You will buy these construction site shoes with square steel toe, padded ankle protection and Kevlar soles in a working clothes shop on Harlemerdijke and pay the equivalent of 100€ for them – it will be more than what you’ll use to put in shoes at the time but considering the many years you’ll use them they’ll end up being quite cheap. You’ll have kept a taste for square steel toe boots since you‘ll have bought a second hand pair in a French military shop that you’ll have nicknamed your ‘aircraft carrier technician boots’ and also kept longer that they’ll be realistically wearable. You’ll also enjoy Doc Martens-style shoes – you’ll owe and wear 20 eyelet boots – but they are too round, too light and too thin compared to real protection boots, they‘ll always make you feel like jogging – you’ll also enjoy colourful sneakers a lot, though this will come later.
The money for the shoes will come from a composition you’ll make for a dance and music piece that will alas remain unachieved – the music that will keep unheard on a computer hard-drive will stay for you the best you’ll ever compose, beautiful, complex, naïve, lively, ambitious… You’ll spend months on it, gathering first a huge database of desirable music references and analyzing every second of it, without any experience or method but a confident feeling of creative drive, to create something new, exciting and emotional (you’ll have to admit that it sounds like a perfect plan to fail). Still you’ll compose on your eMac one hour of music for piano, voices, drums and electronics – having the voice parts played by digital flutes and using drum loops from Garageband –, and you’ll regret all you life never having heard these songs performed live by real musicians. Later you’ll play the piano parts to skilled pianists who will assure you that they are mostly playable – though some parts might require the removal of a few notes since they couldn’t grow extra fingers –, but you’ll never find production money to pay someone to record it.
When you‘ll bring the music to the first working sessions in the Amsterdamse Theaterschool, the reaction of your partners will be unexpectedly disappointing – they will be dear friends, if not more, with whom you’ll be used to work, whose talent and dedication you trust, but though you brought them the project – a re-tale of L’Eve Future of Villiers-de-l’Isle-Adam from the perspective of the 4 female characters, it won’t be you the director, nor the carrier of the project, and you’ll might have screwed up your part: they’ll say that this music is just far too difficult to be performed on stage.
Well it won’t be told and understood so reasonably at the time and it will stir quite a quarrel, leading you to step out and demand to be paid for all your work, while retaining the ownership of the music. And since at the time you’ll have developed a sharp disgust of banks and institutions, you’ll have the habit to claim your right as a musician to be paid cash and right away after any performance (something coming from American jazz-club musicians who would pocket their fee at the break of a gig, having proved that they showed up and were in condition to play, but before the owner of the club had time to run away with the content of the cashbox), so you’ll be the only one to be easily paid and walk away with an envelope of banknotes a few days after the cancellation, when the others will have to struggle with the producer and restart the project from scratch – it will take over one year to resurface as a downsized object theatre video…
Anyway you will feel a little bit embarrassed but in your rights with this money and go buy the shoes you’ll have noticed in this shop right away – and also a new USB keyboard and a USB stereo microphone to keep working on that music, something that will not really happen, but other music will. And pay the bills. The shoes will be perfect as much with straight leather trousers than with baggy skate pants or a suit or a kilt – all kind of clothes you’ll like to wear –, they’ll make you feel comfortable, protected and grounded, good walkers even if heavy at the end of a long day… They’ll be professionally re-dyed and resoled a few times and they’ll stay in condition a long time after looking over-distressed, but they’ll have a big flaw all along: the eyelets will always break laces very easily and they’ll need replacement every few weeks – over the years it will be a lot load of laces! No matter what you’ll try, after a few days you’ll start making knots with ragged bits of laces until they are too short and entangled to deal with, then you’ll wait a few more days and cut them away and pick in the lace box for fresh ones… For years.
