I learned to shop for clothing as an apprentice to a small brood of late-twentieth century women who, for some reason, saw me as one of their own.[1] And socialized in this way, I seem condemned to a complex, bipolar relationship with the idea and experience of any sartorial excursion. Like those hens to whom I was apprenticed, the clothes shopping trip resembles a condensed emotional replica of the great Week Long Cocaine Jag: excitement at the outset, followed by euphoria, ambition, trepidation; soon incipient terror ensues with its crony emotions and tics: self-loathing, delusions, the jitters, the shakes, the chills, exhaustion, rage, desperation; the ordeal winds down with a resolution to become someone new and, eventually, a complete and crippling phobia of any and all reflective surfaces which lasts until the next clothes shopping trip or coke jag.[2] (They, of course, were unaware of any such analogue and would have been scandalized to hear such wanton bloviation.) And I was astonished when, grown-up, I joined a lover on a joint expedition and discovered that not everyone shops this way.
First of all, for me, nothing is simple. Clothes shopping is a visceral, enervating experience. Everything involved in the acquisition of garb is grossly overcomplicated and even the smallest decisions are fraught with worry. “If I try on these jeans first, will I be beholden to them and, later, realize that the others were in fact the superior pair?” “Beholden” is not a word in the dressing room lexicon of most men. Apparently, it’s not in the lexicon of most women, either. My personal record is nine consecutive hours of clothes shopping, most of this spent contorting in the phone booth-sized space of various dressing room stalls. This may sound indefensibly excessive. It absolutely is.
* * *
Requiescat in Pace
Elliott Smith
Sapphire to midnight blue men’s slim fit style, H&M.
12/06 – 02/07
Oh, Elliott, you were too beautiful to break down so young. If only someone had been paying attention to just how badly you hurt. We were barely acquainted when you were rent in the upper thigh by the jagged corner of a glass tabletop; the wound was so clean, so threadless, it appeared surgical; you didn’t unfurl at all, instead just sopped my blood with the white, pilly lining of your left-hand pocket. This wound, the first, seemed benign and, honestly, I meant to stitch you[3]—to apply some clearcoating to your edges at least. I should have showed you I cared.
Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, though: after that day, you seemed to seek out self-destruction. The dorsal side of your cuffs hems wrapped themselves around the soles of my shoes and remained there, salt-stained, until they frayed and fell off; your backside found bleach in which to sit; both shins, improbably, ended up independently impaled on loose nails in the walls of the restaurant where I worked. You held on as long as you could; of course, nobody blames you. And all the while you made me look confident, carefree, sensitive, artistic. But before forty days were out, the basement dryer broke down and I tried to take you, wet from the house, to finish your rejuvenation cycle at a local Laundromat. You’d clearly had it, though, and when I returned home, I found you had escaped the basket and dived beneath my back tire. Assisted suicide: I’d run you down. There you lay, frozen into shape, imprinted with black ichor and the crenellations of my snow tires. It was your will, I suppose, that it be over. Perhaps you were simply suffering too bloody hard: better a quick death than the dragged-out deliquescence of the Denim Holocaust.
* * *
The aforementioned day, my live-in lover and I spent six hours shopping; I spent a mere $103 and returned home cantankerous and achy with three items: jeans, a plain white button down and new socks. To those who accompany me on these jaunts, maybe more horrifying than the profligate wasting of time is the fact that relative impoverishment prompts a perforce frugality; that I will discount certain items, though ideal, because of cost; that I don’t have the bankroll to back up my gravity where clothes shopping is concerned. I’m not sure of the math, but I gather from my memory of the similarly horrified rictuses of a number of associates and contemporaries, all of whom have accompanied me on such treks, that six hours of shopping would be forgiven if it happened to provide me a decade’s supply of at least one garment, i.e.: sweaters, tee-shirts, shoes. “Well, it was a lousy day, but at least you’ve got that belt problem solved ‘til you’re forty.”
But two hours is, with exception, the minimum time it takes me to purchase any given item (socks and boxers excluded).[4] When it comes to trying things on—I try on everything, socks and boxers excluded[5]—I spend at least ten minutes cavorting and posing in all available mirrors to be sure that, should I commit to the item in question, I won’t later be shocked by some unexpected failing either of the garment or my flesh beneath it. “Yes, these jeans are nice, but what do they look like when I’m sitting Indian-style and slouching? What about when I imitate a Sumo wrestler? And if I stand like Washington crossing the Delaware?”[6] Neck a slinky, I twist to scrutinize my own ass in jeans, the back of my head in a collared shirt; for the effort, I generally emerge from these oft-awfully lit stalls short-tempered, woozy and a bit nauseated.
* * *
Requiescat in Pace
Michael Jackson
Variously colored men’s slim fit style, True Religion.
03/07 – 05/07
When I found you on the clearance rack, I was drawn to your darkness. You were not blue, but indigo. I looked over both shoulders, as if I’d done something risqué in selecting you, and I carried you to the cash register thinking, “Indigo jeans, how fucking cool am I?” Indeed, I felt cooler the moment—in the mall bathroom, in fact—I donned you. And then everything got weird. Your quick to fray cuffs caught fire when I crossed my legs above a candle at a quite-belated Christmas party and the smell of singed cotton never really faded. And your beautiful hue: you lost color even weeks I kept you out of the laundry.[7] You left dark smudges on white couches, on bed linens, against walls where I had leaned. By the end, you were so pale I could have worn you to a Miami Vice revival and never garnered a second glance. When I interrogated the attendant in the store where I purchased you, he said that fading was a built-in feature of their new dark denims, but surely this was ridiculous?
When the buttons started to disappear from your fly, I realized that you had some ideas of your own. One afternoon, I found myself at work and quite exposed: bareassed beneath my jeans, button fly completely buttonless while waiting on a table, unobscured groin at eye level for seated guests, one of whom was a gawking preteen. Yes, things got weird. And so I put you down for the Big Sleep. I didn’t want to find you missing someday, and wonder if maybe you’d hidden twisted beneath the basement washer’s lip to mingle with some launderer’s next load; I didn’t want to imagine you chasing through the spin cycle several terrified tiny pairs of size three dungarees from The Children’s Place.
* * *
Alas, my very nature forces me to scrutinize. I judge potential wardrobe the same way I judge human beings: ungenerously. I commit to vestment the same way I commit to women: such a thing is so seldom as to be considered a rarity, but when I do so, I do so informedly and wholeheartedly. In love and pants, I don’t much care for surprise.
When shopping companions witness these admittedly unusual antics and the devolving mood that accompanies them, they are unanimously put off, to say the least. When after several increasingly angry hours we depart for our respective domiciles and I have in tow only a single item—possibly the initial item I examined hours earlier on the excursion and then, after vacillation, near closing time, hurriedly returned for—some are outright livid. I know I won’t hear from them for a fortnight. Others accept calmly a new comprehension of the depth of my Type-A madness,[8] then wait for a moment of silence, a conversational lull during which to make eye contact and swear never to accompany me again. If they do so (swear it), it is understood.
* * *
Requiescat in Pace
Billy Joel
Thundercloud blue women’s relaxed low rise, boot cut style, Gap.
02/07 – 08/07
I settled for you. I tried to keep it from being obvious, but even you had to guess it all along: I never really wanted you. You were no prize, frumpy and discomfiting. You were neither sharp nor casual and no one would have noticed you in a crowd. Perhaps that was your best feature: you did your job without attracting attention; under your vestment, I was neither naked nor striking.[9] Once, I remember, I didn’t even notice you when I hurriedly scoured the dresser drawer and was forced to borrow corduroys from a friend—I thought myself inexplicably pantless as result of some inebriated misadventure the evening before. Your cloth was already balding in the beginning and became eventually threadbare; your zipper was too sharp and stiff and pricked any manipulative digits. When you unfurled in the end, the entire seam from crotch to knee opened up, a wailing, toothless infant’s mouth—a tantrum so drastic, I thought you’d prepared the act out of spite. But when other jeans failed, when others were soiled, you remained. That doesn’t make you Good jeans, but sometimes mere presence is worth something itself.
Requiescat in Pace
John Goodman
Dark ultramarine men’s straight leg relaxed style, Levi’s 505.
06/07 – 09/07
I’m not going to lie to you, John: I bought you because of bloat, because I felt fat. It was a hot June during my tequila phase and I’d gained forty pounds—a full third of my previous body weight—in four months. I had solutions in mind, but you were a stopgap. The surest way to look thin is to hang out with fat people. So I bought you, 34-34, relaxed-fit. And I camouflaged my sagging flesh in your plentiful rugose denim folds until I quit tequila and began to slough off the slubberdegullion’s blubber. Until I received an envelope with snapshots of us together and saw that, clad in your dark cloth, I looked like an underage convict. An out of work janitor.
John, you may have been good-intentioned, but mighty fuck, were you ugly.
You died the day I tripped over your trailing leg and thrice shredded you on cinder blocks. Cinched tight at my waist, you still somehow sagged below the battered leather belt onto which you were threaded to drag on the ground, becoming an unlikely obstacle. My weight loss had made our union unnecessary, impossible and, somewhat damaged, obsolete, I sent you to the grave. Dear John, I’m grateful for the shame you hid, the comfort you gave and I’m sorry for the ignominy of your end. But honestly, I don’t miss you a bit.
* * *
I shop like the bloated, over-privileged American imbecile I am.[10] I am the epitome of the caricatures one will see in French or Muslim media. Thoreau, in Walden, says, “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.” Sage advice, I know, yet still I shop with the arrogance of a man who has tried to reverse the hidden dictum buried in that statement. Semi-consciously, I seem to believe that I might metamorphose into New and Better Man by dressing like someone else. The way in which I shop for clothing is certainly a failing of mine, but shame me later. There is a more pressing point at hand for those with hearts which understand. To wit, there is little to be found on this earth as harrowing and heartrending as the quest for Good jeans.
I capitalize “Good” for the same reason Robert Pirsig capitalizes Quality in his pseudomemoir/explication of the abstract Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And like that nebulous central term, “Good” is essentially indefinable when it comes down to ontological examinations of any given pair of jeans. That is to say, it’s damned near impossible to articulately explain why any given pair are possessed of Goodness. It’s more than simple adequacy of shape or color; it’s more than that they look fine when zipped and buttoned and belted. The Goodness of Good jeans is an enigmatic, irreducible attribute: it cannot be dissected or analyzed. Mrs. Landis—associate of Mr. J. Pitt, Elaine’s eccentric corporate boss of Seinfeld fame—once described grace as follows: “Not many people have grace…[y]ou can’t have ‘a little grace.’ You either have grace or you don’t…And you can’t acquire grace…Grace isn’t something you pick up at the market.”[11] Goodness is similarly elusive. Jeans either are or are not Good; jeans are never “sort of Good”; jeans cannot become Good with a little careful tailoring.
Philosophically speaking, Good jeans are not Kantian “good”—they are pleasing in a way Kant could never have fathomed (having written the bulk of his best work about a century too early for Levi’s overalls and 150 years to early to experience modern blue jeans) when he composed his Critique of Judgment.[12] The best that can be said is that Good jeans are possessed of Greek arête, or excellence—a near ineffable essence the Hellenic ancients spent their entire lives pursuing, attempting to embody. Pirsig himself deals with the term “Good” in his second and less successful tome, Lila. The entire text is, more or less, devoted to explaining the comments of its peripatetic closing sequence[13] in which it’s revealed how deep meaning runs in the word “Good” when conscientiously applied.
* * *
R.I.P.
Jennifer Wilbanks
Cornflower blue unisex slim fit, low rise, boot cut style, William Rast.
05/07 – 12/07
Once upon a time, I left you alone for a single night. It was heartless, I suppose, to leave you lonely in the gloomy foreign land of the laundry room at the bottom of my building. But I’d been drinking and had forgotten how much I loved you. For a while, you’d solved all of my problems so well I forgot I’d ever had them, the problems. I’d become accustomed to your presence, taken you for granted. A fifth of scotch into a bender,[14] it was indicative of my mindstate that I left my abode that evening in almost underwear.[15] When, in the morning, I returned home bleary-eyed and desiccated to discover you gone, I panicked. I mourned you in private and public, posted signs from floors B-to-Four in which I begged for your return and insisted that no uncomfortable questions would be asked. All of my acquaintances suspected foul play, suspected futility in my pleas.[16] But one day, I returned home to find you fresh from the dryer, folded crisply on my doorstep. A single, complexly folded sheet of foolscap was tucked into your stash pocket; unfolded it said simply, “Soory” [sic].
After that, I slept on the couch and in you every day for two weeks. When your belt loops snapped, I secured them with safety pins. Then the pockets began to peel from your posterior, threatening to make you into a pair of pants only The Artist Once Again Known As Prince could love. You fell to pieces, quite literally. Perhaps because you were afraid to stay away, but ashamed to admit that you didn’t want to be with me anymore.
R.I.P.
Calista Flockheart
Prussian blue women’s boot cut style, Gap.
05/07 – 05/07
Calista, you were not Good jeans. You looked fantastic from a distance, I admit it. Nubile; angular and grave. And even those fleeting few moments we spent together in the dressing room were fine. I had high hopes for you—your slender build and my emotional upheaval made me believe you might be some straggler clone of Boba Fett.[17] Our changing stall moment was one of cathexis. But let’s face facts: I was a fool to think I could ever bring you home and be truly happy. Let’s face facts: no matter what the Gap and its prominently posted Body Size Conversion Charts may say about height and weight, neither of us is a Size Four, Long—you: a stretch to claim being Size Two; me: a Six at the least. Let’s face facts, dear: you died because I murdered you and I’m still glad you’re dead.
* * *
And when I am asked about my jeans, on those spare occasions, my reply is laden with meaning, an homage of sorts to that closing scene in Lila. “What kind of jeans are those?” someone will ask. And I will say, “They are Good jeans,” and I will not elaborate. In my epistemology, there are not myriad classifications for jeans: there are merely two divergent poles. Jeans which are imbued with arête, and jeans which are not—there is no milquetoast middle state. There are Good jeans and bad jeans. And the Goodness of a pair of Good jeans is enough to make me teary with gratitude.[18]
The past few years, however, have been tragic ones for jeans where my closet is concerned. Indeed, if the entire century so far has been a bad one for denim—and it has: it is my contention that the dernier cri innovations of gaudy faux wear lines which stripe the upper thigh,[19] stippled albifications,[20] ornate ass embroidery and factory-added, purposive shreddings[21] have been for the relatively defenseless Poland of jeans as the Teutonic footsteps of doom leading up to annexation and subsequent pogroms—then what has happened in my closet this past year has been nothing shy of a Denim Holocaust. My sturdy oak wardrobe, I am horrified to admit, has become Bergen-Belsen or Birkenau. Poor jeans: when I have been able to find a suitable pair, the leather patch on the belt line may as well be an embroidered yellow star for all that will come of them; being forced to cover my pasty legs and netherregions is apparently fatal forced labor for denim. Between January 2007 and December of 2008, I lost Good jeans at the rate of one pair every month—a rate at which I can barely afford to replace them, never mind the cost in man-hours of searching.[22] But the search is ineluctable: Good jeans are beyond recherché; they are Conan the Barbarian’s black lotus, they are home to Odysseus.
As an obviously vain but lazy minimalist who is accustomed to owning one, possibly, two pairs of pants at any given time (both of those pairs being jeans), the loss of one pair per month has been both financially and emotionally crippling. Once, on an inclement April afternoon, I went to replace my only pair of jeans, unexpectedly wrecked and inutile, while wearing tatty, old mesh shorts. I had no choice: it was either the shorts or go pantless and, though I was really no warmer than I’d’ve been if half-nude, I dodged a potentially pesky Lewd and Lascivious Behavior charge.[23] I resolved, obviously, to never let such a thing happen again and committed that day to purchasing two pairs. Alas, I found only one pair that could be called Good and, despite a five-hour foray into two malls and a half-dozen independent shops, I returned home unwilling to settle, wearing one pair of new jeans, yes, but with only my mesh shorts in a bag.[24]
* * *
R.I.P.
Boba Fett
Silvery sky blue unisex slim fit, low rise style, Diesel.
04/07 – 05/07
I won’t mince words here: you were the best pair of jeans that I ever expect to see. With black boots, you were lithe and dangerous; with Chuck Taylor All-Stars, you were hip and frivolous. I looked ready to sprint or strip, fight or fuck. You were more than Good jeans, Boba, you were Cool. Capitalized. Italicized: Cool. Imagine that. And that’s why I don’t understand your eventual end. You were, if I may slip into the vernacular, punked. After half an hour of relatively lazy play with a boisterous pit bull—crawling on carpeted floors, nothing less or more—your knees split open like yawning chapped lips. I’d no idea that fabric could “break” but, Boba, you broke. Shattered. Within one week, your shins had lost all coherence; your right leg looked like shorts with a trailing cape or bridal train. I’d have been institutionalized if I wore you in public. Thirty-one days after purchase, you were gone. Your Sarlacc was an afternoon on sand colored shag. And like your namesake, Boba, your death was an utter let down. Simply lame.
R.I.P
Brandon Lee
Black ultraslim fit style, from Zumiez Skatewear.
11/07 – 03/08
Black and taut, built for speed: in my head I called you my Draven pants and, for the four months of our quotidian association, I lived life like the undead, like a wretch who could never be killed, like Dostoevsky’s Undergrounder. Pill-popping, grandly misanthropic virtual hermitude, incipient homelessness, binge drinking. I can’t count the number of sunny 10mg Vicodin I found in your odd little coin-sized sixth pocket, having forgotten them, spares, until I woke in bright, renewed pain the morning after.
I wore you with boots. Always. And when the boots broke apart before you did, I wrapped them in gaffer’s tape.[25] Mornings, I stumbled about in you, shirtless, in boots unlaced: together we made a fucking rock star. They set you off, those boots, and what dunderpate would split up such a winning pair? Your faux-retro patterned pocket linings lent me extra panache; your aquiline thighs promoted my package. You made malaise sexy. And when the police paid me a wake-up call, I was wearing only you and tattoos and we both reeked of whiskey. You were there for me, with me, at the bottom.
You met your end when you melted to my leg. Binge drinking and pill-popping are such clichéd soft suicides and I remember the sour, hackneyed taste in my mouth when I woke on an unfamiliar chaise to find you smoldering, my leg blistered: a stranger’s cigarette dropped from lips to lap as I slid seamlessly from scotch into sleep. I searched your stash pockets for secreted painkillers that morning, frantic to ease the shrieking of our conjoined skin. It was just that one time you failed me, but I think it made our goodbye easier.
* * *
But enough of abstraction. Specifically and concretely, my list of demands is as follows:
- Jeans must be of such a cut as to serve primarily as a functional garment and not an affectation. I have never, for instance, wished that someone could, upon examining my legwear, immediately understand what sort of music I’m most excited by.[26]
- Jeans must have sufficient length as to completely obscure socks while standing, squatting, sitting politely, sitting with legs masculinely crossed,[27] sitting with legs draped over each other in a damp and effeminate manner,[28] curled foetally, jogging lazily across a mini-mall parking lot, lounging on a truncated chaise—thighs and back supported, knees bent, feet firmly planted on the floor—and so on. Jeans must perform this obscurant function regardless of accompanying footwear: hi-top, lo-top, boots or slip-on. The Off the Wall look is not only embarrassingly Depression- or Regan-era,[29] but physically uncomfortable.
- No embellishment of any kind. This includes but is not limited to: brighter/more ostentatious than normal stitching; zippers, snaps or buttons anywhere but the fly; pockets anywhere but the traditional five locations;[30] pockets set at abnormal angles; silk-screened designs; sequins;[31] the aforementioned wear lines, white spots, ass patterns and factory tears; leather or pleather anywhere but on the rectangular brand patch eventually obscured by the belt; brand patches or logos besides the prenominate obscurable and easily[32] removable one; corduroy patches; patches of other denim; colored patches in the shape of mushrooms, skulls, records, &c.
- A final price tag below $100.[33]
- Jeans must have belt loops. I feel ridiculous even having to demand such a thing but, the world has changed and the presence of belt loops is no longer a guarantee—even in men’s full-length non-hot pants.[34]
That’s it. That’s the whole list. These five qualities are all that any given pair of jeans must embody.[35] Nevertheless, time after time I am confounded in my search, foiled by retailer after retailer and their shoddy denim. And when I am not, when at last I find my Black Lotus—jeans which not only satisfy each criterion in toto, but are possessed of that ineffable Goodness—I guard them jealously, but might be better-suited by simply hoarding them away unworn in some redolent cedar chest and returning to the store posthaste to find a backup pair. O, BJ’s! O, Sam’s Club! Why do you not sell Good jeans in your infamously ludicrous bulk packages] I am condemned, it seems, never to while the hours away in pursuit of anything nobler than denim which will flatter my insubstantial ass.
It should, I suppose, be said that after purchase, I generally wear the same jeans all day, every day, until I go to bed. Sometimes, depending on the state of my dipsomania, I may wear them to and through bed. When I can get away with it, I wear them to work; I wear them to university, to dinner, while shoveling out my car. I wash them only very occasionally. I do little if anything that might be considered taxing to their seams and stonewashed skin, save a lot of walking, leg-crossing and crouching.[36] And yet these past years, I have watched knees and cheeks grow thin, translucent. I have watched insignificant lesions become ragged caries suppurating wan woven thread like the pus of engorged teenage pimples. I watched each enfeebled pair cling to existence with Herculean effort. And then one day, some crucial seam would split and all that remained would be rags and pale blue dust. Lament for the death of my pants.[37]
Were I cruel man, I suppose I might make use of their exploded corpses. Fashion a lampshade from a severed leg,[38] sew a battered back pocket inside my rucksack. But I am neither so industrious nor disrespectful; I am not so cruel when it comes to Good jeans. I know that each pair of jeans has an identity; each pair of jeans is a symbiote sharing my space and, ruined, they deserve to pass into Gehenna[39] intact, undefiled. Thoreau again: “Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know the comfort of wearing a suit that fits.” Yes, Good jeans have personality to spare and, over their tenure, the jeans and I, we bond. To me, Good jeans are larger than life. They are, to me, what celebrities are to the rest of the nation. Worthy of reverence, perhaps, but primarily a bastion of hope and inspiration. And I’m not alone in my romanticism: Beck’s Odelay, carefully examined, is an entire album about Good pants.[40]
* * *
Requiescat in Pace
Ross Geller[41]
Blue men’s styleless, from Express Men.
…09/05 – 12/05, 02/06 – 03/06, 03/07 – 06/07, 12/07 – 03/08…
When all else fails, I always return to you. Always draped sadly on the rack, always the same: Classic Fit, 32-34. I don’t need to try you on, but I do—it provides me with some semblance of the adrenalized drama I’ve come to expect from clothes shopping. Taking you to the register, I whistle the last lyrics of “Love Street,” by The Doors. I guess I like it fine, so far. That’s you, every time. You’re the closet’s Sad Sack, but you’re my safety net. My lobster.[42]
And despite my lack of enthusiasm, my passionlessness, you have always been Good jeans simply because, since I realized the need for Good jeans, you’ve always been there for me. You’re comfortable; with you I don’t have to try to be something I’m not; I always know where to find you. You’re overpriced and I’ll never understand your extraordinary popularity,[43] but when I find myself pantless and panicked I know you’ll come through in a pinch. Of course, I’ll better-deal you the second anything, anything even mildly interesting comes along.[44] But I always do so with the hunch that, in a not too distant future, we’ll be semicontentedly together again. And just maybe, when I one day grow tired of the chase, you’ll become my standard, my counterpart, my companion. Because let’s admit it: you’ll never be anywhere but limp on the store’s chrome rack when you’re not in my drawer or on me. And years hence, some young denim devotee might see us together and ask, “Where is it that old men buy new pants that haven’t been in style for sixty years?”
Requiescat in Pace
Christopher Reeve
Cerulean men’s slim fit, boot cut style, from H&M.
07/15/04 – 08/01/05
You swooped in and saved me from being half-naked in the middle of the night; you clothed and comforted me when I’d been bludgeoned and mugged. My old jeans torn in eight places, smothered in an unfathomable amount of muddy red blood: they were beyond earthly repair and dripped plasma when wrung.[45] You were a gift from the faraway dresser of a friend, he said, “Keep them—they look better on you.”[46] A consolation prize, a booby prize for the beaten. But I did as he instructed, I kept you. And you were perfect in every way, and I wore you every single day for a superhuman stretch of time. You were destroyed by the recklessness of my love.
Concrete was your Kryptonite and we fell—The Girl Who Later Got Away and I—while kissing, drunken and passionate, on the icy shoulder of a neglected alley. You were there with me on what might have been the single finest moment of my life, you cushioned my fall into pavement and love and, that evening, my triumph was the watershed of your dominion. Bloodspattered and torn, I had to hand wash you from then on.[47]
By the end, you were barely recognizable. Flaccid and ratty, I only looked at you because I was afraid to see a future without you. You, my hero. You who had swept in and saved a night from utter ruin imposed upon me by hoodlums, hooligans. By the end, I could only wear you indoors, in isolation, or for gritty manual labors. Your single hope of recovery involved the sacrifice of another pair of jeans and a complexly layered, Frankensteinian[48] network of patches but, frankly, it seemed unseemly.[49]
You died on Moving Day and you died a hero’s death. I jumped a second storey railing carrying the bulk of a sectional sofa. Kryptonite again, I crashed into macadam, first on my feet, then collapsed into a gape-thighed catcher’s crouch, and eventually toppled to my knees. You wanted to fly one last time; I was lucky not to die alongside you. You split from button-fly to back belt loops. Copper buttons, reinforcing brass rivets clattered to the pavement like the shell casings of a supervillain’s tommygun and, when I stood, you fell to the earth, one leg at a time.[50] Torn asunder. Finally far beyond the aid of science at this time in history, beyond earthly repair. And so I mailed you to New York City, back to that friend, with a note that read simply, “Thanks.” Godspeed, Good jeans.
* * *
Though my own wardrobe is the end of the line for so many Good jeans, I mourn each and every time a pair passes into the Denim Afterworld. Though I tend the Death Camp, I bear them (the jeans) no malice and am ridden with sorrow.[51] This year, I have come to see myself as the failed Schindler of Good jeans.[52] Lamentably, I am a lousy ersatz Oskar: every pair memorialized on the preceding pages has passed. Nevertheless, here, then, is my list. A role call of those that didn’t make it—there will be no generations because of me.[53] A twenty-one zipper salute, as it were, to jeans possessed of personality, of Quality (generally), and which should not be forgotten. Here, Reader will find earnest eulogies for the beloved departed, by an author hopeful for company in keening.
I didn’t do enough.
Godspeed all of you, brave, Good jeans. Cineri gloria sera est.
[1] That reason being, I suspect, that I was and am thin, tidy, relatively literate, with a tendency to gesture wildly while talking: I’m not actually gay, but they weren’t the last ones to be confused.[BACK]
[2] I started that sentence with no idea of where I was going to end up. I had no idea that it was going to become the single most truthful thing contained in this essay. And somewhere out there, there’s a bulimic toot-head with body dysmorphic disorder who would completely understand.[BACK]
[3] This is a mostly poetic conceit: I can’t sew at all.[BACK]
[4] This parenthetical aside is no longer strictly true. After the writing of this essay’s body, but during the snowy half-January before the editorial process, I underwent a surprisingly difficult transition: I changed the style of sock I wear. I’d been a black cotton calf-high sock sort of man for a few years—strictly for food service related reasons. But I had decided that, loathe the job as I do (and being possessed of a very fluffy white kitten), allowing it to dictate the garments I wore during my off time was preposterous and masochistic. Thus, I scrapped my foot sacks and replaced them with the sort of sock I had grown up with: white tube. But I was chagrined: it turns out that tube socks are nearly knee-high and offer no facsimile of comfort unless hiked taut.
Knee-high socks were not something I’d planned to incorporate into my adult, male life. I wondered briefly if there was some way to masculinize them. Was I the sort of man who might wear sock garters, a la Crosby or Kaye in White Christmas? No. So, the following Saturday, I scrapped all of my socks a second time. The replacement socks, when I arrived home, were, of course, too short—the sort which rise two inches above low top shoes, just covering the protrudent ball termini of the tibia and fibula. Socks I consider too high for shorts wearing and too short/tactilely maddening for use with full-length trousers. And so I ditched all twenty-four pair of these as well, replacing them, at last, with plain, white calf-high cotton socks (which, to be sure I would not have to make a fourth withdrawal from my rapidly/ridiculously diminishing bank account, I chewed open and test donned right there, on the filthy carpet of Target’s men’s section).[BACK]
[5] See FN4. This too is no longer strictly true.[BACK]
[6] I once returned a pair of jeans because I didn’t like how uncomfortable and obvious they made an erection—a situation I neither anticipated nor attempted (for testing reasons) to incite while in the dressing room.[BACK]
[7] This is pointedly not a poetic conceit. The jeans would waterlessly lose color and it became both a running joke and a serious private mystery. Where did the color go? It couldn’t have all been lost on contacted surfaces—and surely not symmetrically from both dorsal and ventral sides (I’m anatomically incapable of spending as much time on the front of my thighs as I do on the back, while sitting). And when I saw a season one episode of Fox’s House, M.D. entitled “Poison,” in which a pair of teens are made sick by wearing poisoned pants (literally poisoned: an embedded toxin was absorbed through the skin; moral: always wash new clothes before wearing), I just about lost my shit altogether and hurried to check the mirror, to see if I myself had reciprocally darkened.[BACK]
[8] See also: bi-daily vacuuming of all domestic floor space; alarmingly frequent reorganization of both physical text library and digital music library (all night projects during which I am best left alone); a tendency to distractedly count heartbeats/steps/repetitions of key or irksome words and speech disfluencies (viz.: uh, er, um, &c.) during verbal exchanges; exhaustively punctuating text messages (I once returned a phone because its text menu was not equipped with a semicolon); and a near-debilitating compulsion for symmetry (exempli grata: If I am struck in the left elbow, regardless of how much it hurts, I’m impelled to also strike my right elbow). Actually, my shopping habits rank low on the list of personal peccadilloes, for those who know me well.[BACK]
[9] Although Billy Joel-clad, I was once asked, “Dude, are you wearing ‘Dad Jeans’?”[BACK]
[10] QED: See FN4 and know that, in less than a month and during a recession to boot, I spent $50 on socks which I immediately discarded for trivial reasons. To my credit, I donated them to The Salvation Army, but I’m not really sure if they’ll dispense opened packages of even plainly unworn socks. Sorry: I think I may be the reason some Eastern extremists hate this country.[BACK]
[11] Seinfeld Episode 87: “The Chaperone.”[BACK]
[12] Though after perusing the later Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, I think perhaps Kant anticipated Good jeans: they are beautiful in that “beauty is connected with the form of an object,” yet sublime in that they have a certain “might that has no dominion over us.” And indeed Good jeans inspire a certain awe—a subtler cousin of fearfulness—but one is “not afraid of [them].” Or perhaps we’re both loony blowhards. I’m really not the best judge.[BACK]
[13] For those who enjoyed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and are excited to discover that there is a sequel, pause for a moment. The reason you haven’t heard of it until now should be obvious. Yes, the referent closing scene is rather a good one, but its presence in the book is a bit like an adequate, clever and erudite punchline to a joke which, if just 390 pages shorter, would have been a real knee-slapper.[BACK]
[14] I was giddy when a barkeep ex of mine told me that the unit of measure “a fifth” (of scotch, vodka, gin, &c.) means nothing more than one-fifth of a liter, 200ml. Well into my twenties, I’d thought “I drank a fifth of ______” was a claim to inebriation beyond imagination. Any experienced lush, I thought, can put back a fifth on even a sleepy Monday afternoon during lunch! For a while, it became a game for me to see if I could drink a reducible or improper fraction, e.g.: 6/5ths. And then atop a chilly, paper-covered chair, I was asked the routine “Do you drink?” question; to lighten the mood, I told the interrogative doctor the details of my silly little Improper Fractions game by way of answering. He very nearly had me committed—at the very least, the man insisted I be confined for a standard 72-hour observation period. This is when I found out that my barkeep ex was either a liar or misinformed. “A fifth” is one-fifth of a gallon—750ml. In this case, six-fifths of scotch, say, would be a case of Johnnie Walker—what a reasonably trafficked restaurant bar would order to get through a month or two. I was, I guess, well-spoken and earnest enough in the exam room to appear neither mistaken nor braggadocious and the doctor in question apparently thought I was openly admitting to frequent attempts to commit suicide by alcohol poisoning. Check your facts, people.[BACK]
[15] Again: the mesh shorts (which are, for the record, very slightly too short and thus really only suitable for jogging).[BACK]
[16] People I knew did suspect foul play. Laundry room theft is not uncommon. One of my friends told me how he would find them if it was his problem: “Dude, go door-to-door through your building and look for fourteen-year-old girls—I could see one of them gaffeling your small-ass jeans. Or maybe go out and buy new pants from the motherfucking men’s department.”[BACK]
[17] See below for Fett’s eulogy. Really, this should read “another straggler clone of Jango Fett,” but then only other total nerds would get the reference.[BACK]
[18] In fact, my full-on devotion to Good jeans has so pervaded my consciousness that, as a rather insistent atheist, I often cheerfully swap out the “god” in the statement “for the love of god” (which I often use, having unconsciously absorbed it during childhood from a mother born and socialized pre-Elvis) and replace it with “pants.” Recently, I uttered exasperatedly this phrase: “Now, for the love of pants, what were we talking about before your husband came into the room with a handgun?” Although it’s perhaps less remarkable for its modified euphemism than for what comes after it.[BACK]
[19] Which make every wearer, without exception for actual Body Mass Index, look pudgy-legged.[BACK]
[20] Which make every wearer look like a Coors-fond housepainter possessed of a subscription to Hustler or Penthouse Forum.[BACK]
[21] See television’s Family Guy, 2007: “You got a little tear in your pants there—oop, that’s on purpose, isn’t it? You’re a bad boy, a bad boy. Society wants those pants to be intact, but you’re just not going to listen, are you?”[BACK]
[22] An ex-girlfriend once compared one of my jeans searching episodes to sitting through Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King—Peter Jackson’s four-hour extended edition. The one with twenty crying/hugging/slow-mo waving scenes which could serve as the ending instead of the theatrical cut’s mere fourteen. This is not as inaccurate as I’d like it to be. There is, for instance, the same amount of melodrama and you really only want to do it the one time.[BACK]
[23] That I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia about a month later may or may not be related.[BACK]
[24] Doing the editorial runthrough of this piece two weeks after its drafting (three years after the relevant ordeal), I read this paragraph and smiled. My jeans are indisposed at present, having been in rather urgent need of laundering. Thus, I edit (and type this very footnote) wearing the nonce-Methuselean mesh shorts of the referenced sentence. Still, I have just a single pair of jeans. I have learned nothing with age. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.[BACK]
[25] In retrospect, these particular jeans and their counterpart gaffer’s tape-wrapped boots might have been endemic to my Quarter-Life Crisis: twenty-seven, recently degreed and without hope of career, still slinging snacks and cocktails to fat white people for a living. And during my downtime, black- and tape-clad, I probably looked like I was trying way too hard to recapture my relatively worriless quasigoth mid-teens.[BACK]
[26] Most excited by hip hop/high-BPM electronic music programmed/designed for drugged dancing: Kikwear, Fubu, &c. Generally possessed of such ludicrously oversized legs that the jeans themselves are an obstacle to walking. One should never have to walk around one’s own pants. Indeed, I’m not sure if that’s even possible.
Most excited by three chord “punk” rock/growled, semi-intelligible thrash metal: Social Collison, BDG and the newer Cheap Monday. These brands manufacture for sale jeans so tight that they, when donned, render the wearer Frankensteinian in gait (think Karloff’s 1931 portrayal), reluctant to sit down (For fear of splitting? For fear of testicular compression? I never actually see “gutter punks” sitting down. They all slouch or lean lazily like James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause—a semblance which they’re probably careful to invoke, Dean having had his style pinched years later by J. Rotten and S. Vicious, thus making him [Dean] the progenitor/grandfather of skinny jeans) and, gluteally/genitally speaking, rather precisely, obviously and unfortunately delineated. Also: because of the constant frictional situation faced by the bearers of the asses and legs so tightly denim-wrapped, there is an effluvium of sweat—98°+ o-cresol, p-cresol and urea. Urea: pee. Sweat is, essentially, a diffuse mist of piss and that’s the stink you smell the next time a punker passes too close on the subway. Piss thighs.
Skynyrd/Allman Bros./Charlie Daniels/Rebelicious (within the culture, it is, no joke, called “Rebel Rock”): Variously branded generics from Sears, J.C. Penney’s and UltraMegaWal-Mart. High rise in the front accentuates doughiness; a spacious and square-shaped seat that makes one’s ass look shapeless and flat (see TVs King of the Hill); a square foot of superfluous material in the crotch which makes the angle between legs appear membranous, like a bat’s wing. It’s as if they’ve fused together awful parts from other jeans to make a pair of pants that shouldn’t and don’t really work at all. These alternately too tight/too loose, always discomfiting abominations are usually available in an ill-advised blue (the standard automotive shade neither baby-, nor royal-, nor electric-blue—which might actually look slick cruising the byways and alleys ‘round town—but that Carolina blue one which calls to mind crudely spray-painted raw spots in a pounded-out fender; the color of everyone’s first car and which has yet to go out of vogue, despite pleasing 0% of the market share) and a fresh macadam black, assured to never, never lose hue. The latter will still be as preposterously black on washer load 1,000; black after you caught road rash and got pinned under your cousin’s restored Triumph that you knew you weren’t supposed to drive; still black after getting caught in an electrical fire while up a pole, trying and failing to steal cable. These are the kind of jeans we smuggled by the freighter-load to the C.C.C.P. which, after a few unfulfilling years (during which all the–avovs, -yviovs, -skis and –kovs, they discovered that, denim-gussied and blasting Billy Idol from a bootleg boom-box, they were no cooler) sent them back, still ugly and defective. If you wear them, the odds are you’re a lineworker, a cable co. employee, a tower jockey, a landscaper—whatever you do, you train on-the-job and your company doesn’t hire outside of a union, a union in cahoots with and getting kickbacks from both Dickies and the people who make these fucking hideous pants.
The chorus and bridge of Zeppelin, Floyd and Van Halen songs played once an hour on classic rock radio: One-thousand forgettably named brands, all of which are “gently tapered,” have rather high rises, oddly baggy thighs, and too-tight ankles which lead into knees once too tight, but since stretched to ridiculousness by the motion of the joint. Even if purchased three inches longer than necessary, they still feel too short. Worn by longtime husbands who’ve given up trying to have sex with their Pitt/Jolie/Britney-obsessed wives.[BACK]
[27] One perpendicular to the other, ankle atop knee.[BACK]
[28] Which, yes, is how I sit. Excitingly, a 01/06/09 Esquire article says this is no longer damning—apparently it’s even considered classy by contemporary etiquettecians. Quoth columnist Stacey Grenrock Woods, “[W]e need guys like you who are proud to sit in the classic female style, men who aren’t afraid to be called ‘Sally’ or ‘Nancy’ or even ‘Abigail’ to further the cause.”[BACK]
[29] Seinfeld costumers foreshortened all of Michael Richards’ Kramer pants as an invocation of Vaudeville, precisely to make him look like a yutz incapable of being taken seriously.[BACK]
[30] Though I’m aware I’ve mentioned that the “Brandon Lee” pair had that mysterious sixth pocket, I didn’t know about it when I bought them—somehow, despite my dressing room contortions, I’d missed it. If I hadn’t, it actually would have given me pause.[BACK]
[31] At the time of this essay’s writing, Express Men stocks a pair of men’s jeans with sequins on the ass. I guess they coordinate with salmon, erect-collared polo shirts.[BACK]
[33] In fact, I’ve only once been able to muster the spendthrift’s cojones necessary to break the $69.95 line. Based on the impressive lasting power of that pair, I suppose I’d be well-advised to do so more often (quoth the exhausted apothegm: “You get what you pay for”), but those hens (from the long-ago of paragraph one) under whom I studied, well, they weren’t just frugal: they were goddamned cheap. And I suppose I was indoctrinated against even beneficial prodigality.[BACK]
[34] Thank you very much, Levi’s Outlet in New York City. In late 2005, I sent sixty-five bucks to a friend who lived nearby and claimed, “Dude, they’ve got jeans in every size imaginable. What do you want, I mean really want? 29” x 34”? If you wanted 26” x 40”, they’ve fucking got them. Send me some loot and I’ll send them to you.” This “friend” neglected to check for the presence of belt loops and for the Outlet, apparently, all sales are final.[BACK]
[35] That’s not to say that these five qualities are the sine qua non of Good jeans, but being possessed of them does get you an audition.[BACK]
[36] By baseball season, shorts are usually my modus operandi, but for the purposes of argument, I will admit to wearing whatever Good jeans are currently in rotation to the batting cages for one hour every week for, say, the six colder weeks they (the cages) are open.[BACK]
[37] If Reader isn’t already in on the joke, see the 1995 remastered edition of Jim Morrison’s posthumous, preposterous spoken-word jam session An American Prayer, track 15: “Lament for the Death of My Cock.”[BACK]
[38] Yikes. How far can one push a Holocaust metaphor before it’s not just In Poor Taste but actually Ethically Damning? Perhaps this is the moment in which I should mention my Semitic heritage and upbringing—although it’s possible that that just exacerbates the grievousness of the offense.[BACK]
[39] This is probably only funny for other Jews. Gehenna—source of/analogue for the Christian concept of Hell—was a burning garbage pile near Jerusalem. My local landfill is probably not aflame, but wicked or not, that’s where the Denim Dead end up.[BACK]
[40] Okay, this is a slight exaggeration. Look for references to Good pants in about half of the album’s thirteen tracks. Notably: “Hotwax,” “Lord Only Knows,” (“Goin’ down to Houston/to do the hot dog dance./Goin’ down to Houston to get me some pants”) “High 5” and “Sissyneck.” This disc’s 1999 follow-up, Midnight Vultures, is actually similarly peppered with pant-fretting.[BACK]
[41] It says something about our American culture that, despite the fact that I haven’t owned a working television since 2000, despite the fact that, since its 1994 premiere, I’ve only really seen maybe a dozen episodes of the ubiquitous Friends, I know excruciatingly detailed things about the Ross and Rachel love story. And even if Reader has only seen a dozen episodes too, I have faith that she will “get” the joke. And probably a lot more enthusiastically than the Notes from Underground and Crow references in the “Brandon Lee” section.[BACK]
[42] Why, why do I know that there’s a lengthy discourse on that imbecilic aforementioned sitcom in which the Ross and Rachel ordeal is analogized by comparison to mating lobsters, which apparently are lifelong monogamous pairs? I can’t recite the entire Periodic Table anymore, I don’t remember the ASL alphabet, but I’ve got useless bits of this sitcom down pat. For the love of pants![BACK]
[43] Hmm. Actually, I could say the same for David Schwimmer.[BACK]
[44] And then once, years back, I cast you aside grumpily (in favor of jeans I soon decided were not Good but rather very Bad indeed) and a desperate roommate borrowed you without asking. Curious about my misgivings when I confronted him about the unapproved loan, my roommate said, “I thought you hated these jeans? You said you were done with them.” And in reply, I shrieked, “We were on a break!” Sigh. Another germane in-joke.[BACK]
[45] Literally. In a word, it was gross.[BACK]
[46] True story: the best of the Good jeans oeuvre and I stumbled into them accidentally, for free, while drunk, battered and bloody from a very recent mugging. It’s testament to the thesis of this essay that, in agony, missing a tooth and a half, with three broken ribs and a busted nose, cornea lacerated—stinging like an eyeful of ice and Ben Gay—and a hyper-extended knee, before I cancelled my credit cards, before I reported my cellular telephone stolen, I slipped out of my blood and pavement ravaged jeans, strung a belt into you and hurried directly into the bathroom, to the full-length mirror to see how we looked as a couple.[BACK]
[47] Also a true story. And it should be further testament to my espoused devotion to Good jeans that I actually did this, the required hand-washing. For months.[BACK]
[48] Frankensteinian, yes, though with a very different connotation than when used in FN18.[BACK]
[49] Interpolation w/biased political agenda: Though repairing the jeans in this way did seem somehow wrong, the “immorality of stem-cell research” allegory here is only a convenient poetic device. In reality, I think it’s one of the greatest tragedies of our generation that we’re not properly funding such research.[BACK]
[50] Again, true story (well, mostly). Technically, just half of the pants fell to the ground, after splitting (the other half still attached to the waistband which was, despite catastrophic damage, still pinned above my hips by a denim loop or two which encircled an undamaged belt). However, there is greater point to be made about this episode. I am, years later, forced to ask (possibly along with perspicacious Reader): what breed of moron jumps two stories with a fucking sectional sofa in tow? The elementary school pedants who put stock in such things told me that the results of a standardized test or two qualified me for the “Honors Track”—the Bluebirds reading group as opposed to the Robins. But this vignette is the sort of anecdotal shit that goes on one’s Permanent Record to rightly exclude one from any esteemed society into which my Bluebird-alumnus status might grant me. In fact, I wouldn’t blame them if they sent an angry educator to reclaim my primers and strip me of my degrees.
In a nutshell: Three men (whose combined weight was less than George Wendt’s) involved themselves in a poorly coordinated effort to move one of their number out of a converted third storey attic only accessed from the top of an extraordinarily rickety staircase barely affixed to the side of the house it climbed like wooden ivy. The staircase, built from nothing more than two-by-fours and several dozen coats of paint, made on the way to the ground floor two hairpin turns, both of which brought it briefly back under its own steps, as if it wanted to tie itself in a knot. The clearance in both of these underpasses was less than 72” and the breadth of the walkway area—the steps themselves—was no more than 60” between high railings. Each of these enclosed expanses was three steps in duration: about four feet. I’ve no bloody clue who got the antaean, quarter-ton, 77” x 36” x 48” sofa up to the apartment and even less of a guess at how. In the second of these confined spaces—closer to the house itself and thus even tighter—two of these couch-toting amateur movers found themselves at an impasse, for an instant even stuck in the stairwell. After a panicked moment during which they extricated themselves and retreated to regroup, the pair did what any two twenty-something American boys might be expected to: they made the exact wrong decision and rashly, at that.
They did not ask the third amateur mover for help. They stood dumbly, mouths agape. They did not even consider admitting defeat. Soon, the one of these men said simply, “Hang on, I’ll just jump down and you can lower it to me.” The second man peered pensively over the railing, scrutinized the 86 inches of freefall to the driveway below and said with a rising inflection, as if it were a question, “If you do that, for a few seconds there’s nothing but air to hold this thing up—I might drop it.” The first man, nodded and replied to this sensible objection as if he’d already considered and dismissed it: “No problem, I’ll hold one end when I go.” And he climbed backwards atop the railing, like an ill-equipped rappeller or suicidal high-diver, took hold of the sofa unit’s armrest and dropped seven feet to the gravelly tarmac below. It ended about as well as it could have: in near tragedy.
Now granted, that second stair-stranded amateur didn’t really do such great anchor work—even he admitted this, in the end—but in his defense, short of the Fantastic Four’s “The Thing,” who could? And I, the jumper, still sort of wish I’d suffered some sort of grievous bodily harm—one from which complete recovery was possible but maybe not without a long, sensitive scar—if only to teach me a lesson I apparently sorely need. Namely, don’t drop seven feet whilst carrying overhead something that could crush you. Fucking duh.[BACK]
[51] With the already admitted exception of those jeans named “Calista Flockheart.” I am glad they’re dead.[BACK]
[52] That’s it right there. There was a line and this sentence crosses it. Too far.[BACK]
