How Back Surgery Turned Me into a Loafer Lover
A week ago I was walking home in my loafers from the movies, the new one where an ostensibly young Robert De Niro walks like an old man. It reminded me of how I walked after my spinal surgery. That was three years ago last Sunday, and when I came out they didn’t think I would walk again. I didn’t know that at the time, though—I just knew that when I walked, it was slow.
It was a rough fall. I had broken my ankle a year before and injured the other leg a month earlier, and around the election it began to feel like both were being electrocuted. Active recovery from the first surgery caused a herniated disc in my spine, and passive recovery from a second pushed it out. One Thursday morning, after a week of hell, I woke up unable to feel my legs or walk or go to the bathroom. By lunch my whole lower body was gone, and by mid-afternoon I was being carried in an office chair up York Avenue to an emergency room at Cornell Weill, where I slept that night, and stayed for a few weeks, after getting a spinal microdiscectomy, L2-L3.
I wondered how Pesci was doing. I had forgotten my headphones and was listening for the 100th time to my heels hitting the pavement down the same route from the movie theater by me, past the rich-people grocery store, my mail place, the bodega. All this year I’ve worn loafers, and every day I hear them when I go somewhere, and when I head home. Sometimes they sound like the execution scene from Paths of Glory, when the soldiers walk to face the firing squad. Sometimes it’s heels in a boardroom, or oxfords in a courtroom—scenes from other movies I must not be able to remember. Sometimes it sounds like the rain. Any of them might be my favorite. I listen to one tap, then another, and am home.
My conversion to church shoes began in January, after the Celine Fall 19 (men’s) show, where the models’ black tassel loafers looked very good with their white socks. A long-held, bubbling interest in officious footwear boiled into a split-second decision that I needed them, that sort of universal decisive moment that creates both the best and worst stylistic flourishes. I did some research. The models were wearing Luco loafers, black, which also looked like welt-sole Loake Brightons, released around 2015 in England. Loake makes shoes for the Queen of England, and the collection’s debt to Paul Weller demanded British soling. They’re tough shoes to find, not vintage enough to be archived, but old enough to be mostly sold out. I’m pretty good at this; I figured I could find them no problem. Not long after, I tracked down a guy in Long Island City with two pairs and bought one—and wore them, and kept wearing them. This is like anything else, I thought: Find something difficult, solve a puzzle, play by the rules, find a deal, find a story. I bought more after, Loakes and others, from other people.
They stuck, but I wasn’t sure why. Hard-bottom shoes are the only formal tic in my decidedly nonchalant sense of dress. The oxford shirts and sweaters I could pair them with collect dust, passed over for decades-old T-shirts and fraternity jerseys that are slovenly faded but conservatively cut. I would probably make more sense in sneakers. I have plenty and like how some look. They just don’t sound like my loafers. They don’t sound like anything.
It’s not just the sound, though. Nice shoes feel different, respectful, quiet, a more direct way of facing the world. I wore black Red Wing Postmans with white socks to a wedding five years ago, but never anything more than necessary elsewhere. But after starting to try, I liked it, and how they look. Led by my feet, my wardrobe has gotten distilled to a more deliberate version of itself, if just as informal. Loafers are versatile, both forgiving informality, and complementing effort. What else do they go with? There is a lot more to choose from.
The day after my surgery I thought, “Boy, that was close.” The further I get from it, I wonder if it was. I think about it less. It’s not accurate to say I almost died, but it feels like that sometimes. I learned months later that my surgeons said if I arrived a day later, I’d have left in a wheelchair. It’s hard to get around that difference. After hearing that, I thought, “Crazy, my legs work,” whenever I looked at them. I couldn’t help it. Every time I glanced down for two years the thought would spring up. It’s nice to walk to the store, but exhausting to feel what that means every time you look down. Better to hear it.
I didn’t pick up on De Niro’s walking slow the first time I saw The Irishman, but on my second go I wondered how the old young man looked to everyone else. There’s a bodega on my route to the theater with tables outside and stairs next door. When I got back from the hospital I’d climb them with my walker after a walk around the block. The walk took half an hour. The staircase took five minutes but felt longer. Sometimes people sitting at the tables there would look up, hearing my walker tap up the stairs. I hated that sound. That bodega is the better one, but I don’t go there anymore.
This fall the pain stopped, and my legs got better, not as tired, and those thoughts went away. In July the trainer I’d started working out with, this strong guy with excellent posture I met through my chiropractor, told me I couldn’t wear the Margiela sock racers I had on to work out in, just the Polo canvas sneakers I have instead. It’s not crazy for legs to work if you work them. Lately they are the only sneakers I wear.
I am dreading the winter and looking down at boots and not loafers. My oxblood Loakes, a second pair with a finer sole, are louder than the black ones, but can I get them wet? I like them. I have Pradas I found for cheap enough to ruin in the snow. Maybe I’ll do that. I no longer think how close it all was, or anything, really. All it was is what happened to me. I just need that sound. It reminds me of what I have. The sound of my legs working is a steady rhythm, one tap and another. Once in a while, the less often the better, I think about it all when I hear the clicks. It always sounds nice to me to go somewhere.
Originally Appeared on GQ
