Three days ago I was on my way to returning a SIXT rental car (La Cienega south of Wilshire) when I decided to pick up my Beatle boots from a West Hollywood shoe guy. They were too tight so I’d asked him to stretch them out. I wasn’t wearing socks but I put them on and they fit well enough. I impulsively decided to ask the guy to repair the banged-up suede mocassins I was wearing, so I wore the Beatle boots from then on.

Or at least until I’d dropped the car off and began walking back to the pad. My bare heels began rubbing against the inner boot and were starting to really hurt. So I went into a men’s store opposite the Beverly Center and bought a pair of socks.

But with the socks on I discovered that the Beatle boots were too tight again. So the hell with it — I walked the rest of the way home in the socks, carrying the boots in a plastic bag. At that moment I was the only sober guy in Los Angeles who was walking on a major boulevard in socks — nobody else was doing that. I had to stare at the sidewalk the whole way, of course, as I had to watch for stones or shards of broken glass.

I’m realizing now that the Beatle boots will probably never work. I used to be a size 12 but now I’m a 12 and 1/2 or a 13.

Back in the mid ’90s Robert Evans told me the following: “When you get older your feet get a little bigger, your ears get longer, your teeth get smaller and your nose gets bigger. And women won’t fuck you as much. Or you don’t want to fuck them as much. Or something like that.”