Jimmy of Bob’s Shoe Repair
The man who runs Bob’s Shoe Repair, on Jersey Avenue between Newark Ave and Columbus Drive, is a really nice guy. His name is Jimmy, and he is so nice, and runs his business with such a magnanimous disregard for policy — how much a customer must put down as a deposit, when a payment is due, how many of those little adhesive heel pads a customer can have for free, and so on — that instead of making a person want to take advantage, the niceness has an inverse effect, and inspires feelings of loyalty and obligation.
Also because of his niceness, the front part of his shop, which is about the size of a large hot tub, is usually occupied by at least a couple of people who are not customers, who are there mainly to loaf, to enjoy the broken-in wicker chairs and the glow from the electric heater perched on the glass display case and the sad 70s love songs from the radio wedged behind it. There are more of these loafers when the weather is inclement, and they consider themselves part of the establishment. When my son was a month old I was backing into the shop in the middle of a sleet storm, jerking the stroller up over the doorstep, when a loafer sitting just inside the door pulled the door open for me and I sat down suddenly in his lap. Next to us was a guy wearing leather gardening gloves with the name “BRUNO” written across the knuckles in ballpoint pen, who was asleep.
The head loafer, who is there nearly every day, is a tall, voluble guy in a baseball jacket to whom Jimmy occasionally gives some responsibilities, like taking down a telephone number if Jimmy’s hands are covered in polish or applying pressure to an insert glued into a high heel.
Jimmy is no relation to the titular Bob, who opened the shop in the 60s and sold it to Jimmy in 1981. Prior to owning Bob’s Jimmy owned a shop on West Side Avenue; it was called Right Shine and is now, he thinks, a chicken place. When Jimmy bought the business from Bob he decided to keep the name, probably partly out of niceness but possible also for shrewder reasons like brand consistency and customer base.
Business at Bob’s Shoe Repair is not what it was in the first years after Jimmy took over the shop.
In those days, he had five men working for him, and they were often too busy repairing shoes to eat lunch. They turned over 1000 repair tickets in two weeks. Today it is just Jimmy, and he turns over 1000 tickets in four or five months. Jimmy attributes this generally to Gerald McCann, two-term mayor in the 80s and early 90s who “raised everything sky-high.” He also blames it on Newport Centre Mall and the arrival of parking meters downtown, which he says robbed the area of its foot traffic. Meters are a sore spot for Jimmy, who hands out quarters to his customers to foil the meter maid.
The head loafer is also vigilant about meters, and once when I found a spot directly in front of the shop but couldn’t get the meter to accept my quarters, the head loafer came over and delivered a punishing series of right hooks to the side of the meter and then inserted one of his own quarters, which it took.
It is hard to imagine six men working in the shop today. The space seems to have thickened around Jimmy like a sclerotic artery, layers of equipment and supplies accreting inward until there is just a narrow cavity in the middle where he does his work. The cash register faces sideways in the path between the front and back of the store; Jimmy operates it by standing next to it. There is a bracing smell in the shop that is chemical and animal, a combination of polish, glue, leather, and feet.
Jimmy started repairing shoes in his early twenties, when he was newly arrived from Egypt with a degree in civil engineering but couldn’t find a job. He enjoyed it, and spent two years at a school on 28th St in the city, learning how to make shoes from scratch. When he set up shop for a living, he made twice as much as his friends in their engineering jobs. Plus, the work suited him; he had a knack for customer service.
Shoe repair, after all, is a numbers game, where success comes through a large quantity of small jobs, and a good customer is measured by how much he cannot afford. “Poor people are the best customers,” Jimmy says. “They fix their shoes.” Since shoe repair is a local service, his customers reflect the demographics of the neighborhood, with the exception of the New Yorkers who have moved to the area, mostly white, who don’t, he says, spend money in the area. “Jersey City to them is like a motel.”
In his free time Jimmy works out and reads—usually historical nonfiction—but most of what consumes his daylight hours is shoe repair. He says there is no problem a shoe can have that he can’t fix. “It is only a shoe,” he says. “There has to be a way to fix it.”
The last time I saw Jimmy the weather was warmer and the shop was empty. When I came in he was talking on the phone and taking down a number using a piece of shoe leather as a notepad. After a moment the head loafer materialized. It had been a month of so since I had seen him, and he asked if I had a quarter to pay back the one he had put in my meter. I didn’t but I had a nickel and two dimes.
“That won’t work,” he said. “I need the quarter for the number, to play Powerball.”
I asked if I would get any of the winnings. “I’m going to give most of it to my mother,” he said. “The with what’s left over, there will be some for me, and some for you.”
