I went to Winchester elementary school in beautiful West Seneca, New York. Back in the 80’s it was a pleasant little middle class burb. Today, not so much. I lived my K through fourth grade existence relatively care-free. I had some friends. I was in the smart reading group. And my mother dressed me like a little douche! (I emailed my mother to send me pictures from fourth grade, so I could show you. She said “I have two and I don’t think you’re in fourth grade in one of them and you’re in your football outfit in the other.”)
At some point in fourth grade I was made painfully aware that everything was not created equal. The blue non-assuming white stripped no-name sneakers my mother purchased for me at K-Mart would somehow become a focus of ridicule. The ORANGE and not RED tag on the back of my Levi’s would also become ammunition for little a-holes to make fun of as well. And even though I agreed with the notion that velour shirts were pretty lame and skuzzy, I got four of them from my grandmother every Christmas and somebody had to wear them! But this isn’t a story about blue jeans or tacky 80’s blouses; this is a story about sneakers and the boys and girls that filled them.
I have no memory of name brand anything until I got to the fourth grade. During that year a couple little shits discovered Nike and they slowly starting showing up in my classroom of 25 or so pupils. This was a fairly quiet movement until one afternoon. It was close to the end of the day and Mrs. Boobfield (Her REAL name.) did that thing where she appoints an annoying blabbermouth girl in charge of the class so she could shoot the shit with another teacher down the hall, probably Mrs. Saggyboobs (NOT her real name.) She’d be gone for a solid 20 minutes and if we kept it down we could do whatever we wanted.
This particular day I decided to stay at my desk, which was located in the back of the room, and read a Danny Dunn book. He was a boy detective that got into some pretty boring adventures all about science and math. He was my Harry Potter God damnit and in retrospect I got freaking gypped! There were no movies! Nobody died! No cool monsters and magic potions and Danny certainly didn’t bang his buddy Joe Pearson’s sister! At any rate…
As I’m reading about Danny and invisible paint or some shit, a few of my fourth grade classmates decide to adjourn to the coatroom. As my desk was positioned right in front of the coatroom I couldn’t help but hear the debate that ensued. Apparently one of the four Mikes in class was hassling one of the three Daves in class and a Steve and a Rich were milling around. The Mike was fronting on the Daves’ canvas Nikes because his leather Nikes were obviously superior! You can imagine how deep this argument got coming from a couple of ten-year-olds. The word excellent was thrown around like twenty times.
At the time, I was buddies (I’m foreshadowing!) with the Dave mixed up in this conversation. In 2012 he can go piss up a rope for all I care, but in 1980 I considered him my friend. I opened up the hood of my little desk threw in my Danny Dunn book and went to my buddy Dave’s defense.
“I like Dave’s sneakers better cause they got the blue thing,” I said as I hit the coatroom. “Much cooler then red.”
I only wish Admiral Ackbar was present in the classroom that day, because he could have warned me I was walking into a trap!
“It’s called a swoosh,” Mike shot back. Then with a little head nod in my sneakers’ direction he finished with, “like you should talk… buddies!”
If you were to look up the word “buddies” in a real dictionary, it will just tell you it’s the plural form of the word buddy. It’s a noun and it means friend or companion. But if you wanted to slum it on down to the Urban Dictionary you’ll find the particular definition that we’re looking for today.
From The All Knowing Mother Fuckers Down At the Urban Dictionary: Buddies – 1970’s and early 1980’s slang for off-brand sneakers.
Basically if you were wearing cheap sneakers from any dime store regional retail outlet, you were wearing buddies. There’s even an ode to them. Some of the older folks might remember this ditty. “Buddies! They make your feet feel fine! Buddies! They cost a dollar forty nine!” Depending on what part of the country you lived in the buddies were either $1.49 or $1.99. In Western New York we went with the $1.99 version. Realistically, a good pair of buddies would set you back like $12-$15.
Let us return to the coatroom where my sneakers were just referred to as buddies. Looking a little confused I just say, “buddies?” “Yeah, nice buddies,” laughs Mike. “You get those at K-Mart?” This is eight years before Rainman proclaimed it, but everybody already knew “K-Mart sucks!” All I could say was, “No!”
And then Dave turned on me too. “I’ll bet he doesn’t even know how to say the name of our sneakers.”
Thirty seconds ago these two were at each other’s throats, now they’re the Nike Brothers and all of a sudden they’re coming after me!
“Yeah, how do you say it,” asked Mike.
“Nike,” I say it so it rhythms with bike.
Mike burst into laughter and pronounced it the correct way for the occupants of the coatroom. “It’s Ni-key,” he enthused with an unbelievably smug self-congratulatory look on his face. The kind of face you dream of punching several times.
Rich and Steve took this opportunity to pile on and point out that they even “knew how to say it,” and whether or not that was true, they were given free passes to join in on the fun. Rich was wearing the same sneakers I was and Steve was sporting a pair of Buster Browns about six months passed their due date. I just stood there with a befuddled look on my face, as I was showered with a barrage of “nice buddies,” “do your feet feel fine?” and “you probably don’t even get good traction with those buddies!” For some reason we were really into traction back then.
Luckily, Mrs. Boobfield returned and ended the coatroom powwow. “Take your buddies back to your Danny Dunn book,” Mike lobbed with a whisper at me as he went back to his desk.
I went back to my desk and sulked for the last twenty minutes of school.
The sneaker war had just begun and Leather Nike Mikey would sit on his thrown as the biggest dick I’d know for several years to come.
Flash forward a couple months passed the coatroom confrontation and things hadn’t improved much for my buddies situation. Christmas was a bust and I didn’t fair that much better on my birthday either. My parents weren’t going to spend the money on nice sneakers for me. In retrospect I get it. I was an overactive kid that got into everything and I pretty much outgrew or ruined anything nice they got me. (Notice my broken arm in one of the pictures.)
“Please mom! I really want Nikes! I’ll take care of them,” I’d plead.
“Just like you took care of your digital watch?” she’d reply.
“C’mon dad! They don’t cost that much,” I’d beg.
“Neither did your ten-speed bike,” he’d say.
I was forced to wear buddies for the rest of fourth grade as the great sneaker renaissance happened all around me. Canvas and leather Nikes blossomed all around school. Kids dabbled in Adidas, Converse and Puma! Tretorns and Keds were declared NOT buddies by the powers that be and a minimum $20 difference in sneaker price separated the haves from the have-nots.
A class war was taking form and I felt like the first victim, although I did have an entire busload of allies. West Seneca was like any town with a good side and a bad side of the tracks and I wasn’t exactly living on the good side. Winchester Elementary had seven or eight busses that would bring all the kids to school and at some point in the spring of 1981 it was pointed out that most of the kids on one particular bus all wore buddies! It became known as the Buddy Bus and I got off at the last stop.
The Buddy Bus’ route took it to the edge of South Buffalo, which was a real shithole and some of that poop rubbed off on my part of West Seneca. It was because of this proximity to South Buffalo a secondary term for buddies was born… liberty leapers. A few blocks into South Buffalo there was an old school shoe store located on Seneca Street. Liberty Shoes was probably the shit back in the 1950’s, with a big city store front display filled with shoes. But in 1980 it was a shell of its former self and specialized in selling buddies. I’d say almost every kid that rode the Buddy Bus sported liberty leapers at one time or another. Back at school the kids wearing buddies breathed a sigh of relief whenever a pair of liberty leapers strolled by.
(Author’s note – I’m just realizing how much this narrative sounds like A Christmas Story. Damn you Jean Shepherd! Watching that movie 800 times has influenced me in ways I don’t even know!)
I was determined to break the buddy cycle and I put forth a long term plan that my parents eventually agreed to. If I got good grades at the end of fourth grade and did all my shit show chores over the summer I could get a pair of Nikes for the start of fifth grade. After mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, keeping my room clean and skimming our white trash above ground pool all summer I was awarded a pair of canvas Nike sneakers with a blue swoosh! I was psyched! I couldn’t wait to prance into school on Monday with my first non-buddies and/or liberty leapers.
Unfortunately I literally couldn’t wait and the Saturday before school was to start, I snuck out with my new sneakers on! I had to show them off to my follow Buddy Bus buddies! They weren’t that impressed for some reason.
At some point in our afternoon adventures we were hopping a fence to get from one point of our neighborhood to the next, a fence I had hopped a thousand times. I placed my left foot into the middle of the fence, pulled myself up and swung my right leg up and onto the top of the fence. As I pulled my left foot up and prepared to do the actually hop, my right sneaker got caught on a sharp edge as I jumped over. The sharp edge snagged my right sneaker, leaving it with a nice long rip. The snag threw my momentum off balance and as I hopped over the fence sent my left foot straight into a sufficiently deep mud puddle that I should have missed by about two feet.
It was upon learning of this event my mother coined the phrase, “this is why you can’t have nice things.”
As I rode the buddy bus on Monday morning, I couldn’t help but staring at one pristinely white ripped sneaker and one dingy mud stained sneaker. They didn’t even look like the same pair. My new fifth grade classroom was almost empty when I got there, but quickly began to fill up. To my surprise nobody seemed to care about footwear and the morning flew by wonderfully.
It wasn’t until we were all lined up against the wall to head to lunch when Leather Nike Mikey saddled up next to me and said to everyone in earshot, “What’s the matter Brad? Did you get your sneakers at the Salvation Army?” What a dick!
Five years later Leather Nike Mikey cut off two of his fingers at BOCES and the last I heard he just got fired from a dog food factory for pissing in the dog food vats. In some small way that makes me happy.
I dunno. Maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment