Fish Boots!

I once wrote a post about Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, one of my favorite books ever, and started it with an anecdote about "reading a fish book," but in my head that phrase is always said with Christopher Walken's voice.

As in, "You're reading a fish book..."

But it's all just a silly reference to a small, non-essential part of "Suicide Kings", a gangster movie starring Christopher Walken, some 20-something kids, and Dennis Leary. Dennis Leary is conversing with his partner (the actor know for playing Chip, Big Pussy's FBI contact in the second season of the Sopranos) about his very expensive boots. They're made from stingray.

That caused Walken's Carlo Bartolucci/Charlie Barret to quip, "You're wearing fish boots..."

There's an entire exchange about the boots that's quite funny, and it's played perfectly by Dennis Leary.

So...I was clunking around looking at western style boots. It's been 30 years since I had a pair of boots, and I was curious what the costs might be, where could I try on a pair...stuff like that. One company with a very Italian sounding name (Lucchese) had a variety of western boots, and judging by the pricing I had been seeing, they were on the upper end of the scale. The lowest prices were just over $200, and many of the fancier pairs went for between six and eight hundred bucks.

Sheesh, I thought. And then I saw the most expensive price I had seen during that entire twenty minute rabbit hole jump: a five-spot short of $2200. HOLY COW, I remember thinking.

They looked cool and all, but damn. I mean, judge for yourself:

Is...is that, like chain-link on the bottom part's leather? Is that a pattern? I mean, I could easily spot the ostrich and snakeskin and gator skin, but this was something else...

So I looked at the details: "Chocolate Pirarucu."

In all my life I had only heard of one of those two words, so I looked up the other. Here's one picture that Google delivers:

That chain-link looking pattern is easily noticeable on the Amazonian river monster known as the arapaima, or pirarucu.

BUT THESE ARE ACTUALLY FISH BOOTS!

I think it would be cooler to call them "River Monster Boots," or "boots made with the remnants of the skin of a river dragon," but I'm not in charge of marketing...