Strange Portents and Toe Sucking

I don’t know why, but toe-sucking has touched my life peripherally in a 20-year cycle, starting when I was around 10.

Beth will remember the first incidence.  At the time, the whole idea of “toe sucking” had never even occured to me; I was introduced to the concept by my sister, who is 4 years younger than we are.  Here’s what happened:  one night, back in the days when we still lived across the street from one another, Beth was spending the night at my house.  We were in bed, and my mom was in the bathroom doing her nightly ablutions, while my sister, who was notorious for refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, was hectoring her from her room.  It went something like this:  “Momma….momma…momma…momma…”  “Kate, go to sleep!”  “Momma…momma…momma…momma…” (sounds of teeth brushing) “momma…momma…momma…momma…momma…….YOU SUCK!!!!” (sounds of bare feet slapping wood floors as mom strode quickly from bathroom to Kate’s room…sounds of hand slapping flesh…shrieking…) “YOU SUCK YOUR TOES!!!  I MEANT YOU SUCK YOUR TOES!!!”  (sounds of me & Beth trying to control laughter so it won’t be heard).

Anyway, that was my introduction to the whole concept of “toe-sucking.”  It wasn’t until some 15 or 20 years later that I learned that it could also be a sexual fetish, and again, I didn’t ask to know this; it was foist upon me.  By this time, I was living in Little Rock and the town was abuzz with tales of the Conway Toe-Sucker, an unfortunate young man with an uncontrollable passion for feet.  He struck at Baptist Hospital at the time a friend of mine was in for surgery; she and her roommate almost burst their stitches laughing at their jokes about how he was going to jump out and get them while they did their doctor-ordered hallway walks.  Some months later, I met the actual Baptist Hospital toe-suck victim quite by accident, when she joined a group of my friends for dinner at a restaurant.  By this time, the Toe Sucker had been convicted and this woman had testified at his trial.

I, of course, was full of questions.  I asked her how it had come about that this guy was actually able to, you know, get her toes in his mouth.  At this, her husband said in a shocked tone, “he had your TOES in his MOUTH?” in the same tone of voice you expect to hear someone say “you SLEPT with him?”  Meanwhile, I’m thinking, dude, you’re MARRIED to her, shouldn’t you KNOW about this already? 

Anyway, she said that what had happened was that she was in her office when a nice-looking guy had come in and started talking to her; he sat down and then started complimenting her shoes, saying that he used to be a shoe salesman (this was in Al Bundy’s heyday, so…I’m not sure why she didn’t find this ridiculous), and asking if he could take a closer look at them.  He put one of her feet in his lap, took off the shoe and…started sucking her toes.  When she reacted with alarm, he jumped up and ran out of the office.

After hearing her story, I said, “ok, I understand that it’s kind of icky to have some stranger’s mouth on your foot but…that seems relatively harmless, so why the deal with the trial and sentencing?”  She said that he had approached a woman at the Little Rock airport and told her he wanted to cut her feet off and take them home with him.  So the court thing had, it turned out, been completely necessary.  She went on then about how she just couldn’t understand why this guy was doing this; she said he was good-looking and had a beautiful wife and a couple of kids so it just didn’t make sense that he was running around trying to suck all these women’s toes.  I waited a beat, then said, “maybe he just needed to get some STRANGE TOE.”  Which, of course, brought down the table.

A couple of years later, I learned that another friend of a friend had been approached by the Toe Sucker; in this case, he struck when she was at a convenience store getting back into her car.  He came up and started complimenting her shoes and was crouched by the side of her open car door as she was sitting in the car, and had just gotten around to fondling her feet when she said, “what in the hell are you doing?”  This scared him off.  Valerie had a much better sense of humor about the whole thing; according to her, it was her own fault for “enticing” him, since as she noted she was wearing open-toed shoes and had just polished her toenails.

That was the last I ever heard of the Toe Sucker until…today.  The story has even made the Reuters network – I cannot tell you how PROUD I am, once again, to live here.  This is almost as good as the time the WWF announced they would not return to Little Rock because of the fans’ lack of manners and respect.  HOW REDNECK does your town have to be for the WWF to refuse to come there?  Anyway, I’m pretty sure the current toe-sucking suspect has to be the same guy because…what are the odds?

The other reason I love all things Conway Toe-Sucker related is that it always reminds me of the Baltimore Foot-Stomper from Polyester:

Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction.