The Leather Potato

David and I were sandal makers during the golden age of gladiator movies. While Victor Mature leered at the prelate’s consort in a thousand theaters, I was in a little shop in the carriage house of the Brattle Inn, Harvard Square, hair to my butt, holding a mouthful of clinching nails, building thigh-high Roman footwear for tenured professors to wear beneath their Harris tweed trousers. Business was good.
Business was too good. At twenty-two bucks a pair, custom fit, fourteen days lead time, we sold sixty pairs a week. We were capable of building fifty-five. That left five disappointed foot fetishists per week, five folks to whom I could not explain that Leary and Alpert and Harvard University had paid me to drink dropper-dosed water, that the water allowed me to read the minds of the of all the customers at Mrs. Barley’s Burger Cottage, that the water washed graduate school from my soul and made me regard ants as equals. Rather than disappoint our customers, we invented Herb.
Herb was an unanswered phone. If a customer showed at the shop and we were not prepared to deliver the goods, David and I found that we could temper our guilt and demonstrate that we were, indeed, dedicated businessmen by dialing one of our own home phone numbers, then ranting and raving at the ring signal in an empty house, asking Herb why Mr. So-and-So’s sandals which we’d sent to him for final polishing were not in our shop, not ready on the date we had specified. We’d then give Herb the “By God....or else” option, apologize to the customer, and ask him to come back in a couple of hours, after we had retrieved his sandals from that no-good Herb. It took us and hour and a half to make a pair of sandals from scratch.
The Irish can make a party out of anything. On a spring morning in 1963, Colleen Mahoney, secretary to the president of the Maine Potato Growers’ Association, entered our shop and asked if we were capable of making a leather potato. Her boss had decided to retire on the 118th anniversary of the Irish Potato famine, and she needed something a bit unique as a present. Aye, and sure we could build a tuber of leather. Could she be coming back in two weeks?
Two weeks later, just before lunch, there she was again. I panicked, grabbed the phone and got brutal with Herb, threatening to terminate his employment with us if he didn’t finish the Mahoney job soon and have it in our shop within two hours, at the latest, by God. Colleen had a bit of shopping to do in Boston. She granted us three hours. David and I went to lunch.
Our lunch was Kantian in its routine. Every noon, year around, we bought two fried egg sandwiches, mine with sweet pickles, his with catsup, and two cartons of chocolate milk from the same woman in the same diner, ate them beneath the same tree beside the Charles River, then played bare-handed, high-fly-ball catch with the same softball, in the sun, snow or mud. Neither of us questioned the monotony of our habit. Lunch tied us back to the Midwest, to our lives before Mad Dog, Romilar, amyl nitrate, the devil weed, and, now, lysergic acid. We needed those fried egg sandwiches.
On the day of Colleen’s return, David launched a ball into the midday sun. I misjudged the trajectory. The ball boinged off the paved bicycle path then plopped into six inches of April-in-Cambridge Charles River muck. I was smitten with creativity.
We soaked the softball in the river, then took it back to our shop, squeezed it in a bench vise, beat it into a spuddy lump with the blunt end of a splitting maul, pecked eyes into it with a small punch, dried it in our toaster oven, dipped it into a vat of antique brown dye, waxed and polished it, then sold it to Colleen for twenty dollars. She was happy. I do know that someday I must return her money.
As she was leaving the shop, Colleen lifted a finger to me, and said “I’d be thinking again about the way you treat this Herb fellow. He stitches so beautifully."