Cutre

Here are your heroes at the 2006 Big Shoulders Swim Race in Chicago. My pasty, hydrodynamic body is shaved clean of it's furry outer coat in hopes that I might swim faster. We left for Spain later this same day, and I spent the next three weeks itching all over as my silky coat slowly grew back in. Note the high-quality French-made flip-flops on my feet.



A pixelated closeup of my legendary flip-flops.

Not long into my very first trip to Madrid in 2000, I was itching for some regular exercise. In the prior year or two, I had taken up some informal swimming in Las Vegas. I had not yet risen to the level of formal, United States Masters Swimming-level workouts, but I was getting wet regularly. In 2000, I definitely had the need for more exercise, having ballooned up to my heaviest weight ever (205 or maybe even 210!). Plus, I just had a need to be active. After a trip down to El Corte Inglés in La Puerta del Sol of Madrid, I outfitted myself with goggles and a swim cap. My problem was that it was early January, and nobody had flip-flops in stock. Spain is a beach-happy country, but there is not an abundance of flip-flops in mid-winter. Also, there is no beach in Madrid. This fact is noted in a silly pop song about Madrid that notes that, despite all it's wonders, "Al llegar agosto, ¡vaya, vaya! Aquí no hay playa, ¡vaya, vaya!" This translates more or less as, "When August comes, go, go! There is no beach here. Go! Go!" This alludes to the long-standing tradition for residents of Madrid to go on vacation in August that I have previously noted. You can see a video for that song here.

I don't recall all of the details, but I know that for a short time, finding flip-flops was a high priority. Simply put, flip-flops were a necessity at a public pool in Madrid. Our local pool dated back to the 70s, more or less, I believe. I realize that a large part of Franco's government was fascist, but the public pool in our neighborhood met my stereotype of what a public pool must have been like in communist Moscow circa 1975. I guess totalitarian regimesm, regardless of ideology, share a common style of public swimming pools. The facility was a large concrete structure completely lacking in amenities. There were no lockers, though there was a guy with whom you could leave your valuables. This caused me some anxiety on account of my ongoing, irrational fear of losing my passport. The changing area was a bare concrete room with spigots for showers sticking out of the wall in one corner. The pool itself was fairly decent from a serious exercising point-of-view. It was simply a large, deep concrete rectangle. The water was cold. This was not a pool for playing. It was for exercise only. It was used for lap swimming only. It actually would've been fairly decent setup for me except for the fact that the pool attracted a pretty large crowd. I was by no means a fast swimmer at that time--pretty slow, in fact--but there were so many other swimmers paddling around that it was impossible to get a head of steam before you were climbing up some Spanish matron's back side. Each lane was crammed with 10-15 people trying to get some exercise all at the same time. Unfortunately, there was no system to allocate swimmers of similar abilities to particular lanes. The bottom line is that it was very difficult to get a decent workout in that milieu, and so I eventually abandonded my swimming career in Madrid.

But wait, isn't this all about the flip-flops? Yes, it is. After a day or two (or three?) of searching, we stumbled into musty little variety shop on some side-street. They had my flip-flops. They also had other eccentric knick-knacks, although I cannot remember any of the details aside from stacks of boxes and claustrophocially-spaced, shelving units crammed into the tiny space to allow for maximal offering of merchandise. Nines informed me that the shop was "cutre." For some reason, I've always remembered that word and linked it to my flip-flops. More interestingly, cutre means, in a literal sense, "cheap and nasty or dirty," according to my dictionary. I believe that Nines defined it more like "tacky," but she clarified that for the hip, there was "good" cutre and "bad" cutre. This shop qualified good cutre in the same way that you might think of a cool second-hand shop with lots of trendy, retro clothes and assorted knick-knacks.

The very sad news that I must report is that I lost beloved Spanish flip-flops a couple of weeks ago. They were made in France. Say what you want about the French, but those guys can make flip-flops! Those flip-flops have been a peculiar keepsake of mine for years with many memories tied to their cheap plastic and rubber. The are memories not just in Spain, but from all over the place. In the same sense that I wonder if Floyd will ever die, it seemed to me that my flip-flops might live on forever too. They're both black, after all. I have no idea how I could've lost my flip-flops. I know I had them at the Las Vegas pool one day. A couple of days later, I returned to my locker, but they were not in there with the rest of my gear. I must've left them sitting out on the bench right next to my locker. I find it hard to believe that I would walk away leaving my stuff just sitting there, but I must've done so. I think I also lost a towel at the same time. Sadly, they were not in the lost and found. As excellent as they were, I doubt they could've been of value to anyone else, being old, worn, and most importantly, someone else's intimate footwear. I suspect that the guy who "cleans" the locker room must've chucked them. I'm now wearing some soulless Wal-mart-class of flip-flop that leave me empty and hollow on the inside. For a while, I was hoping that my lost flip-flops might turn up somewhere, but I'm now afraid they're gone.