These Boots Are Made for More Than Walking

By Raanan Geberer

Visiting Tomas Sladek, my Czech immigrant friend, in his new incarnation as a graduate student in engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia raised a question in my mind: Would his newfound status change him?

After all, when I’d met him as an undergraduate at Brooklyn College, he was a drug user, a frequent shoplifter, an adulterer and a heavy drinker. From time to time, he also made outrageously racist, sexist and anti-Semitic jokes in public, not caring who heard them. All in all, these were not the type of qualities that would be considered ideal in a civil engineer, even though he was also a straight-A student. Would he now “go respectable?”

I followed him down busy Walnut Street -- which was hard to do, given how fast he walked -- to a stately old highrise building topped by a marquee with the name “Samuel Adams Hotel.” Walking into the lobby, I was stunned by the lack of activity. Looking past the desk into the rooms, it appeared that they were all empty. Mystified, I looked at Tomas, who was almost a head taller than I was.

“De hotel vent out of business,” he said rapidly in his deep voice. “Dey’re selling all kinds of tings dat ver in de rooms."

“Why don’t we take a look at what’s on these tables?” I said, motioning toward two tables in the back of the room. “Not so fast, not so fast,” he replied. “Come vit me!”

We took the elevator up to the 10th floor – a floor that was totally deserted. With the plain white rooms and white hallways and the furniture already gone, it looked to me more than anything else like a deserted nursing home. Tomas led me into one of the rooms.

“You see all de old brass doorknobs and chains? Dey must be vorth a lot of money!”

“So?” I asked.

“So?” he countered, smiling. He then reached into the high cowboy boots that every self-respecting twenty-something, myself included, wore in 1979. He took out two screwdrivers.

“Here,” he said. “Vun for you, vun for me!”

We spent the next five minutes or so unscrewing doorknobs and chains and stuffing them into our boots. On the way out of the building, Tomas suddenly went to one of the tables in the back of the lobby, then picked up a pillow as if to appear more legit.

“Is dis a fedder pillow?” he asked the middle-aged female cashier.

“What? … Oh, a feather pillow? Yes. It’s two dollars”

“I’ll take it, please,” he told her, taking out his wallet.

As we left, I found my answer to the questions I’d asked myself earlier that day. Yes, engineering student or not, Tomas was exactly the same as he’d always been.