The Man in the Green Shirt

Comments (0) Thursday, Apr 14 2005

Mauricio was stationed in front of the Million Dollar Theater, the shuttered downtown movie palace at the corner of Third and Broadway. Watching over him, from 30 feet above on a molded cornice, were a pair of terra cotta grotesques, winking devilishly. He was wearing a kelly-green T-shirt, Adidas jogging pants and white running shoes. A multicolored beach umbrella provided a spot of shade, Rod Stewart the soundtrack. Mauricio motioned to a high chair, the kind you’d find discarded in an Office Depot dumpster. I sat down, placed my right foot on a small pine box with a built-in shoe rest, and instantly recognized where I was: Mexico City. Mauricio was keeping faith with the tradition of those street urchins who tote wooden boxes the size of rat’s coffins in search of a pair of Ferragamos along the streets of the Zona Rosa.

Earlier, I had got to thinking that the scuffs on the toes of my Red Wing oxfords were undermining my casual yet orderly dress code. After a brief stop at the Criminal Courts Building, on Temple and Broadway, I’d set out to find a shine. It wasn’t easy. Service, let alone courtesy, is strictly verboten at the CCB, more of a lockup than a courthouse. Likewise, so I ascertained, at the Federal Courthouse, on Spring, and at the state’s Stanley Mosk Courthouse, on Hill Street. Caught in a loop of my own sepia memories, I’d pictured the wide terrazzo ground-floor hallways of these civic institutions as having shoeshine stands. Somewhere near the door, there would be a wooden platform with padded Naugahyde chairs and iron footrests, and a man in a smudged, waist-length smock putting aside his newspaper as I approached. But all I found were pistol-packing guards, X-ray machines and electromagnetic portals.

I ventured toward Bunker Hill, whose soaring towers contain downtown’s highest concentration of lawyers, accountants and deal makers — and, therefore, expensive leather shoes. On notoriously vacant Grand Avenue, not a pair of Allen-Edmonds in sight. In fact, at 9:30 in the morning, I saw just six pedestrians between First and Third, all of them wearing sneakers. Following them wouldn’t lead to a spit-’n’-polish kiosk.

I crossed Grand Avenue, wandered onto Wells Fargo Plaza, then briefly peeked into the KPMG Tower. The gimlet eyes of security-desk officials steered me away before I could even begin to utter my question, “Is there a shoeshine stand in the . . .”

It was on my way down the library steps, en route to the Biltmore Hotel and Pershing Square, that it dawned on me: I could find a shoeshine, like everything else downtown, on Broadway. At the Grand Central Market I asked the unarmed security guard, who was busily chatting up a well-endowed woman sipping a soda. Leaning his head out onto Broadway, he pointed up the block and said, “The man in the green shirt.”

That was Mauricio, who was now swirling a brush in a tin of saddle soap and quickly washing my shoe. With a horsehair brush, which he wielded like a baton twirler, he swiped away the residue of soap. Next, he applied a swab dipped in dye. A tap on my toe said, “Time to switch shoes.” He repeated the preliminary steps. Another tap, back to my right foot. Mauricio loaded his left-hand fingertips with black shoe wax and burnished the polish into my pebble-finished leather uppers. Two more stages of brushing, and then, without much flourish, and with just an occasional snap, he buffed the shoes to a glowing finish.

“How much do I owe you?” I asked.

Palm down, he spread the five fingers of his right hand.

As I got ready to get up, a man in evident need of a shine walked past. Mauricio, catching the man’s eye, nodded toward his shoes, diffidently, partly asking but partly telling him he ought to stop for a shine. The passerby didn’t know what he was missing. With tip, I’d paid $7 to let my mind drift with the uncomplicated ceremony of wash, dye, wax, brush, polish and pay. I’d purchased five languorous minutes to gaze absently at a parade of wool-suited businessmen, plaid-shirted laborers and ragged-trousered panhandlers. I’d call that an inexpensive restorative.

Later I learned that I’d missed two higher-end stands, one in the Wells Fargo atrium, the other at the Gas Company Tower, on Fifth Street, catering to the wingtips hurrying down the halls of those corporate office buildings. No matter. Now I knew about Mauricio and his outdoor room from which I could observe the labyrinth of the city at a turtle’s pace.

—Greg Goldin

Runaway Chain-Saw Mom

If any one figure in early punk embodied the healthy Valley Girl gone very bad, it would have to be Cherie Currie, the lingerie-clad, platinum-blond jailbaitery who fronted the legendary Runaways. So it’s oddly fitting that Currie’s current occupation is chain-saw artist. With Makita in hand — or maybe an Ekko — Currie can reduce a piece of redwood, pine, palm, elm or cedar into a carefully carved work of art, generally at the rate of about two a day when she’s really cranking.

Still, there’s some serious cognitive dissonance when one first meets the former teenage “Cherry Bomb” snarler and encounters the amiable Chatsworth soccer mom who appears at the door. Inside her Southwestern-style home, her work abounds — from the colorful relief images that adorn her walls (the “relief carvings,” as she calls them, are one-dimensional and done with a dremel tool, a kind of rotating blade with different bits) to the completed and in-progress pieces of full-on chain-saw art, which are generally wooden animals and, more specifically, cute renditions of bears.

“Most of my clientele commissions the bears because they’re very cute,” she says. “They can sell for $250 and up — I’m busy all year with them.”

Carefully goggled and gloved, she strips the bark off a log via chisel and then commences to chain-saw and talk about her art.

“Haven’t killed myself yet with the saws,” she says. “But I have been winged by flying pieces of wood that hit you at 150 mph.”

Luckily, Currie is in excellent shape, possibly as a result of her mid-’80s, post-Runaways career as a personal fitness trainer. In fact, after a couple of hours talking with her, it becomes clear that there’s little she hasn’t done. After she parted company with the Runaways (“We hated each other. The abuse was unreal because I was the singer and always getting photographed. The others were jealous”), she acted in many movies, including Foxesand a turn in ThisIsSpinalTapas the source of that cursed band’s herpes outbreak.

“That scene was on the cutting-room floor,” she says, “but made it to DVD.”

She came upon her new career as a craftswoman, artist and entrepreneur completely by chance. “I was driving over Kanan Dume Road one day and saw these dudes doing chain-saw carving by the side, and I knew I had to get into it. I started interning at the place, the Malibu Mountain Gallery, and before I knew it, I was doing it.”

It wasn’t all that different from her start with the Runaways. “I dropped out of high school to go on the road, and they promised they’d help with my education,” she says. “Of course, the education I got was nothing like the one you usually get.”

For now, her future as carver is bright. She even got a spot recently on the Discovery Channel’s MonsterGarage.In her episode, called “The Logsplitter,” she says, “I got to chain-saw carve next to the legendary Bob King, who’s the best carver out there.”

Currie’s present dilemma is that she can’t do much carving at home because of the noise and wood-chip refuse — all these years later, she’s still the queen of noise — but the West Valley real estate boom has made a move to a workshop or storefront difficult. No matter, she loves her work.

“I was told when I started that all you had to do was visualize something in the wood and do it,” she says. “If you can’t do that, you can’t carve.”

As for the inevitable question of a Runaways reunion — she and Joan Jett did “Cherry Bomb” onstage in Anaheim about three years ago — it is unlikely to ever happen.

“Lita Ford is the main reason,” she says, sadly. “Seven years ago, she set up this reunion thing and we had to talk Joan into it and that was hard, but Joanie finally said she would do it. A tour, a record deal, everything in the works was a go, until Lita heard Joan’s voice on the conference call and then freaked out.”

Apparently, Ford didn’t sense enough enthusiasm from the band’s most famous alum.

“Lita basically says, ‘Hey, if you don’t wanna do double backflips over this, I won’t do it.’ Joan [told her] that she was just off the plane from Hong Kong and was a little tired, but that wasn’t good enough for Lita. Lita goes, ‘I’m a household name, I don’t need this,’ and that was that. She did it again four years ago when we were offered $3 million for a 40-date tour. I think it was a setup from her to kind of string us along and drop it, because she’s still angry.”

Currie isn’t, which is a good thing — she’s got a chain saw and she knows how to use it.

—Johnny Angel