The Great Foot and Mouth Love Challenge
My Happy Feet By David C. Bailey
W
hen I dared Maria Johnson to smoke a stogie, she counter-dared me to get a pedicure, which sounded OK at the time. But the more I thought about actually getting a pedicure, the less I liked the idea. You see, I don’t like to be touched by other people — except for my wife (and potentially a few other females — Keira Knightley comes to mind). It’s my mom’s fault. She would look at me sideways, swivel around with her embroidered handkerchief in one hand, grab me with the other, and after wetting the corner of her hankie with, ewwww, spit, clean the ice cream or bicycle grease or just dirt off my face as I squirmed and flailed beneath her farm girl’s iron grip. Or blame my dad’s family, who never touched one another except for the occasional tit-free, triangular hug that my South Carolina wife, who comes from a full-frontal hugging family, finds so cold. Blame a childhood punctuated by a series of surgeries, during which time I had instruments inserted where I didn’t want them and needles poked into my arms when I was lucky and elsewhere when I wasn’t. At any rate, when someone grips my shoulder consolingly or gives me a great big bear hug, I’m always subconsciously on the lookout for hidden hypodermics. So of course I dreaded having my feet touched by a complete stranger! There, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way. By the way, my instructions were to make this a humorous column, whereas my stock in trade is writing about food and beer and business. Maria and editor Jim Dodson thought it would be simply hilarious because of my so-called manly image — a guy who drives a Jeep, uses a shotgun to knock poor defenseless doves out of the sky, fishes, hikes, smokes cigars and turns the air blue whenever he smashes his finger with a hammer. Whatever. It seems to me it’s silly enough for any man to want to immerse his feet in what looks like one of those Parisian bidets. And feet are, in my humble opinion, funny in their own right. They’re oddly shaped, like the roots of a vegetable from Middle Earth. What’s more, they sometimes smell funky, and as age overtakes some of us, they develop new geography — misshapen toenails, calluses, warts, bunions and corns. Toes are a scream, with some of them going to market and some of them going to town and some of them having roast beef and some going, “Wee, wee, wee” all the way home. Big toes, again IMHO, are especially humorous — bulbous, and often twisted as if they had a mind of their own, as one of mine is from being broken while fishing for smallmouth bass in a rocky river. So who wouldn’t feel a tad self-conscious about his feet?
78 O.Henry
February/March 2012
But the day arrived when at last I had to actually go and sit down and take my shoes and socks off and submit my tootsies to the scrutiny and ministrations of a total stranger. And why should any manly man do this? I wondered. Women, of course, with their toe-revealing and impractical footwear, need pretty feet, but for a respectable sock-and shoe-wearing man like myself, having your feet burnished is a little like having your belly button polished. Who’s going to notice? “You’re going to love it,” Maria reassured me, with preternatural sensitivity recognizing my reluctance. After all, she’d sent at least a dozen emails asking whether I’d made an appointment at her favorite salon of toe touchers, Friendly Nails. (I ask you, does ‘Friendly Nails’ sound like an oxymoron or what? What’s next, Cozy Claws?) “You sit in a massage chair,” she said, “and put your feet in a whirlpool of warm water and you grab a magazine and relax. It’s one of the most relaxing and enjoyable things I can think of.” I had doubts about the range of Maria’s imagination, but even more I worried about my bolting from the quivering chair, leaving wet footprints across the parking lot to my Jeep, which I’d have to drive home barefoot in the cold. “They bring you a glass of wine,” she said. “Really?” I said. “And fill it up if you empty it,” she said. “And I’ll go with you.” And she did, thank goodness, and introduced me to Sue, whose name, it turned out was actually Thao Le (pronounced Tao Lee). Thao was nicknamed Sue because her hair stuck straight up in the air when she was an infant — I didn’t get it, either. Thao’s English, by the way, is first-rate, but her best form of communication is her winning smile and her self-effacing laugh. She came to America when she was 6 and is 20 now. Maria commented that she was beautiful. I had already noticed that. I tried not to stare. “Men come all the time,” Thao told us (I bet they do). “They come with their wives and they get pedicures together,” she said as she filled the whirlpool, dropped a couple of fizzy tablets into it and switched on an underwater light that she said killed germs. A glass of wine appeared, and I took a big swallow so as to get up the courage to take off my shoes and socks. The moment of truth had come. Maria and Thao both said that I had nice feet. “I bet you say that to all the feet,’’ I joked, and then asked her if she sees many ugly feet. “Sometimes, yes, but that’s why they come here,” she said diplomatically. By that time my tootsies were tingling in the warm whirlpool, the deeply cushioned vibrator chair was rumbling to life, and my wine was half gone. “I can see the attraction of this,” I told Maria as she headed out to do some shopping. “Sit back and enjoy it,” she said. And although I’m a trained observer and usually have a notebook in one hand and a pen in the other, I decided to take her advice. I fiddled with the controls of the chair — kneadThe Art & Soul of Greensboro
PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAM FROELICH
Love the soak, hold the paint