It was 1976. And I needed pants.
I was beginning junior high — my chance to escape the dreadful stigmas that somehow attached themselves to me in elementary school. Stigmas related to my having the athletic ability of Stephen Hawking and an unfortunate nose-picking incident.
Mom took me shopping and I found them at Macy’s — The Pants That Would Change My Life (PTWCML). They were jeans, pre-washed with bell-bottoms and some fancy shit on the back pockets that looked like I had sat on a kruller*.
In the dressing room, I checked out my pert tween lack of a butt. Good God! I was transformed into the bassist from Grand Funk Railroad, but without the porn star moustache. A chick magnet. Junior high would be different. I would finally be cool. I would steal people’s locker combinations and write them down in a small notebook, amassing power and respect. I would get into fights and not lose yet again. I would tease that kid with the English accent, and the girls… the girls! How they would laugh!
But oh, fashion, you fickle mistress.
That first day of 7th grade, I swaggered off the bus like a member of Humble Pie scopin’ out the groupies. But, then I noticed all the boys were wearing dark blue, straight-legged Levi’s with no fancy shit on the pockets. They were dressed like coal miners. I was dressed like a gay Jew from Staten Island. Even the weird foreign kid whose parents worked at Cold Spring Harbor Labs (his mom was hot but she smelled) was cooler than me, and he was wearing Sears Tough-Skins, for God’s sakes! Sears Tough-Skins are to jeans what textured soy protein is to beef!
A kilt would have been better than The Goddamn PTWCML!
I was mortified. Shattered. I would end up eating lunch with the kid with the English accent. My prospects for sex were reduced to this girl Linda, who had a weird thing under her nose — it was snot mixed in with a cut she got from being hit in the face with an iceball. The bullies would start with my pants then work their way up to my big nose. There would be cruel words, beatings and they’d push me into the boys room where a bunch of 12th graders would pin me down and inject me with heroin like they did to Gene Hackman in “The French Connection II.”
I spent that day pirouetting and spinning like a spastic in the hallways, trying to keep anyone from seeing my back pockets. Sliding my ass across the lockers. Holding my book-bag awkwardly low and behind me, my skinny arms hugging me backwards, straining to keep my butt covered.
When I got home, I buried The PTWCML way, way down in the lowest drawer of my dresser, underneath another abortion of a fashion statement I made in 5th grade — I insisted my mom buy me a plastic Washington Redskin’s poncho with a big Indian head on the back. I had no idea we were in Jets country and kids actually cared about football enough to hit me. What a world! I’m thinking, “But I look like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars,” as Jimmy Schultz throws me over a snow fence.
The pants stayed under the poncho until I outgrew them and my mom finally stopped asking, “Why don’t you wear those expensive jeans you insisted on having?” The poncho eventually migrated upstairs and my grandma would wear it to get the mail when it rained. One day, Jimmy Schultz spotted her and tossed her into the road, breaking her hip.**
1976 flashed through my head while I was stuck behind a school bus. In the mirror in my mind, I see myself at 83 pounds, wearing a pair of pants bought to do an impossible job. I gun my car… it’s a Prius. You can’t really “gun” a hybrid. That’s like, I don’t know, setting an electric toothbrush to “stun” or something. Whatever. I crank up Janelle Monae. And I guess I’m as cool as I’ll ever get.
*A kruller is a fancy, oblong, twisted donut — like two snakes mating that have been decapitated and deep fried. On my back pockets. What the hell was I thinking?
** This didn’t happen. Everything else did.