For Horner’s part, there was the show, and now that the end was in sight, this new writing project he’d been toying with.

As he began talking about it, planning it out in his head, he realized he was in love — with who or with what, he couldn’t say. Did it matter?

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