The famous writer rode public transportation to stay in touch with the city. So I had read in Time magazine. He had stepped aboard the bus and dropped his coins dutifully into the slot like any ordinary citizen, then taken a seat some rows behind me and opened a book. Writers don’t attract the attention that other celebrities do; his reading went undisturbed.

            That was mostly how I began the story through its many versions. I was conflicted about withholding the famous writer’s name. Was I being too coy? But I wanted to build suspense. In some drafts I tried to explain what I was doing on the Michigan Avenue bus in the middle of a brilliant fall afternoon in 1984, but it was complicated. I tried fictionalizing, but that didn’t work either. Eventually I just left it out. Briefly put, I had done an errand in the Loop and was on my way to the shoe store I managed on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, North Michigan Avenue. It was my day off, and I was going to stop in to see if everything was OK.

            As the bus made halting progress in the Michigan Avenue traffic, I thought of my English teacher senior year in high school. Mr. Lumsden could have been a college professor, people said. He was inclined to ask questions that were over our heads. What was the significance of the light at the end of Daisy’s dock? We had no idea. Students today were not what they used to be, Mr. Lumsden chided. For example, he wanted to know how many of us had read Seven Types of Ambiguity, and of course nobody had. At one time, he said, at least several students would have raised their hands.

            
            Mr. Lumsden had once been aboard a ship on which T.S. Eliot was also a passenger. He told us this during our study of The Waste Land. As a young man, he explained, he had been interested in writing poetry and had greatly admired Eliot’s work. One night at dinner Eliot was sitting at a nearby table. All through dinner Mr. Lumsden thought about how to approach him, what he should say. But Eliot left before Mr. Lumsden could make up his mind. He concluded the story with a regretful little smile.

            
            This wasn’t the first occasion I had had to reflect upon Mr. Lumsden and T.S. Eliot. One day in 1979 Tom Wolfe walked into the store, trademark white suit and all. I was still a salesman at the time. Later I would manage a suburban store and then be sent back downtown to manage the Michigan Avenue store where I had started.

            
            The other salesmen were busy that afternoon and wouldn’t have been excited about waiting on Tom Wolfe anyway—they were into athletes and television personalities, not writers. When I greeted him I didn’t mention that I knew who he was.

            
            “I’m looking for a banker’s shoe,” Wolfe said. He cast a skeptical eye on me, as if he doubted that a twenty-something salesman would be able to fulfill such a request. Perhaps other shoe salesmen had failed already—the term “banker’s shoe” was from the days when men wore suspenders and hats, when the style had been a staple in men’s shoes.

            
            “Sure,” I said, and showed him the Florsheim Penfield. It was the genuine article, a seven-eyelet balmoral oxford with the characteristic seam running straight across the toe. That was what he wanted, but fitting him in the banker’s shoe was going to be a problem because he had a narrow foot and I knew we didn’t have the correct width for him in that style.

            
            “A little on the narrow side,” I said to Wolfe as I set aside the measuring device. I suggested that I might also check on a wingtip for him. Wingtips were good sellers, and we always had lots of them in stock, expensive and cheap, thick soled and thin, and in all widths. But Wolfe wasn’t interested in wingtips. I said I’d be right back.

            
            In shoe sales you have to make the best of the hand you’re dealt. Wolfe swam in the 11D I brought him, so I said I’d check for a smaller size. One of the tricks of the trade is to go shorter in order to compensate for the width. The guys called it “jamming” a foot. Wolfe didn’t seem concerned about this, and his old shoes, ordinary looking three-eyelet bluchers, were in fact quite short on him. I returned with a 10½ D, which he said was still too big.

            
            “The length looks good,” I said, pressing on the toe. I never liked to jam a customer if I could help it. Wolfe was recalcitrant, though. This time I brought him a 10D, and he said he’d take it.

            
            Throughout the sale, I had been thinking about what to say to him. I thought of saying that I liked his writing, but that seemed inadequate. If it had occurred to me at the time, I could have mentioned the opening of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, where he effectively characterized the hippies by their soft footwear and by their attitude toward the hard shoes straight society wore.

            
            “Have you just started selling shoes?” Wolfe said. The decision made, he sat back and relaxed for a moment. Here was my opening. I absolutely forbade myself to blurt out that I wanted to write.

            
            “I’ve been selling shoes for a while,” I said, and left it at that. Wolfe asked me if he could wear the new ones, and I said I would put his old ones in the box. He went to his book signing at Kroch’s and Brentano’s in style, wearing a banker’s shoe.

            
            At one time the story had a long interlude about the shoe business. I also went back to my college years and told about conferences with my advisor in his attic-like office on the top floor of the old English Building in Champaign. He had essentially told me that I was stuck and was not progressing with the family memoir I dreamed of writing. He wanted me to write about other things, but I resisted. I told how I carried those conferences and those family stories in my mind when I took the L downtown to my job in the shoe store.

            
            I once sent an 18-page version to the Chicago Reader, hoping it would be my first published story. When I didn’t hear anything in a month, I called and was given the managing editor. He said he had the story on his desk and told me to call back in a week.

            
            When I called back, the editor said there were some things they liked about the story. But he mentioned the length and also that the publication’s primary commitment was to covering the community, not telling stories about people who wanted to be writers. He said that if the story were about a shoe salesman who was struggling to feed his family, that might be of interest. I thanked him for his time.

            
            In writing workshops students weren’t sure the subject matter of the story was valid. One student defended it, saying that most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and he believed the story was about wanting to be something more than a shoe salesman. One of my teachers suggested that I look at the Zuckerman novels by Philip Roth. The more I tried fixing the story, the more overgrown it became, and eventually I just put it away.

            
            Fast forward several years to a workshop with writing guru Molly Daniels Ramanujan. Molly preached immediacy. I dusted off the story, chopped it down to four pages, and turned it in. She called me at home and said she wanted me to read it on Sunday at the Woodlawn Tap.

            
            According to Molly, the Woodlawn Tap, aka Jimmy’s, was the world’s most intellectual bar, the place where Nobel Prize winners went to hatch their schemes. Located near the University of Chicago campus, it was one of the few survivors on a barren stretch of 55^th Street that had undergone so-called urban renewal back in the 1960s.

            
            When you walked in, Jimmy’s looked like a down-and-out neighborhood bar. The TV mounted near the ceiling was on, and a few patrons, all male, were huddled over their beers. Sunday afternoons for many years, writing students with their notebooks and backpacks hurried through the bar to the rear hallway, which led to the back room. The back room was fairly large, at least as big as the front area, and full of mysteries—a bar that looked like it hadn’t been used since 1940, small circular tables with their crazy assortment of chairs, and ancient signs and plaques from brewing companies on the wall. At the front of the long, narrow room was a slightly elevated stage with a bench and a microphone.

            
            That afternoon in January 1991 the back room at Jimmy’s was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. I looked at the program Molly handed out and saw my name at the end. I was going last.

            
            During intermission I went out and walked in the brisk weather, but it didn’t help. My nerves wouldn’t settle. When I finally approached the microphone, the manuscript was visibly shaking in my hands. My unsteady voice boomed out in the darkened room.

            
            I labored through the part about my high school English teacher and T.S. Eliot. On page 2 there were a few titters of laughter and that gave me some momentum. When I returned to the Michigan Avenue bus on page 4, I felt the back room at Jimmy’s become still.

            
            Sitting directly beside the Nobel Prize winner seemed out of the question. I got up and took the seat behind him.

            
            “Excuse me,” I said, leaning forward. “Mr. Bellow.”

            
            He looked up from the hardbound volume he was reading, and I saw that it was H.G. Wells’ Outline of History. A suitable choice of reading material for an afternoon ride on a CTA bus. Very Bellowian. A philosopher-observer loose on the streets, clutching his H.G. Wells. Life imitating art. Wasn’t there a character in Mr. Sammler’s Planet who was a Wells fan?

            
            Bellow offered a light handshake over the back of the seat. His large, perceptive eyes scanned my face.

            
            “I didn’t mean to disturb you,” I said. “I just wanted to say I’ve enjoyed your books.” He acknowledged my appreciation with a small nod and then waited, as if to see what else I had to say for myself. He seemed perfectly receptive to having a little chat on the bus.

            
            The moment passed, and hearing nothing further from me, Bellow turned around, put on his reading glasses, and opened his volume of Wells. My stop would be coming up shortly.

            
            There was applause, and the Sunday-afternoon reading at Jimmy’s, which had gone on for more than two hours, was over. Later a classmate told me my nervousness had actually accentuated the performance.

            
            I hadn’t looked at the story for many years and wasn’t even sure I would be able to find the version I read that day in 1991. It is with trepidation that I open the plastic storage tub in which I keep old notebooks, folders, and loose papers. What teachers’ comments and fragments of my book will haunt me?

            
            I found the Bellow story, four pages of typewritten text, in a folder. The manuscript bore the address of a tiny apartment I had in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I wasn’t making much money then as a proofreader for a publishing company, but I had escaped the shoe business.

            
            Molly had helped me with the writer’s block from which I suffered. When I was home from work sick for two weeks in January 1993, I looked for the first piece of the family memoir I ever wrote, about my mother’s struggle with cancer, but couldn’t find it among my papers. So I rewrote it from scratch. And then sat on it for a couple years before sending it to some literary magazines listed in the back of Best American Short Stories. The story was published 20 years after I finished college. I wanted to send my advisor at the U of I a copy, but I was too late. He had died the year before.

            
            In morning traffic on my way to work I still think of meetings with my advisor and the idyllic view of campus from his third-floor office in the English Building . When I was a student in Champaign , I used to joke that if you listened closely, you could hear Scarborough Fair playing in the background on the quad. Now I’m like Benjamin Braddock, the graduate, someone who no longer belongs there.

            
            The last time I saw my advisor was a couple years after I graduated. I had driven down to Champaign on one of my precious days off from the shoe store. I ran into him on the quad, and he said to come up to the office for a conference. He was about the same age as my father, a man of the World War II generation, very responsible.

            
            In my mind we have a conference once again. I tell him that over the years a few pieces have appeared in small magazines. A draft I’ve given him sits on his desk, and I see he’s made some pencil markings on it. He leans back in his chair and considers what to say.