Walking a Mall in His Shoes

Living for a week in the middle of a disaster tries the nobler aspects of character. You can only be honest, alert, caring, generous and hard-working for so long before you hit the emotional wall and have to do something superfluous for a change. To all those who experienced tragedy in the last two weeks I sincerely apologize for what I did when my part of the drama was over, and for the words that follow.

I went shopping.

Unlike a lot of men I know--and some women--I love to shop. It makes me feel anonymous, depersonalized, part of a system. I love the pitch, and I love salespeople. I’m fascinated by the way retailers strategize to get our business.

Many a time I’ve stopped by the vacuum cleaner store in the Laguna Hills Mall, just to see the new demonstrations the salesmen have come up with to dazzle potential buyers. With a new Hoover, they suck up piles of pennies! They hold a bowling ball in the air, fastened to the vacuum line only by the Eureka’s studly power! The new Panasonic can lift nails out of a rug as if they were bits of foam!

This time, two items were my goal: some wool blankets for winter, and a pair of hiking boots. One morning after the fire, my brother and I had done some quick calculating and realized that by not losing the house, we had theoretically saved a whole lot of money. Since money is unhappy until it’s spent, the blankets and boots came immediately to mind.

My first stop was Ikea, which sounds Japanese but is in fact Swedish. Ikea is to retail what Jimmy Buffett is to pop music--the slickest, most pandering, most geared-to-please act in all of capitalism. Approaching Ikea gives one a sense of insignificance, because the building is about as big as three Queen Mary ocean liners, but very ugly. There’s nothing extra on an Ikea building, just right angles and dinky little windows. The message you get is: You, the consumer, are about to be consumed.

And consume you they do. The entire store is cunningly organized so that you have to walk through the whole thing--two stories of it--to find your item. You actually follow an arrow painted on the floor so you don’t get lost.

There’s a children’s playroom as soon as you walk in, where you can stash Jillian or Alex, because Ikea knows that more revenue is lost to parents distracted by bellowing 2-year-olds than can be made up for by the impulse items--strategically placed at every turn of the arrowed aisle--that kids can toss into mom’s cart. A quiet mind writes a bigger check.

Going up the stairs, you are informed by taped messages precisely how to deal with the complexities of Ikea merchandise: If it’s got a yellow tag, grab and buy it immediately, but if it’s got a blue tag, ask someone for help.

Once you have achieved the first floor, you then follow the arrow through virtual prairies of home furnishings. The acreage is divided into smaller parcels, in each of which furniture of a certain style is grouped so you can see how good it looks. Through these theme areas the consumer passes, forced to admit, for instance, that the high-tech halogen arc lamp, the cream leather sofa and simple pine coffee table look pretty bitchin’ when they’re all set up together. There’s a theme for every taste. Kids play house in kindergarten; grown-ups play house at Ikea.

After many hours of following the arrow, I found the blanket section. They had several thousand styles to choose from. I found two that were wool, red, gigantic and cheap. The design was mystifying--a bright red background against which played semi-geometric shapes in yellow, purple, blue. I guess it’s Sweden’s version of American Southwest meets Paul Klee meets child’s finger-painting. I had to have them.

Of course, once you’ve found your item, you still have to walk through the rest of the store to pay for it. Two hours later I arrived at the checkout area, something akin to the U.S. Customs portion of LAX. Cash registers stretch in a row for as far as the eye can see--in this case the children’s playroom where the future leaders of our republic were busy trying to dash each other’s brains with harmless rubber balls, laughing, biting, wailing, filling diapers.

The purchase went smoothly. The first thing the checkout girl wanted to know was my ZIP code, so I told her somebody else’s, hoping to throw a tiny monkey wrench into this great machinery. They took my check with only 34 forms of ID, and I took their blankets.

For the boots I went to the Red Wing store in Lake Forest, which in many ways is the opposite of an Ikea. If the underlying suggestion at Ikea is you better buy this stuff because everyone else will, then the subtext to a Red Wing boot store is, we only have special boots for special people--are you one of them?

The Red Wing in Lake Forest is small, quiet, and run by a man named David Starks. Starks is intelligent, well-spoken, and knows everything in the world about boots. He measured my foot on a largish gadget that revealed the exact size of the ones I own. We talked hiking, hunting, fishing, working. We talked support, comfort, breathability, water-resistance, hot-cold dynamics, lined versus unlined, sole materials, methods of producing the cotton used in socks, healed versus moccasin construction, Red Wing history and manufacturing principles, speed hooks versus eyelets, wax versus cream, wicking properties of wool, synthetic, cotton socks and all blends thereof. We talked service, maintenance, and, like old brothers-in-arms, the agonies of ill-fit boots.

I tried on 10 different pairs, none of which seemed quite right. I almost bought some, but David wouldn’t let me. Instead, he ordered me up some more and I left. Three days later the new boots were in. I tried on five more pairs. Finally we found some--Red Wing Irish Setters--that fit perfectly.

I strode around the store, trying them out, impressed that things so tough and unpretty could feel so good, inspecting in the mirror the way my spindly legs looked even sillier when supported by the staunch Irish Setters. We closed the deal with a personal check (no ID required), and a handshake.

David told me that he’d clean the boots for me any time (no charge), re-waterproof them any time (no charge), replace eyelets, speed hooks and laces any time (no charge). He would probably wear them for me any time (no charge) if I didn’t have a chance to wear them myself.

But I have made time. I wear them around the house to break them in, though they’re already as comfortable as a boot can be. I wore them last night after tennis. I wore them later with my bathrobe. I’m wearing them now to write this article, hoping that a happy sole will make for a decent column.