Do you like my sneakers? A Poor Sneakerhead Confession.

“It’s 5:10 PM on a Tuesday and I have finally decided to sit down and focus on the blog that I want to write this week. “Slow Down” by Skip Marley comes on, and I wonder if Bob Marley is aware of how blessed he was to have created a lineage of talent. Even though I’m in front of the computer, I still procrastinate a little more by looking at socks on the Stance website, as if I need another pair. I don’t need socks right now. Not in the middle of this pandemic. I’m not going anywhere important enough that I would need a new pair of socks. But I can’t help it. I love Stance socks. Socks are the underwear of the feet and nothing feels better than new underwear.   

I’m also thinking about how happy I am with the response of the blog so far and how consistent I’ve been with it and how I don’t want to fuck that up.    I’m wrestling with figuring out when is a good time to write about how I deal with my depression. I don’t want to own it, but it would be narcissistic of me to carry myself as if I wasn’t depressed or aware of my battle with it from time to time. I want to believe that I’ll rid myself of it a little at a time when I write. I can only speak from my own personal experiences about not feeling supported when letting people know you deal with depression. I’ve shared this information with practically every woman I’ve dealt with over the past ten years, and they either dismiss me or tell me I need to go to church more. Some people treat a Black man saying he has depression the same way they would treat someone who tells them that they may want to get checked for chlamydia. They’re in such disbelief that they might have the clap because they thought they had good judgment of character and that there’s no way they didn’t pick up on this. I use chlamydia as an example because you don’t know you have chlamydia until you go get tested. That’s because the host generally doesn’t show any symptoms. But I have it. Not chlamydia, but depression. Now to the blog.”

“Hi. My name is Maronzio Vance, and I’m a sneakerhead,” is what I would say if I were at a place for people who need help for having a sneaker-collecting addiction. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term sneakerhead, let me enlighten you. A sneakerhead is someone who is considered a sneaker enthusiast, but, I have to be honest, I’m not a pure sneakerhead. My obsession with collecting sneakers may be misrepresenting itself with something deeper.     

That deeper part of me feeling the need to collect shoes may have come from some scarring moments that took place when I was a child. I’m not always comfortable talking about my living situation when I was growing up. I don’t mind writing about myself without filters, but I always have a moment of pause when I tell stories that involve my mother. I worry what my mother’s reactions to some of these stories may be if she were to ever read them. I don’t want to hurt her feelings by how I describe the way I remember our living conditions because I’m speaking from my younger self. She did the best she could, and I wish I knew how to release her from caring about what others may say in regard to how she handled the trials on her journey.

I could be a difficult child at times. I’m sure that’ll be no surprise to some of the people who read this. I don’t know how my mother did it. My mother, bless her soul, raised three children of her own, as well as assisted in raising several others that were related and unrelated to us. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. We didn’t really become stable until my junior year of high school, when my mother’s husband purchased a home for us to live in. At the time, I refused to move in with them. I never cared for my mother’s choice of who she wanted to spend her life with, so I opted to stay with my grandmother, who lived five minutes away from the high school I was attending.

When I was in the sixth grade, we moved to Northwood Estates. I know the name of this neighborhood sounds as if it were a gated community.  However, you can pump the brakes on that notion. These homes were nowhere near that nice. At best, this neighborhood was filled with a few above-average sized homes belonging to well-to-do Black people. The rest were a bunch of middle- class homes occupied by Black people who took pleasure in making poorer Black people feel bad about not being able to afford a home in this neighborhood. I will admit that the new neighborhood was an upgrade from our previous one but not at the level of confidence the new kids carried themselves with. My family being able to move into this neighborhood wasn’t enough for these children to welcome me into the fold. It took a while before they warmed up. I felt as if they had to do a background check on my family to make sure we could afford to live there before they accepted us. They treated me with the same hesitation someone would treat a person trying to become a member of an upscale country club.

Despite how uppity these kids were, I still wanted to be accepted by them. I decided one of the ways to prove I belonged was to transfer to the school that all the kids from the neighborhood attended. I was doing what I thought would help me get into their circle. Well, I would soon regret that decision, when we were forced to move shortly after I was able to transfer. It didn’t take long for those kids from my now-former neighborhood to make me wish that I had stayed at the school I fought to leave. At least at my old school, the kids only physically bullied me. I had made peace with those kids’ forms of abuse. However, the kids from the neighborhood I wanted acceptance from took the mental abuse approach. From my personal experience, it’s much harder to get over mental abuse than it is physical abuse.

They treated me as if I were some sort of fraud when they found out that my mother was renting the house we were living in. I didn’t know that my mother renting a house was equivalent to me misrepresenting myself as a false friend. It’s so funny because we didn’t move too far from where we were originally living. We moved barely five minutes away into some low-income apartments. The next day at school, you would have thought I was a homeless person begging them for change when I went up to greet everyone. Kids can be mean. That’s why I don’t feel bad when I say, “Fuck kids.” I know what kids are capable of doing. I used to be one. When I say, “Fuck kids,” I mean it in the same way you do when you’re talking to yourself and you say, “Fuck Trump.” Sure, you should show his position some respect, but if we want to live in a better world, than we have to be honest and comfortable with looking past titles and be able to own up to the fact that he’s a fuck-up. We should be able to say that about kids as well. I’m aware they don’t know everything, but it doesn’t excuse the fact that they can be evil little pieces of shit at times.

Once again, I found myself in the same predicament I was in when I first moved into the nice neighborhood and I was trying to get these kids to accept me. I had to figure out how to show them that I was the same kid as before. I was in total disbelief at how these kids whom I had once shared a neighborhood with now considered me less than human. There’s no handbook you can read as a child to help you understand how to handle mean kids, especially when they’re mean to you over something you have no control of.   

Then one day, I saw my chance to prove that I was still one of them, when I saw a couple of the important kids from my old neighborhood wearing the same shoes. Nike had just released the Alpha Flights. These shoes were the new must-haves if you wanted to be a part of what was going on. So, I told myself I had to have these shoes. I remember asking the kids at lunch how much the shoes cost. That was my way of dropping a subtle hint that I was thinking of doing something that they thought was cool. When they told me the price, I got a lump in my throat because I knew asking my mother for these shoes was going to be extremely difficult.

This is the part of the story where I hate my younger self for not being strong enough to not care about what those kids thought of me. I never asked my mother how much money she made. A part of me believes I didn’t ask because I knew she never had enough, and making her answer the question would only remind her of that truth. I told myself I needed these shoes in order to feel like I mattered. I remember going to my mother and telling her I needed some new shoes. I thought if I took the angle of describing the shoes to her first that she would be more inclined to get them. It was childish thinking on my behalf, but I was a child. I could have told her the shoes were signed by Marvin Gaye, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t have the money to give. I was asking a single mother of three to spend ninety-six dollars on one pair of shoes. When I was in the sixth grade, ninety-six dollars was more like five hundred and ninety-six dollars; it was a huge ask.

My mother said no in every imaginable way you can think of.  They ranged from an angry, “No!” to an I-really-wish-I-could-but-I-can’t type of, “No.” I wish I had been more understanding of her circumstances. I wish I had been wise enough to look deeper at her situation before I decided to act like an unappreciative spoiled brat. After she told me no, I was unbearable for the next few days. For some reason, I felt my mother would give in to buying me the sneakers if I was mean. I don’t even know how I came up with that idea. Eventually, I wore her down, and my mother gave in and took me to get the shoes I had been begging for.

“It’s been extremely hard for me to write this story. I am truly embarrassed when I think of my behavior in that situation. I’m also struggling to get through this because I really want to write about how everything going on in this world, from the murder of George Floyd to the pandering I see from people thinking they are supporting the pro-Black movement, makes me feel. I’m also reevaluating if we should even accept being called Black. We are not a color. We are humans who are descendants of cultures that we were removed from. It’s too much to unpack. Back to the blog.”

What makes me feel ashamed about this incident is how I responded to my mother when she finally gave in and told me she would buy me the shoes. I remember deciding to clean my room, even though my mother had been begging me to do so for days, and I had refused because I was upset with her. At that time, I definitely belonged in that group of “fuck those kids.” Everything she would ask of me on a normal day that I wouldn’t care to do, I did on this day. I even got my brother ready to go so we could buy the shoes as soon as my mother got home from work. However, when she arrived home, no part of me took into consideration, nor did I have compassion for the fact, that she may have been tired after a long day of getting two kids ready for school and another one for daycare, as well getting herself ready for work. If I had been really paying attention, I would have been able to see the exhaustion on my mother’s face. If I wasn’t behaving so selfishly, I would have been able to set aside my own selfish desires to be accepted by these kids so that she could have caught her breath. It sucks that I let the pain of feeling left out and being unaccepted by these children made me neglect my mother’s well being.

I was trying so hard to control what little I could of my life, and in my eyes that required me to be selfish. My goal was to get to Foot Locker as soon as possible, because I had made myself believe that they were going to sell out of the shoes in my size. My mom didn’t do it, but looking back now, I wouldn’t be mad at her if she had kicked my soul through the fucking wall.   In retrospect, I can see how foolish I was by thinking that pointing out all the red lights and erratic drivers were ways to show how much I wanted to help her. It came from a disingenuous place; I wasn’t helping my mother drive because I want to be a good team player, I just wanted to get to Foot Locker as fast as we could. When we arrived, I ran directly to the salesman with the shoe I wanted. In a very authoritative way, I said, “I need these in a size nine.” I’m sure by the way I spoke to the salesman, he would have liked to kick me through the same wall my mother probably wanted to kick me through.

My mother had her hands full with my baby sister and my younger brother, at whom I became angry when he decided to ask my mother for shoes, too. My heart began to race because I knew if she agreed to get him some shoes, it would cut into my shoe money. My mother played politics well by telling my brother she would get him some shoes later. Later could have meant any time, but it was enough for him to stand down. My eyes lit up when the salesman brought the shoes out. I rushed to try them on. Even if they didn’t fit, I was going to make them fit. I turned to my mother as she asked me, “How do they feel?” and I replied with, “They feel great; let’s get them.” She could tell I wasn’t completely present for the question she was asking me, so she reached down to see how much growing room I had. That is a very important thing for a mother on a budget with several children to know. She needed to know how much room I had in the shoe so she could determine how much time she had before she needed to buy the next pair.

I watched my mother hand the salesman at Foot Locker $101.96 for one pair of shoes, for one child and still didn’t see how what I was asking of her was a lot.

The next morning, I was so excited to get to school in order to prove to the kids that I was still one of them. It took everything in me to not chop up those children with a Hanzo sword when I walked down the hallway, expecting to get compliments, and they ignored me. These spiteful children decided they still did not want to include me as one of them. I heard someone whisper, “He thinks he’s cool because he got some shoes like us.” Another kid blurted out, “Those shoes are old. We are on to something else.” I wanted to cry, but how can you cry when you have on new shoes? Crying and new shoes don’t mix, unless they’re church shoes that hurt your feet. I didn’t know what to do. There I was, stuck with a $101.96 pair of sneakers that I forced my mother to purchase, even though I knew she couldn’t afford them.

I resented those kids for how they made me feel, and I carried that same resentment for a long time. What’s worse is that I carried around the need to own things in order to feel valued by people even longer. That need to feel valued put me in unnecessary financial debt by wanting to look worthy to be accepted by people. My shoe collecting brought out irresponsible behaviors, such as neglecting bills. I would justify that behavior and the purchases by telling myself that being accepted is a greater cause. The financial debt I created made me seek out someone to fix my credit. But my credit wasn’t what needed fixing; it was my self-worth that needed repair. Being locked up in my home during this quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect upon and strengthen my self-worth. As I write, I examine the unwavering love a mother has for a child. You can’t measure that love with any instrument known to man. As much as I cringe at the thought of my mother reading my writings, I wouldn’t mind if she read this one. I tell her that I appreciate her, but I think reading my reflective thoughts about realizing how much she loved me would help a lot. I also secretly hope that some of those kids from that old neighborhood who rejected me will read this and understand why I say, “Fuck kids.”

-EAT

I write as a form of healing for myself and others. If you enjoyed what you read, “tip the writer” by donating to Venmo or zelle @maronziovance or Cashapp $Gift2MaronzioVance