Shoe Dog (4 page)

From Onitsuka I went straight to the nearest American Express
office and sent a letter to my father.
Dear Dad: Urgent. Please wire fifty dollars right away to Onitsuka Corp of Kobe.

Ho ho, hee hee . . . strange things are happening.

BACK IN MY
hotel I walked in circles around my tatami mat, trying to decide. Part of me wanted to race back to Oregon, wait for those samples, get a jump on my new business venture.

Also, I was crazed with loneliness, cut off from everything and everyone I knew. The occasional sight of a
New York Times
, or a
Time
magazine, gave me a lump in my throat. I was a castaway, a kind of modern Crusoe. I wanted to be home again. Now.

And yet. I was still aflame with curiosity about the world. I still wanted to see, to explore.

Curiosity won.

I went to Hong Kong and walked the mad, chaotic streets, horrified by the sight of legless, armless beggars, old men kneeling in filth, alongside pleading orphans. The old men were mute, but the children had a cry they repeated:
Hey, rich man, hey, rich man, hey, rich man.
Then they'd weep or slap the ground. Even after I gave them all the money in my pockets, the cry never stopped.

I went to the edge of the city, climbed to the top of Victoria Peak, gazed off into the distance at China. In college I'd read the analects of Confucius—
The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—
and now I felt strongly that I'd never have a chance to move this particular mountain. I'd never get any closer to that walled-off mystical land, and it made me feel unaccountably sad. Incomplete.

I went to the Philippines, which had all the madness and chaos of Hong Kong, and twice the poverty. I moved slowly, as if in a nightmare, through Manila, through endless crowds and fathomless gridlock, toward the hotel where MacArthur once occupied the penthouse. I was fascinated by all the great generals, from Alexander the Great to George Patton. I hated war, but I loved the warrior
spirit. I hated the sword, but loved the samurai. And of all the great fighting men in history I found MacArthur the most compelling. Those Ray-Bans, that corncob pipe—the man didn't lack for confidence. Brilliant tactician, master motivator, he also went on to head the U.S. Olympic Committee. How could I not love him?

Of course, he was deeply flawed. But he knew that.
You are remembered
, he said, prophetically,
for the rules you break
.

I wanted to book a night in his former suite. But I couldn't afford it.

One day, I vowed. One day I shall return.

I went to Bangkok, where I rode a long pole boat through murky swamps to an open-air market that seemed a Thai version of Hieronymous Bosch. I ate birds, and fruits, and vegetables I'd never seen before, and never would again. I dodged rickshaws, scooters,
tuk-tuks
, and elephants to reach Wat Phra Kaew, and one of the most sacred statues in Asia, an enormous six-hundred-year-old Buddha carved from a single hunk of jade. Standing before its placid face I asked,
Why am I here? What is my purpose?

I waited.

Nothing.

Or else the silence was my answer.

I went to Vietnam, where streets were bristling with American soldiers, and thrumming with fear. Everyone knew that war was coming, and that it would be very ugly, very different. It would be a Lewis Carroll war, the kind in which a U.S. officer would declare:
We had to destroy the village in order to save it
. Days before Christmas, 1962, I went on to Calcutta, and rented a room the size of a coffin. No bed, no chair: there wasn't enough space. Just a hammock suspended above a fizzing hole—the toilet. Within hours I fell ill. An airborne virus, probably, or food poisoning. For one whole day I believed that I wouldn't make it. I knew that I was going to die.

But I rallied, somehow, forced myself out of that hammock, and the next day I was walking unsteadily with thousands of pilgrims and
dozens of sacred monkeys down the steep staircase of Varanasi temple. The steps led directly into the hot seething Ganges. When the water was at my waist I looked up—a mirage? No, a funeral, taking place in the middle of the river. In fact, several funerals. I watched mourners wade out into the current and place their loved ones atop tall wooden biers, then set them afire. Not twenty yards away, others were calmly bathing. Still others were slaking their thirst with the same water.

The Upanishads say,
Lead me from the unreal to the real.
So I fled the unreal. I flew to Kathmandu and hiked straight up the clean white wall of the Himalayas. On the descent I stopped at a crowded
chowk
and devoured a bowl of buffalo meat, blood rare. The Tibetans in the
chowk
, I noted, wore boots of red wool and green flannel, with upturned wooden toes, not unlike the runners on sleds. Suddenly I was
noticing
everyone's shoes.

I went back to India, spent New Year's Eve wandering the streets of Bombay, weaving in and out among oxen and long-horned cows, feeling the start of an epic migraine—the noise and the smells, the colors and the glare. I went on to Kenya, and took a long bus ride deep into the bush. Giant ostriches tried to outrun the bus, and storks the size of pit bulls floated just outside the windows. Every time the driver stopped, in the middle of nowhere, to pick up a few Masai warriors, a baboon or two would try to board. The driver and warriors would then chase the baboons off with machetes. Before stepping off the bus, the baboons would always glance over their shoulders and give me a look of wounded pride. Sorry, old man, I thought. If it were up to me.

I went to Cairo, to the Giza plateau, and stood beside desert nomads and their silk-draped camels at the foot of the Great Sphinx, all of us squinting up into its eternally open eyes. The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I
thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.

I went to Jerusalem, to the rock where Abraham prepared to kill his son, where Muhammad began his heavenward ascent. The Koran says the rock wanted to join Muhammad, and tried to follow, but Muhammad pressed his foot to the rock and stopped it. His footprint is said to be still visible. Was he barefoot or wearing a shoe? I ate a terrible midday meal in a dark tavern, surrounded by soot-faced laborers. Each looked bone-tired. They chewed slowly, absently, like zombies. Why must we work so hard? I thought.
Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin.
And yet the first-century rabbi Eleazar ben Azariah said our work is the holiest part of us.
All are proud of their craft. God speaks of his work; how much more should man.

I went on to Istanbul, got wired on Turkish coffee, got lost on the twisty streets beside the Bosphorus. I stopped to sketch the glowing minarets, and toured the golden labyrinths of Topkapi Palace, home of the Ottoman sultans, where Muhammad's sword is now kept.
Don't go to sleep one night
, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet.
What you most want will come to you then.

Warmed by a sun inside you'll see wonders.

I went to Rome, spent days hiding in small trattorias, scarfing mountains of pasta, gazing upon the most beautiful women, and shoes, I'd ever seen. (Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.) I explored the grassy ruins of Nero's bedroom, the gorgeous rubble of the Coliseum, the vast halls and rooms of the Vatican. Expecting crowds, I was always out the door at dawn, determined to be first in line. But there was never a line. The city was mired in a historic cold snap. I had it all to myself.

Even the Sistine Chapel. Alone under Michelangelo's ceiling, I was able to wallow in my disbelief. I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes.
He couldn't wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn't like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I went to Florence, spent days seeking Dante, reading Dante, the angry, exiled misanthrope. Did the misanthropy come first—or after? Was it the cause or the effect of his anger and exile?

I stood before the David, shocked at the anger in his eyes. Goliath never had a
chance
.

I went by train up to Milan, communed with Da Vinci, considered his beautiful notebooks, and wondered at his peculiar obsessions. Chief among them, the human foot.
Masterpiece of engineering
, he called it.
A work of art.

Who was I to argue?

On my last night in Milan I attended the opera at La Scala. I aired out my Brooks Brothers suit and wore it proudly amid the
uomini
poured into custom-tailored tuxedos and the
donne
molded into bejeweled gowns. We all listened in wonder to
Turandot
. As Calaf sang “Nessun dorma”—
Set, stars! At dawn I will win, I will win, I will win!
—my eyes welled, and with the fall of the curtain I leaped to my feet.
Bravissimo!

I went to Venice, spent a few languorous days walking in the footsteps of Marco Polo, and stood I don't know how long before the palazzo of Robert Browning.
If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.

My time was running out. Home was calling to me. I hurried to Paris, descended far belowground to the Pantheon, put my hand lightly on the crypts of Rousseau—and Voltaire.
Love truth, but pardon error.
I took a room in a seedy hotel, watched sheets of winter rain sluice the alley below my window, prayed at Notre Dame, got lost in the Louvre. I bought a few books at Shakespeare and Company, and I stood in the spot where Joyce slept, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I then walked slowly down the Seine, stopping to sip a cappuccino at the café where Hemingway and Dos Passos read the New Testament
aloud to each other. On my last day I sauntered up the Champs-Élysées, tracing the liberators' path, thinking all the while of Patton.
Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

Of all the great generals, he was the most shoe-obsessed:
A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior.

I flew to Munich, drank an ice-cold stein of beer at the Bürgerbräukeller, where Hitler fired a gun into the ceiling and started everything. I tried to visit Dachau, but when I asked for directions people looked away, professing not to know. I went to Berlin and presented myself at Checkpoint Charlie. Flat-faced Russian guards in heavy topcoats examined my passport, patted me down, asked what business I had in communist East Berlin. “None,” I said. I was terrified that they'd somehow find out I'd attended Stanford. Just before I arrived two Stanford students had tried to smuggle a teenager out in a Volkswagen. They were still in prison.

But the guards waved me through. I walked a little ways and stopped at the corner of Marx-Engels-Platz. I looked around, all directions. Nothing. No trees, no stores, no life. I thought of all the poverty I'd seen in every corner of Asia. This was a different kind of poverty, more willful, somehow, more preventable. I saw three children playing in the street. I walked over, took their picture. Two boys and a girl, eight years old. The girl—red wool hat, pink coat—smiled directly at me. Will I ever forget her? Or her shoes? They were made of cardboard.

I went to Vienna, that momentous, coffee-scented crossroads, where Stalin and Trotsky and Tito and Hitler and Jung and Freud all lived, at the same historical moment, and all loitered in the same steamy cafés, plotting how to save (or end) the world. I walked the cobblestones Mozart walked, crossed his graceful Danube on the most beautiful stone bridge I ever saw, stopped before the towering spires of St. Stephen's Church, where Beethoven discovered he was deaf. He looked up, saw birds fluttering from the bell tower, and to his horror . . . he did not hear the bells.

At last I flew to London. I went quickly to Buckingham Palace, Speakers' Corner, Harrods. I granted myself a bit of extra time at Commons. Eyes closed, I conjured the great Churchill.
You ask, What is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory . . . without victory, there is no survival.
I wanted desperately to hop a bus to Stratford, to see Shakespeare's house. (Elizabethan women wore a red silk rose on the toe of each shoe.) But I was out of time.

I spent my last night thinking back over my trip, making notes in my journal. I asked myself, What was the highlight?

Greece, I thought. No question. Greece.

When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary.

I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea.

And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis.

Hours before boarding my flight at Heathrow, I meditated on that moment, looking up at those astonishing columns, experiencing that bracing shock, the kind you receive from all great beauty, but mixed with a powerful sense of—recognition?

Was it only my imagination? After all, I was standing at the birthplace of Western civilization. Maybe I merely
wanted
it to be familiar. But I didn't think so. I had the clearest thought: I've been here before.

Then, walking up those bleached steps, another thought: This is where it all begins.

On my left was the Parthenon, which Plato had watched the teams of architects and workmen build. On my right was the Temple of Athena Nike. Twenty-five centuries ago, per my guidebook, it had housed a beautiful frieze of the goddess Athena, thought to be the bringer of “nike,” or victory.