Tony Lama Ostrich boots with Spanish extra virgen olive oil stains.
I was thinking about writing to you about to see if you could tell me how get the olive oil stains off those tall bird boots.
Tony Lama Ostrich boots with Spanish extra virgen olive oil stains.
I believe I got them at the Rusty Spur as well, but I may have purchased them at Weird Austin Allen's.
Allen's Boots on South Congress Ave. in Austin, Texas.
Note the big Justin boot over the awning. Justin owns Tony Lama Boots.
I
have this pair of Tony Lama Black Teju Lizard boots scouted out at
Allen's as probable purchase to become my front-line black boots to wear
to black-tie functions and also another pair of Tony Lama Peanut
Brittle Teju Lizard boots to replace the rattle snake-and-Thomas
Keller-reduction-sauce-bitten original vintage boots that are the
subject of this very true story.
Tony
Lama Black Teju Lizard boots at Allen's in Austin. These are my
Sunday-go-to-meetin' boots that I wear to black tie events in New York
City.
The
only time that I bought a pair of boots in Texas that I didn't purchase
at Allen's in Austin was the time I went to Dallas and got a pair of
light peanut brittle-colored boots that are way too pretty to wear. Not
only do I rarely wear them, except under controlled circumstances (no
rain the forecast, no tapas bar hopping, no possible reduction sauce or
olive oil moments) because they are too pretty to ruin, they also have a
very narrow throat, which means that I can only wear them if my SE
(Spousal Equivalent) will be around to help me pull them off and at the
risk of inducing a hernia in one of us at that. Four years after I
bought them, as I was doing an in-depth full boot review so I could be
informed before I entered the Tony Lama Boot contest, I looked inside
for the brand and saw a stamp “For Export Markets Only,” something I
have not seen inside my Tony Lama boots.
That
leaves the boots in the photos that I am entering in your contest and,
well, as you might imagine, there is one Hell of a story behind these
boots. First off, I wore them out on the town in New York for many
years. I was in the wine business and sold some of the world’s greatest
wines to a slew of top restaurants. I was wearing this pair one night
when I went to Rakel, where Chef Thomas Keller, now of The French
Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon and God knows what other big-time restaurants
in Napa Valley, Las Vegas, New York and maybe Singapore (who knows?),
was cooking.
Tony
Lama boots, purchased at The Rusty Spur, Marion, IL, circa 1976. Note
the darker area on the left-hand boot (right foot) stained by Chef
Thomas Keller's reduction sauce at Rakel's in New York City.
The
particularly eventful night I went to Keller's Rakel wearing these Tony
Lama boots (the ones in the enclosed pictures) I was out with John
Williams, the owner of Frog’s Leap Winery in Napa Valley.
We
were having one of Keller’s fabulous dinners and trying to talk, but
there was a piano player at Rakel playing a pretty stepped up version of
jazz music, so much so that we were getting a little frantic trying to
have a conversation with this schizoid music going on in the background.
I
looked down at my Tony Lama boots and thought, “D-mn, these'r sum gd
lukin bts.” (I told you the music was making us crazy, and this was
before texting.)
Then,
with my hand in time with that rapido piano music, I lifted a fork full
of Keller’s food—it was a dish with a very dark, very rich reduction
sauce—towards my mouth and missed. A big drop of Keller’s sauce fell and
plopped right onto my beautiful Tony Lama boot, the right one to be
precise. You can imagine how I felt. I tried to wipe it off with my
napkin, but it had indelibly tattooed a dark spot on my Tony Lama boot
and God, I loved those boots.
Not
long after that spill that stained these beautiful Tony Lama boots, I
looked over at John Williams and said, “J—s Christ, I wish somebody
would tell that piano player to stop!”
John Williams, Owner, Founder, Winemaker and Philosopher at
Frog's Leap Winery, Rutherford, Napa Valley, California.
Photo courtesy of seacoastonline.com
Williams said, “Me, too!”
Right about then, the piano player took a break, much to our relief.
“Wow, what a relief,” I said.
John
Williams said, “Speaking of relief, I going to the pissoir. (He makes
wines with several French grapes, so he knew what a pissoir was in
French.)
I contemplated the disaster that had befallen my prized Tony Lama boots.
After a few minutes, Williams returned, a bit red in the face I thought.
“You
will never believe what happened, “ he said. “I was standing in the
pissoir taking a wiz and there was a guy at the urinal next to me.
He asked me how I liked the restaurant. I said , ‘Fine, but I wish somebody would shoot that piano player.”
The guy said, “I am the piano player.”
Chef Thomas Keller's reduction sauce stain from Rakel's in New York City.
For
years, I pestered Thomas Keller, who was a charter member of a club I
founded for chefs—The Chefs From Hell Acrobatic Unicyclists and
Winetasters Club (we didn’t allow acrobatic unicyclists at our
gatherings), to buy me a new pair of Tony Lama boots to replace the pair
that his reduction sauce had ruined. All these years, he has
steadfastly refused. (I just saw him in northern Spain in November and
he re-affirmed his refusal to buy me a new pair of Tony Lama boots.)
Three-star
Michelin Chefs Juan Mari Arzak & Thomas Keller at San Sebastián
Gastronomika 2010. Photograph by Gerry Dawes©2010.
That
reduction sauce stain was not the only thing that happened to these
Tony Lama boots. There was also the rattlesnake incident, which truth be
known was as much the fault of the boots (or Keller’s reduction sauce)
as it was of the rattlesnake. I come from Southern Illinois, which is
below the Mason-Dixon line and is full of hills, many of them made out
of huge boulders pushed ahead of the glaciers back in the Ice Age, so
where I came from is hilly while most of the rest of Illinois is very
flat.
Now,
rattlesnakes just love these hills for some reason, so much so that
Southern Illinois University, home of the Saluki Dawgs (Mr. Walt
"Clyde" Frazier of the New York Knicks played college basketball at
Southern Illinois when they won the NIT, back when the NIT was worth
winning), started a movement to protect the snakes down in the Pine
Hills area. When I was a kid, I went fishing down there with my
Grampy, Chig Minton, and Uncle Bob.
On the way
into the fishin’ hole, we stepped over a log that had a copperhead
coiled under it (Uncle Bob killed it after me and Grampy had stepped
over the log), then Grampy stepped on two water moccasins at the same
time. We saw rattlers on the road and a whole bunch of other snakes
swimming, sunning themselves and hanging from the trees that day down in
the Scatters, which is what they call the swamps down there in the
bottoms, or bottom lands, of the Mississippi River.
I
was wearing my Tony Lama cowboy boots—the very ones in the
pictures—when I went back home to Southern Illinios and decided to drive
down there to the Scatters one day to show my ex-wife (she wasn’t my
ex-wife then!) how beautiful those hills and swamps were. I really
didn’t intend to get out of the car, because the area has been known to
shelter snakes (see above). In fact the geniuses (geniusi?) at the aforementioned Southern
Illinois University managed to get the road closings during rattler
mating season so them mean ole boys downtown wouldn't run over them in
their pickup trucks. But, since they didn’t have the road closed
through the Scatters for rattlesnake mating season, during which the
hillls are alive with the sounds of rattlesnake tail music!, I figured
it wouldn’t hurt to get out of the car and have a look at the swamps to
see if there was something interesting to point out to my ex-wife, like
snakes hanging from tree branches. Mistake!
I
got out of the car to have a look around to see if it was okay for my
then-wife to get out and I had gone no more than a couple of yards
alongside the gravel road when I heard a noise that sounded like a baby
boy with hyper-tension shaking a toy rattle. Oh, boy! I figured
right away what that rattle was attached to, but not before a
rattlesnake about ten-feet long lunged out from the side of the road and
struck at my foot. Now, I pretty well figured that my calves and
shins were protected—why do you reckon I wore by cowboy boots to snake
country?
That
snake struck a glancing blow at my boot and just snagged a bit of the
top of it on the right side, leaving a gash about an inch long. He
didn’t get a second chance, because I was out of there like a bat out of
Hell. I drove down to levee road, which was high enough above the
swamp and didn’t have all that many places for snakes to hang out.
My then-wife said, “Are you okay?”
“I think so, but I need to see what that snake did to my Tony Lama boot.”
I
got out and I asked her to help me pull off my right Tony Lama boot,
being careful not to get any venom—not to be confused with Keller’s
reduction sauce—on her hands. She had a little trouble getting the
boot off. Since the boots had always been a little tight and the throat
was a bit narrow, it was potentially hernia-inducing to get them off
without a boot jack (if you don't know what a boot jack is, stop
reading).
Once
she removed the boot, I examined it and saw the rip along the top. My
boot was now a wounded lizard. But fortunately the fangs did not
penetrate the boot and nail me in the foot, ‘cause by the time she would
have been able to pull that boot off and suck the venom out of my big
toe, I would have been dead, with just my (one) Tony Lama boot on.
Tony Lama boots, purchased at The Rusty Spur, Marion, IL, circa 1976.
Note the rattlesnake strike tear on the left-hand boot (right foot).
I
got to thinking about it on the way home. I figured that that
rattlesnake had one of two things on his mind. Either he had been
after Keller’s reduction sauce or, more likely, he had mistaken that
gorgeous lizard boot for another reptile, had taken my left boot to be a
female reptile—probably the scent. I reasoned that the snake had
fallen in love with my left boot--Tony Lama boots can cause more than
snakes to be smitten--and had struck the right one to get rid of her
boyfriend. Either way, because I feared that I might absorb some
venom by osmosis, I decided to retire those boots that had tightened up
further—shrunk with fright, no doubt--after their encounter with the
rattler.
Retired, rattlesnake-wounded, Keller reduction sauce-stained, Tony Lama boots.
Those
boots have been in the back of the closet for at least twenty years as I
went on to more boots, including those Tony Lamas mentioned above.
The rattlesnake-attracting qualities of my first pair did not deter me
from my long-term aficion for Tony Lamas.
When
I saw that there was a Tony Lama contest on, I decided to pull out my
original boots and see what kind of shape they were in. I think you can
see by the pictures that these 35-year old something boots are in
pretty damn good shape for what they have been through—the Scatters, a
rattlesnake, New York City, a frantic piano player and Thomas Keller’s
reduction sauce. And I think the rattlesnake venom must have been
somewhat like a natural crazy glue, because the snake gash seems to have
healed somewhat—or maybe the lizard re-generated some skin.
So,
this is my story about Tony Lama boots, but if you should deign to
consider my boot story a winner, I have to tell you that I need two new
pairs of your boots, a replacement for the snake-bit, reduction sauce,
wounded boot and a new black pair to replace the ones that I wear to
black-tie events in New York City and in Madrid.
The
black pair are neither snake nor sauce bit, but after twenty years they
don’t look quite as new (see second set of photographs) to wear just in
case I get invited to a dinner for the Queen of Spain again, and the
toe is too rounded to be bonafide chain link fence climbers. But,
that’s a story for another time.
New York City Tuxedo Tony Lama Black Teju Lizard boots.
Yours truly, Gerry Dawes
