11/23/2023 0 Comments Buster and punch north america![]() No one had enough to get anything dirty, never mind to litter. There was not much to distinguish the inside from the outside: both were hugely empty, a neat, vacant streetscape, without money. ![]() The hallways in these apartment houses were long and ill lit. It was appallingly clean, especially once you got to the side streets, which were exceptionally clean-long rows of wide sidewalks and tenements, mainly in bland, dusty, pale brick. Inwood was a neighborhood of the respectable poor (maybe that’s what accounts for the Buster Brown shoe store). We finally settled in Inwood, way uptown. My first day in New York, in the United States of America. For the most part, the snake barely moved and there were long silences. This all happened in black and white, so in truth I don’t know what color shirt the man wore or what color the snake was. A man in an open-necked white shirt stood next to a glass case in which a black snake moved extremely slowly, sometimes across the glass, sometimes across the screen. On the screen was a show from a zoo, maybe the Bronx Zoo, a show about snakes. The adults gathered around the dinette to catch up on their news, and I-I was ten years old-was plopped in front of the TV. We got off the boat and were driven to the apartment in the east 30s of a landsman. But it seemed clear even to me as a just-landed immigrant that he was of the wrong time and the wrong place, of a simpler time and a more rural place, and hence either an archaic or a nostalgic figure, and it puzzled me how one or the other could be very good for business. The ads about this boy confused me-I was never quite clear about where the boy was supposed to be from and what sort of life he was supposed to be living. And one more puzzling thing, to do with language and the important mysteries of advertising: Even then, when my American English was an unreliable, uncertain, crude instrument for the apprehension of things, even then I wondered about the prudence of naming a store something as hokey as “Buster Brown.” There was a boy attached to this name, a boy after whom the store was named. I liked those things for all that they made uneasy-I mean the almost kinky consanguinity of the brilliance of the latest technology, all lit up, as it were, mixed with the tawdriness of the back of the store. ![]() The back of the Buster Brown store appeared distinctly shabby-you could see the storage area, which didn’t have a carpet there were little bits of crepe paper and tags and such lying around and dust. I was ardently devoted to mastering all this so I could claim my destiny as an American boy. The objects of my devotion included Campbell’s baked beans, Superman, Roy Rogers, cap guns, baseball gloves, Spalding balls, Levis, the Shadow, Bazooka gum, peanut butter, Coke, Chevys, Louis Armstrong, Dinah Shore, Milton Berle, Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Imogen Coca, the Pledge of Allegiance (at that moment, still godless but about to become a pious weapon in the war against godless Communism). Who knows how this should have been done: I experienced it as being akin to what’s expected of a devotee. It was the weirdest object of study among the welter of things that I, having just got off the boat, wanted so badly to see and feel and value the way any American kid would. I loved, feared, and felt altogether gaga about that contraption. At the base of this tall box was an opening where you stuck your feet while wearing strangely stiff, not-yet-purchased shoes the top of the box enclosed a rectangular viewer through which you looked down at-this was the magical part-an X-ray of your feet darkly outlined in their casing of new shoes! It was a kind of out-of-body experience, before I knew there were such things, and one blessed by science: a scientific measure to ensure that your brand-new shoes fit perfectly. The most wonderful thing in that store was a magical contraption kept in the rear against the back wall, a tall wooden box resembling an elongated cardboard carton or a miniature coffin. On 207th Street, way uptown in Manhattan, a couple of blocks north of the elevated subway, there used to be a Buster Brown shoe store.
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