Teenage Dreams and Dr. Martens
Novelist Delia Cai reconsiders her formative years as a Midwest scene kid by taking her first-ever pairs for a spin through New York City.
My high school friends in my hometown of Dunlap, Illinois, and I always agreed on one thing: Sunday mornings were for God, but Friday nights were for shows.
At the end of the week, once everyone survived the total drag of home-cooked dinner with our families, we’d pile into someone’s Camry and head off to the latest concert we’d heard about from Myspace. The venue situation was never , but it was always rough around the edges. Sometimes we had to schlep to the hipster coffee shop located in the next county over; other times, when we were lucky, we only had to drive down to one of a few particularly progressive churches across the river that lent space off-hours to the local indie scene. Once we’d arrived, the rest of our pre-curfew freedom was spent learning how to head-bob to the exotic sounds wafting from some grimy 22-year-old’s bass while passing my cherry-red Canon PowerShot around like a communion tray.
This was how I spent the best parts of my teenage years, wading through the Midwestern DIY music scene of the late 2000s. Dunlap was a former railroad town, with a population of 1,500 people, all manured fields and icy highways. The predominant avenues for a solid hang were limited to football home games or Sunday school. It was so boring that “driving around” was considered a form of socializing. It was the kind of place where everyone knew when deer season began, because class attendance would dip when kids would go hunting with their dads.As a classic nerd/student council president/emo rising, I couldn’t wait to leave. At home, I spent hours in front of the family computer trying to vicariously experience life in places like New York City. Myspace and YouTube introduced me to a kind of music I’d never heard before, with jagged-haired kids barely older than me who played guitars and sang constantly about wanting to leave their hometowns, too. My friends and I started pooling our internet research and gas money so that we could properly survey the crunchy undergrowth of our local scene: bands with names like Centralia Mine Fire, The Fastest Kid Alive, or Go Radio. We devoted our waking hours to thinking and talking about music, plotting how to better become part of this sweaty movable feast that gathered all the combustible energy of nothing-town angst and the infant social media age in order to create new sensations of unexpected belonging. In rural Illinois the options for rebellion are limited.
How anonymous and interesting I felt at a show; how ironic it felt to mosh awkwardly with a bunch of other Hot Topic–obsessed Pete Wentz–wannabes in an ironic state of communion. I studied the ways everyone dressed—the deep V-necks, the spandex jeans, stacks of neon wristbands limp from the shower, the endless variations of Dr. Martens that I’d clock again and again at the shows, and later at school. More than anything else, it was that telltale yellow stitching that felt like a wink, a Cinderella slipper that wouldn’t disappear even after the show ended. I took great pleasure spotting them around my hometown and recognizing them as a kind of secret handshake.Recently, I wound up watching a young indie band play a showcase in the middle of the day in New York, where I’ve lived for more than nine years. In that time I’d published a novel, held down a day job at a prestigious magazine, and launched a successful newsletter with 27,000 followers, a development that my younger self would find completely mystifying. The band members onstage, they’d clearly had come up long after I’d traded my band tees for button-ups and mixed CDs for Spotify Premium, but I was filled with a sudden longing to share this moment with my teenage self. What would she think of my life now, as a 32-year-old sitting in the back of the bar in Greenwich Village?She had done the things we said we were going to do: leave Dunlap and make a life in the big city as a writer who interviewed musicians and stayed out late and wore whatever she wanted. Wouldn’t she be proud? I wondered if my younger self would think I strayed too far, if she would glance at my résumé of corporate jobs and static Spotify playlists and shake her head. Certainly, she would take issue with my clothes and how quiet they had become. Where were the neon purple skinny jeans? Where were the mesh fingerless gloves?
That day in the Village, I felt so shaken by this confrontation with my former alt-girl ego that when the opportunity to test drive a couple of the latest Dr. Martens presented itself, I knew I owed it to myself to relive the dream—or, more accurately, to see it through.My first pair of Docs became a pair of the Elphie II, a silhouette appropriate for what I hoped would be a newly reintegrated me. I laced them over my ankle early one February morning, pleased with the jaunty, feminine punctuation they brought to my usual black uniform for another day in the city. I’ve learned to love a good, pointed toe for striding around the city—it’s like strapping arrows onto your feet. Yet the bouncy soles made gentle what invariably became the kind of hectic, 15,000-step day that no amount of Tumblr dreamscaping on the family computer ever really prepares you for.Still, on the train, at the dermatologist’s office, and in line waiting for coffee, I enjoyed the affinity bias that wearing my new Docs gave me, because now I was noticing them everywhere on the strangers around me. The shoes were no longer the strict purview of the 2010s Midwestern scenesters—nor the grunge kids of the ’90s, nor the punks of the ’60s—but there remained an ineffable sense of recognition, the secret basement handshake.
Over the weekend, I swapped my Elphies for a pair of Buzz 5-Eye platforms. They reminded me of the towering boots I’d borrowed from a friend on my last night in Berlin a few years ago, when we’d decided to go to Berghain last-minute. (See, teen me? She’s still got it!) For a car-less New Yorker, I find that a platform is the real power shoe in the city, practical enough for everything from an errands day to nights out at the Ridgewood warehouses. These platforms felt ageless and chameleonic; at the Chinatown produce stands and later, over coffee with friends at the park, I enjoyed the feeling of merging within the greater sea of black leather shoes dotting the pavements around me, except that I knew mine were particularly special. Living in New York is all about cultivating this kind of delusion. It’s probably what being an adult is, too. Delusion, or conviction—something to live for!How rigidly I used to cling to the correct signifiers, terrified that I’d get everything wrong and be exposed. Thank God that was all over now. I didn’t have to throw myself into a pit of terrified teenagers and mosh my way to validation. The jeans are roomier now, and home is wherever I want it to be.
And so, on a cold February night, I found myself in that classic New York end-of-week dishevelment, breath lagging and spilling over with bags and a still-hot carton of takeout. I walked all the way down Bowery and turned left near the Manhattan Bridge as the subway roared on by, then climbed up the stairs to my boyfriend’s apartment. I set my platforms down where he’d also left the only type of shoes he’s ever worn for years: a pair of Dr. Martens 3989 Bex Smooth Leather Brogues. Lined up together by the door, our shoes looked like a pair of wayward adventurers who had found each other, even all the way over here.
