Man has lived without shoes for 20 years because of foot pain – 04/16/2023 – Equilibrium

A few years ago, Joseph DeRuvo Jr. made a quick stop at an upscale supermarket to buy eggs and was stopped in the dairy aisle by a store manager. “You’re not wearing shoes,” he remembers the manager telling him.

Was he right. DeRuvo wasn’t wearing shoes. He almost never uses it.

The official cited health codes. DeRuvo denied that he was violating them. The official made vague references to insurance policies. DeRuvo responded, “More people break their necks in high heels than barefoot.”

“A customer is complaining,” the manager finally said, as DeRuvo recalls. “We’d like you to leave.”

DeRuvo initially decided to forgo the shoes because of painful bunions, but continued to go barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort. Back then, he saw himself as a litmus test of people’s tolerance and their willingness to put up with the unconventional lifestyle of a stranger — and perhaps try to understand him.

There are questions he is asked frequently that he is always happy to answer. How does it handle snow and ice? Doesn’t he get sharp objects stuck in his thick calluses? But those are the simple things. “Navigating this terrain is easy,” he says. “Navigating people is tricky.”

When asked to leave a store or restaurant, he usually leaves without protest, says DeRuvo’s wife, Lini Ecker, a shoe wearer who serves as a bridge between her husband and a world that often calls for conformity.

“Once someone takes on their ‘I’m in charge’ persona,” she points out, “once they get started they can’t go back.”

Perhaps occasionally, DeRuvo fights back. “If you’re grumpy,” he says.

The egg episode was one of those moments. He argued with the manager for a few moments, then left and bought eggs elsewhere.

For two decades, DeRuvo, 59, has lived mostly barefoot, a life he built, with Ecker’s help, to limit or avoid such confrontations. After years as a photographer and photography teacher, he is still working for himself, now as a Pilates instructor, a particularly barefoot-friendly profession. And the couple stays close to home. When they go out, they frequent well-known stores and restaurants, where they can form personal connections with the owners and managers, and he can be seen as more than the barefoot guy.

Still, “we get kicked out of a lot of places,” says Ecker, 61.

sympathy for dogs

It was an unseasonably hot day in February when DeRuvo went out for a short run. The weather was a welcome break from the previous week’s record cold wind. While hot days can be more challenging than cold ones, with sun-scorched pavement forcing you to run across the painted center line or into the shadows cast by telephone poles, nothing is as painful underfoot as salt chemically treated to melt. the ice.

“It gives me a lot of sympathy for dogs,” he says.

DeRuvo’s lifestyle has given him cause to think a lot about bare feet, assessing their safety and hygiene and whether they are a threat to polite society. He found no health risk. What germs might your feet carry that the soles of someone else’s shoes don’t? (Connecticut has no regulations prohibiting customers from going barefoot in stores or restaurants, says Christopher Boyle, spokesman for the Department of Public Health, “but commercial establishments can set their own rules.”)

And he knows when to surrender, he says. He keeps a pair of loose-fitting sandals in the car in case something happens that makes other people uncomfortable that he is denied entry, like when they go out to dinner with friends.

But generally DeRuvo chooses the comfort of his feet over doing anything or going anywhere that requires him to put on shoes.

‘People are disgusted’

Bare feet outside the beach, yoga studio, or pedicure chair often draw attention. “Shoeless Joe Jackson” was famous for conspiring to rig the 1919 World Series, but legend has it that he went barefoot because of the blisters that gave him his enduring nickname. Britney Spears’ passing through a gas station in 2004 became global news when paparazzi caught her leaving the bathroom with no shoes on.

“People have a thing with their feet,” says DeRuvo. “They feel disgusted.”

DeRuvo’s look like they would hurt in a pair of shoes: the big toes, with a protruding bulge at the base, project aggressively toward the little toes diagonally.

The bumps are bunions. About 20 years ago, they became painful — throbbing during long runs in tight shoes and interfering with your life. DeRuvo consulted a doctor who recommended surgery. While waiting for the date set for the procedure, he was barefoot because the pain was so intense. In those days, he learned that the screws that would be implanted in his feet contained a metal to which he was allergic. He also noticed that he felt better since he stopped wearing shoes.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that walking barefoot was enriching his life in ways he hadn’t expected. There were physical benefits beyond bunion relief: He found comfort in the ground beneath him. “The haptic feedback just makes everything else feel a little smoother,” he said.

There are also spiritual benefits, says DeRuvo, a religious man. “God says to Moses, ‘Take off your sandals, you know, this is holy ground,'” he says. “Well, I kind of like to take it as far as possible.”

‘Remember that they are animals’

DeRuvo was born in New York. His mother was a nurse at Bellevue Hospital. Her father worked at the printing press at B. Altman Department Store, eventually overseeing the mail-order catalogs.

In the mid-1980s, he enrolled at the New England School of Photography in Boston. There, he met Ecker. They’ve been virtually inseparable ever since and got married in 1987.

He doesn’t remember exactly when he last took his shoes off. “It was about five years before the iPhone,” he says (which would make roughly 2002).

His kids don’t remember a big declaration that Dad was going to ditch the shoes, just that his shoe collection got smaller and smaller. “Somewhere along the way, something changed and he stopped relying on shoes,” says Nate DeRuvo, 33, a barista in Boston.

As a child, Nate had a general perception that his father was viewed with suspicion by outsiders. “It was clear that he violated a social contract, but it didn’t make sense why that particular one was so embedded in people,” he says.

He once asked his father why people got so upset. “People don’t like to be reminded that they are animals,” her father explained to her. “They don’t like to admit that we’re not that different from other creatures out there.”

Ecker is undeterred when asked if her husband’s not wearing shoes has limited his life. “You get the whole package when you marry someone,” she says, shrugging, as she has lunch with him at the Norwalk Art Space cafe, her clogs nestled under the table by his feet.

As for DeRuvo, he says living without shoes has allowed him to be the person God wants him to be. “Unless you see someone ‘different’ but still able to build a life,” he says, “you don’t know it’s possible.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves