The boyhood of the unraveling pants

The boyhood of the unraveling pants
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — As I was riding the Métro in Paris awhile back, face-to-face with a lovely young thing, I noted — with a familiar sense of perplexity — that both the knee areas in her custom-blemished Levi-Strauss 501 jeans were torn and ravaged, framing her lovely nude patellas in twin ovals of weathered thread. There was also an alluring gash in the right-thigh region of her pants.

All of this trouser damage is, of course, the height of fashion. It has been, inexplicably, for years. Pre-ripped, pre-faded, pre-stained and pre-distressed jeans cost more than those that hang pristine on the rack. I often wish that this bizarre trend was active when I was eight years old. In that era before the dawn of Goodwill Store chic, I could not for as long as a week keep a new pair of pants from lacerating horizontally at the knee, from LCL to MCL.

No sooner did I burst onto the playground at St. Mary’s and plunge headlong into a game of pom-pom — as I upshifted in pursuit of my speed nemesis, Timothy Larkin — I would clip the golash of another kid, stagger forward at full tilt and end up skidding five abrasive yards along the jagged Catholic asphalt. If I was lucky, only one knee of the pants Mom had just bought at the Tomah Cash Mercantile for an exorbitant $3.99 would be shredded. But never mind, there were three recesses every day. Plenty of time to wreck the other pant-leg.

My mother — like every housewife in those days — had a sewing machine. But Mom was a reluctant, infrequent and not very dexterous seamstress. She was much better at watching me come through the door, my pants tortured, my knees raw and seeping blood, and saying, “Oh my God, David. I just bought those pants.”

This could have been her motto.

The expedient solution to kid-wrecked pants was to buy a set of iron-on knee patches at Burris’ Five & Ten, which Mom would do and then sullenly apply them, leaning vindictively on her weary and dented Westinghouse steam iron. After my first iron-on knee patches began to separate from my pants within the first block of my walk to St. Mary’s, I lost much of my faith in the American adhesives industry. By recess that morning, my patches were barely associated with my pants. Flopping noisily with my every step, they became a source of general fascination.

True to the Code of the Kid, my chronically torn-up knees had always wrung ridicule and sniggering from my uniformly callous classmates. This only got worse at the sight of these two unnaturally blue squares of glue-backed pseudo-denim rapidly abcissing from the giant ragged holes in my pants. Eventually, I crept to the boys room, stripped away my iron-ons — enlarging the original gashes — and spent the remains of the day with my tattered pants and my scabby knees on full display, resentfully evoking a street urchin in a Zola novel.

Sometimes I wonder: Am I the only the only guy who’s spent his life plagued and bewildered by issues with his pants?

Even my favorite pants, when I was a kid, posed the odd crisis. They were khaki-brown with the usual five pockets — two in front, two in back and the little coin slot that’s easy to slip a nickel into but not quite big enough to accommodate the number of fingers you need to get the nickel back out (which is, of course, another pants issue). But the beauty of these pants was the two saddlebag-size side-pouches slung just above the knee.

Like any other self-respecting kid, I stuffed every valuable item I could find — in my pathetic stash of possessions, in the street, in the yard, beside the lake, beneath the trees, in the heaps of offal at the Monowau Street dump — into my pockets. On any given summer day, with my pockets bulging, I walked with the labored gait of a pack mule on the borax flats. I rattled, I clanked, I zizzed and I chafed. But I had everything I needed to survive for at least 36 hours after a nuclear attack, unless the weight of my pockets pulled my pants down to my ankles, which happened a few times. (Don’t get me started on belts.)

But even those, my favorite pants, might betray me — particularly the day I extracted a striped, strapping three-foot garter snake from a pile of concrete shards in the storage yards behind the Milwaukee Road frog shops. I would have happily worn the snake around on my arm but, I reasoned, why do that? I had pockets.

It took but a moment to shift my worldly wealth to the other six pockets and make room for Murray (the name I’d bestowed on the snake). Stuffing thirty-odd squirming inches of Murray into my right saddlebag took a while, but I managed the feat, securing the snake’s captivity by closing the two pocket-snaps.

Then, I strolled back into metropolitan Tomah, proud in the secret knowledge that I was armed with a menacing serpent whom I could suddenly snatch from my pants and brandish like a colored illustration from Edith Hamilton, sending blue-eyed little girls screaming into the bosoms of their governesses.

I’d gone several blocks before a certain lightness in my step revealed to me that a couple of mere pocket-snaps were sorely insufficient to secure the custody of a whip-smart garter snake. Murray was gone, cheezing it back to his rockpile, and I was left with a reminder of what snakes do when they feel trapped. Murray had emptied his bowels, into my pocket — almost a month before these pants were due to be laundered. I spent a few days sticking my right hand into that particular saddlebag and pulling it out suddenly, smeared with snake-slime.

However, after a while, the residue dried nicely, lost that cloying aroma unique to snakeshit and allowed me to re-stock my pocket.

I always think of those pants when I’m watching a James Bond movie.

You see, although I no longer pack my pockets as voluminously as I did when I was eight, I still keep something in every available space. Wallet front left, pens front right, coins in the annoying coin pouch, a graceful carbon-steel Thiers jackknife in this neat little buttoned pocket on my right thigh, keys and a card folder in each hip pocket. My stuff.

But then, zounds! I go to the movies and watch Bond seduce Ursula Andress or Teri Hatcher. Yes, this has never happened to me, or probably you, but the scene is somehow believable until the moment that Sean, or Roger or Pierce, whips off his pants— and nothing falls out. Nothing, not even a ticket stub or a crumpled sawbuck. His change doesn’t spill all over and roll under the bed. His wallet doesn’t escape, spread its wings and fling his credit cards and driver’s license across the room. Neither the photos of his ex-wife and kids, nor his laminated Henry Aaron rookie card are exposed.

James Bond wears movie pants. James Bond — and Steve McQueen, Harrison Ford, Ryan Gosling, whoever — never has anything in his pockets to clatter out and embarrass him at the moment he’s untying Judi Dench’s bikini top.

Okay, sorry. Holly Goodhead.

When I got to high school, Mom declared my manhood and issued me forth to go buy my own pants. I know. Sending Huck Finn off to purchase the most complicated item of clothing that ever befuddled a universe of grown men? True to form, my first unguided safari to the J.C. Penney Men’s Dept. rendered fresh humiliation. I proudly chose three pairs of suspiciously cheap greenish chinos that promptly shrank in the tumble-dryer. I had to cover my beltline for the next nine months in school because I couldn’t — without breaking a finger or rupturing my waist — close the top button. I got heavily into sweatshirts that year.

Since then, I’ve had good pants, bad pants and pants that launched strangers into peals of laughter. I gave in to bell-bottoms in the same month that bell-bottoms plummeted violently out of fashion. Worst of all, I’m alone in my suffering. There might be others with my troubles. But we’re all guys.

And guys — true-blue Duluth Trading ballroom jeans guys — never share how they feel about their pants.