Countdown to

FLASHPOINT

3/11/04

19 days (and counting to Flashpoint, in stores on March 30th)

Note from Suz:  Here's my wonderful husband Ed, (pictured left with Eric and several other presidential types) with... 

Tales from the Road!

The Tale of Gordo, the Wandering Sandal
-or-
Suz’s Costume Malfunction

The lead actors in this drama:

I guess the most important thing to know before I can tell you the story of Gordo is that when Eric and I go on tour with Suz, all three of us are very clear on our respective duties. Suz is in charge of meeting as many readers as she can, and enjoying the company of the terrific people who like her books.

And while Eric and I love to meet and hang out with readers, too, our real mission is two-fold. First, we need to keep Suz alive. And second, we need to take care of everything else.

Just so there’s no unnecessary tension, Gordo fell into the second category.

But one more thing before I can really begin. Even though Suz has got some things that make being away from home for long periods of time a little tough for her, she loves booksigning tours so much that she has figured out all kinds of ways around the challenges that she runs into from time to time. For example, Suz is badly allergic to all dairy products, and she doesn’t eat red meat. And when she’s doing a booksigning tour, usually she only has time to eat in the car between signings. So a several hundred mile stretch of interstate between Booksigning A and Booksigning B featuring only pizza joints, fast food burgers and Big Fat Ernie’s Cheesesteak Palace might, at first glance, appear impossible for us. But not so. Suz comes happily prepared with a positive attitude, plenty of cans of tunafish, and a cooler full of Suz-friendly other food and drink, so that as we drive past our highway-based nutritional opportunities, we can lean out of our speeding van, cheerfully say, "No thanks, Big Fat Ernie!" and drive on to the next booksigning, without fear that mid-autograph, Suz will collapse of starvation.

But even with Suz’s willingness to deal with whatever comes her way on tour, Eric and I try very hard to, well, for lack of a better phrase, keep her out of the tuna. Which is why the whole Gordo thing really got us going.

See, footwear is a big deal for Suz. Actually, since the Gordo incident, I have learned that it is a big deal for just about everyone but me. I wear sneakers or cowboy boots. Period. But for Suz, the choice is considerably larger. And normally, that’s not a problem. But on tour, she has found that in order to look nice and feel comfortable, especially for long stretches of time, there aren’t a whole lot of choices of footwear that are appropriate. And she had come to rely on a pair of Bass sandals as the perfect footwear for many of her booksigning tours. Comfortable, but nice-looking, and somewhere between casual and dressy. Just perfect.

And then, on that fateful summer day in New York, while at the RWA national conference, mere days from our departure on a two-week booksigning trip down and up the east coast, Suz realized that one of the leather straps on one of her perfect sandals had pulled free from its sole. The sandal was not wearable, and suddenly Suz was faced with the prospect of doing the entire tour in shoes which made her feet hurt, or made her look funny, or something else bad. (I should jump in here and make sure everyone knows that Suz was fine with wearing an alternate pair of shoes she had. But Eric and I recognized what we were really facing here -- if we didn’t do something, Suz’s feet were going to be facing the equivalent of two straight weeks of tunafish. For us, it was clear -- the day needed to be saved.)

At first, it seemed so simple. When Eric heard about the sandal problem, he said, "Oh, your Bass Casuals? That’s a classic style that will be easy to replace, for this is New York City, the greatest city in the world, and I am Eric, knower of fashion things that only women, gay men and Metrosexuals know. I will call Bloomingdales--" (he called it ‘Bloomies,’ I’m pretty sure just to make me crazy) "--and Saks, and I will find out where we can buy a new one."

(I should put a quick note in here that Eric is a straight guy, but he’s got interests that lots of gay men have, like women’s fashion. For me, women (and women’s fashion) are miracles. They get dressed up, and I love them. Eric loves women, too, but he knows where they buy the stuff that they get dressed up in. That makes him a Metrosexual.)

Anyway, Eric got on the phone, and I figured that the problem was solved. Eric and I would take a cab to the laundromat (it happened to be do-the-laundry-before-not-doing-it-for-another-two-weeks day), drop me and the laundry off, Eric would go buy the replacement sandal, and then come pick me up with the laundry. Mission accomplished. Spike the football lustily, and dance around in the end zone.

(By the way, from the moment that the sandal broke, Suz immediately moved on to Plan B. She assumed that the sandal issue was closed, and had already headed off to a meeting in her alternate shoes, figuring that’s what she’d be wearing for the rest of the trip. All of this sandal salvation business was taking place without her knowledge.)

So, while I organized the laundry, Eric was on the phone. Then he called somewhere else, and then somewhere else. Finally, the laundry was sorted, and I was ready to go. Eric hung up the phone for the last time, looked over to me with an ashen countenance, and said simply, "We’re blanked."

(A note about language. As is the case with any high stakes adventure, language during the Gordo incident occasionally got, shall we say, enriched. For the purposes of this version of the story, however, I will simply use the word "blank" to convey other words which one normally wouldn’t use in polite company. And you should also know that Eric and I occasionally refer to a profoundly regrettable encounter with a duck as shorthand for really blanking up in a big way.)

As Eric explained to me, it turns out that the Bass Casual classic style was so classic that it hadn’t been made in over a decade. So Saks, and Bloomies, and whatever other places Eric had up his puffy Metrosexual sleeve, didn’t carry a replacement for Suz’s sandal. It looked like we had, indeed, rendezvoused with the duck.

But then a simple solution occurred to me. Why not just get the sandal repaired? Surely we could get that to happen in New York City. And a quick trip through the Yellow Pages confirmed it. Not too far from the laundromat, there was a shoe repair place. We could drop off the sandal, have it repaired while we did the laundry, pick it up on the way back to the hotel, and commence end zone dance.

So we went downstairs with the sandal and the laundry, got a cab, put the laundry in the trunk, climbed in the back seat with the sandal, gave the cabbie the address of the shoe repair place, and we were off.

I don’t know what happened between the time that we left the hotel and the time we reached our destination, but for some reason, my mind decided that this was too easy. As the cab slowed down to drop me at the repair place, I began to imagine the exchange that would take place as I entered the shop.

First, it would be dark, lit only by a dirty skylight and a dim lamp hidden in a cluttered corner. The slowly turning ceiling fan would do little to stir the stifling, smoky air. And as I made my way to the counter, littered with coffee cups and old newspapers, an old man with yellow teeth and an eye patch would limp out from behind a dingy curtain separating the front of the shop from his workspace. I would hand him the sandal, and he would look it over with his one eye carefully, cough, mutter something in a foreign tongue, put it down on the counter, and whisper, with a heavy accent, "Where did you get this thing?"

I would try to explain all about Suz and the booksigning tour, but he would cut me off, and explain that what I had brought to him was a very rare sandal, made from the leather of a now-extinct breed of albino mules originally kept in the private zoo of a fourteenth century Moroccan prince. He could do the repair, but it would cost $16,000, and it would take three months. Two if he really hurried.

So when I actually went into the clean and brightly lit shop, I was considerably surprised when the friendly man behind the counter took one look at the sandal, said, "Four bucks -- come back in an hour," and then handed me a claim ticket. I returned to the cab as if in a dream.

Our time at the laundromat was serene. Eric and I knew that we had saved the day. The sandal was to be repaired -- the booksigning tour would proceed unmarred. The laundry almost did itself, and fifty minutes later we hailed another cab, put the clean and folded laundry in the trunk, gave the driver the address of the shop, and arrived at the appointed hour. I surrendered my claim ticket and four dollars, took the sandal, and returned to the cab. As I placed it carefully and securely on the seat between Eric and me, we looked at each other, exchanging the glance only heroes may share.

About five minutes later we pulled up to the hotel. We were bursting with excitement to bring our news to Suz. We bolted out of the car, grabbed the laundry from the trunk of the cab, paid the driver his fare and a handsome tip, and hurried up to our room, where we intended to explain just exactly how terrific we really were.

When Suz saw us, laden with clean and folded laundry, she was very grateful for our hard work, but Eric and I knew that what she was feeling at that moment was only a shadow of the exultation she would experience when we told her the story of how the sandal she had dismissed as hopelessly lost to the ravages of wear and tear had been diverted from its premature trip to the garbage heap, and returned to glorious and active duty.

And so as we began to tell our tale, Suz indeed became excited, and happy, and very very grateful, until the precise moment when I turned to Eric, expecting him to present the sandal to Suz, and found him looking at me, expecting me to present the sandal to Suz.

Of course neither of our expectations would be met at that time, for, as you have already surmised, the sandal was nestled safely in the back seat of a cab, somewhere in the middle of Manhattan.

Naturally, I cannot describe how my face looked at the moment that I realized that I had, rather spectacularly, blanked the duck. But neither can I describe how Eric’s face looked at that moment, because, well, frankly, the air was thick with feathers.

Apparently, the day was not to be saved.

I suppose that the good news was that since Suz had never expected to see the sandal again anyway, she had hardly had a chance to get used to the fact that it was back before she learned that we had left it in the cab. So she wasn’t nearly as disappointed that she wasn’t going to get her sandal back as we were. She did lament, however, that the sandal was now alone, driving all over New York City, like an explorer, like a kind of footwear astronaut, drifting through Manhattan.  (Note from Suz:  I believe what I said was, "Gee, I'm a little jealous.  My sandal's going to see more of New York City than I am." <g>)

We decided, at that moment of deepest despair, that we would give the sandal a good, astronaut name.

We came up with "Gordo."

And Eric and I promised that if we ever recovered Gordo, we would fall to our knees, and exclaim, "Oh Gordo, thank goodness you have returned." (I believe that we also decided that since Gordo was on an epic journey, we would pronounce "returned" with three syllables: re-turn-ed.) Suz thanked us for trying, and went down to one of the bars in the lobby, to meet with a group of readers. She was fine.

Eric and I, however, stayed behind in the room, devastated at the loss of Gordo. It was like against the greatest odds, we had fought our way through the NFL’s toughest defense, finally reaching the endzone, only to discover that we had left the ball back on the forty yard line.

It might have been the loss of that feeling of accomplishment, or maybe it was just guilt, or shame, but I foolishly thought we still had a chance to achieve triumph. I had kept the receipt from the cab fare, and I decided I would call the New York City Taxi Authority and see if we could locate the cab.

And at first, things looked up. I reached a human being on the phone, who took the information I gave her, and found the phone number of the cabbie. Nearly giddy with relief, I called the number.

But it had been disconnected. And when I called the Taxi Authority back, they had no more information. We had reached a dead end.

In the distance, I heard a faint quacking sound.

But then Eric sprang into action. He couldn’t believe that in New York City, the greatest city in the world, someone could leave something in a cab, and not get it back. Especially if they had a receipt from the very cab carrying the lost item. So he called again, and explained the problem to someone else. He was put on hold, and another person got on the line. He explained the problem again, and once again, he was put on hold.

And then Mrs. Finkelstein got on the line.

Let’s just say that Mrs. Finkelstein doesn’t take any blank. Because as soon as she heard the problem, she told Eric that she would look into it, and call him back in less than ten minutes. Seven minutes later, the phone rang. It was Mrs. Finkelstein. She said that we’d be getting another call in less than five minutes from the cab driver.

Three minutes later, the phone rang again.

And twenty five minutes after that, we were in the lobby of the hotel, checking to see if a familiar-looking driver pulled his cab up to the front door of the hotel.

* * * * *

There were several people in the hotel bar that afternoon beside the dozen or so that were meeting with Suz, but Eric and I barely noticed them. Nor were we worried that in later conversations, they would recount the story of how two strange men knelt in the middle of a busy New York hotel bar, shouting something about a guy named Gordo and mispronouncing the word "returned."

For Gordo was back.

And we had sav-ed the day.

That's all for now!  Be sure to come back for tomorrow's installment in the Countdown to FLASHPOINT!

See you tomorrow!

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