Sequin-Studded Black Shoe

Greyhound Rock, June 2016

After weeks on a national book tour for Grunt, with radio interviews that sometimes began at 4 a.m., Mary Roach needed a break. When one of her events was scheduled for Bookshop Santa Cruz, she invited me to join her on the short road trip south and appear with her “in conversation.”

I took the wheel of her blue Mini Cooper and drove us along Highway 1. We skirted the sharply defined edge of the continent, sharing mini-pretzels and nectarines. Mary’s dearest wish was to stop for 15 minutes, somewhere, anywhere, and breathe the ocean air. I suggested Greyhound Rock: an obscure and beautiful county park, south of Año Nuevo and north of Davenport, where I’d spent many drug-addled afternoons during my half-hearted matriculation at UC Santa Cruz. One of the reasons I loved Greyhound Rock, I told her, was that it was a great place to find abalone fragments, hole-ridden rocks, and driftwood—objects I’d integrated into assemblages during my years as a visual artist.

We parked and followed a steep, lupine-lined path to the beach. It was intoxicating to be back on that nostalgic crescent of sand, watching the waves splinter against the eponymous offshore rock (which Mary insisted looked more like a crocodile). There wasn’t much abalone or driftwood, but we found this shoe: A single black sequined flat, better suited to dancing than beach-walking.

How had it ended up here, amid the kelp and crab shells? Through lust, shipwreck or distraction? How we longed for a QR code, a quick portal into the lonesome shoe’s story.

Mary drew a good crowd at the bookshop, and kept her fans entranced with tales of stink bombs, maggot therapy, and penile reconstruction. And though I kept up my side of the conversation, my mind kept returning to this size 6 shoe. For every grain of sand at Greyhound Rock, there are a thousand stories that no one will hear.