Trouble With Pants: an exercise in writing about maladjustment

Not long ago, at the end of an evening of movie-watching at home, Annie and I clicked off and then tried to get up from our easy chairs where we’d (at first) sat and then (gradually) slumped since about the second half of whatever we’d been watching. “Oof!” “Ow!” “This gets harder every week!” Annie got about halfway up and then wavered and had to lunge for an armrest to keep from falling all the way back down. “Are you OK over there?” “Yeah,” she said, “I'm just having . . . trouble with my pants.”

Trouble with my pants! I laughed loud and long, knowing that I’d stumbled on my theme for this essay.

Pants? I’ve been having trouble with ’em, sure I have. (Not your pants, my pants. Your pants are your problem and you’re welcome to them.) I’ve been having trouble with my pants for a long time now, years in fact.

“Pants” is a funny word. A dog pants, but a dog doesn’t wear pants. Is a one-legged pants a “pant”? Isn’t “trousers” another funny word? Another plural term for a singular item. It sounds like a name for a pet, a pet dog, you can see it on the side of Trousers’ food bowl: TROUSERS. It would seem to be a noun for something that trouses. I don’t like the sound of that! Keep your trousing hands off of me!

OK, so. What’s the problem with your pants, Dave? 

Well, I’m glad you asked. They don’t fit. Or, perhaps, I can’t get them to fit. (So is that my job then, is that what you’re saying?) NOTHING EVER FITS! I mean, my clothing hangs on me just well enough that I can pass through the world without acute embarassment, which isn’t nothing, I guess. For casual wear, and I dislike any other, my go-to pants are Levi’s 505’s in 36x34, in a “dark rinse” finish, I think it’s called. I run them into the ground, is what I do. I also have some khaki slacks left over from my office days, and wheat-colored hiking pants for when even “good” jeans would be too downscale, and a suit to wear when people die. Nothing in wool. No way. It itches. I’ve got maybe two extra pairs of jeans, the ones that used to be “good,” so torn and stained and grungy I only wear them for yard work.

505’s are the heart and soul of the “dad jeans” look, almost aggressively unfashionable. They’re slimmish but not tight. With wear, they fade, sometimes appealingly, sometimes appallingly, and they get poochy at the knees and at the butt, of course. Let’s skip over that part, OK? I'm aware of what it looks like back there. As the day goes by, I can feel my waistband slipping and the extra fabric gathering in unwanted folds, a real baggy-butt look. It doesn’t bother me except when I see photos of myself.

I inherited my mother’s large rear end (bet you weren’t ready for that), so for a time I kept it partially covered with the tail of my shirt (see below). But you can’t wear that look everywhere. Maybe, you can’t wear that look anywhere. So then you’ve got to take into consideration the belt.

My belt is a thick strip of brown leather meant to hold my pants up day after day for as many years as possible while looking just the teensiest bit manly. But what happens is the belt itself migrates south, owing to gravity. It’s 1.375" wide but the space afforded by the belt loops is 1.875". So the belt settles to the lowest possible position, while the topmost part of the waistband rolls out and over the top of the belt, like toothpaste blurping out of the tube you forgot to cap up last night. Is it a good look, the look you were looking for? No, it isn't.

My mother (my mother!) bought me my first pair of bell-bottoms. Basically they were white with many vertical candy-stripes of all hues, extra wide at the bottom, and more like a velour fabric instead of denim, very soft. Very Carnaby Street, very Incense & Peppermints. Where and when was I going to wear them? While hanging out with my buddies behind the Friendly’s downtown, smoking? But I didn’t do that! Where else, then? Not to church, not to school, not while biking, not while fishing down at the pond. (Or was I getting too old for that now?) I strove to like them, more as a reward for Ruth for at least trying, but I only wore them twice.

How about shirts? These days I own a handful of shirts that I would wear when I’m out in public. Couple of button-down collar shirts from the office days, couple of flannel shirts for cold weather, and maybe four decent t-shirts, all L.L.Bean, all solids, no stripes, no logos, no illustrations, no funny sayings, no nothing. In addition I’ve got some clapped-out t-shirts that I wear only while sleeping, usually because the collar is pulled out of shape or something, but there’s wear left in them. (That’s a strange concept to some folks: that you can look at a beat-up garment and ascertain that “there's another six months of wear left in that.”) My size is 16-and-a-half 34-35, or Tall Large, depending; it took me years (and lots of cash) to figure out what to settle on, what were to be my standards.

NONE OF THEM FIT! My shirts slide around on me. To get a shirt that’s long enough I have to buy one that the shoulder seams wind up somewhere halfway down my upper arm. My narrow shoulders are up near my ears all the time anyway, from excessive shrugging. What about tucking-in? Do we wear these shirts tucked in, or untucked? Look at yourself in a full-length mirror. Your belt-line is at the equator. How’re you looking? Do you want to have a sharply-defined, solid bar at your equator, marking the border between North and South? Or are you a bit self-conscious about packing part of your mother’s anatomy back there, and so maybe you want to fudge that equatorial line a bit, leave that shirttail out, let the North seep into the South a little? Don't ask me — haven’t figured it out!

Reminds me of my own little-kid imagining of the actual “Equator,” on first hearing the word. Right away, I pictured a gigantic silent machine up there in the bright blue sky, obscured just a little by gauzy clouds, an enormous weightless contraption with many flaps and gears and swooping cowlings, a cross between an engine and a fishing reel, but huge, huger than huge, way bigger than the Hindenburg, but silent. A mysterious purpose it had, to “equate” everything on the planet so it would all even out. Did the equator, then, have something to do with daylight savings time, or the shortness of our winter days? Was it part of God?

Let’s stop and think this through. Most of us humans have two legs on the bottom and two arms, a head on top, and a trunk in between. How are you going to clothe all of this territory efficiently, effectively, functionally, attractively, affordably? It’s a set of thoughts that must have kept clothing designers, makers of textiles, and tailors up late at night for many centuries. Speaking as a guy: you’ve got to pull on pants from the bottom and up to your waist. You’ve got to pop two shoes onto your feet, most of the time. (I find it hard to work, even to paint or write, unless I am wearing shoes, although I’m taking a walk on the wild side by writing this in my sock feet.) You’ve got to yank a pullover over your head and down to your waist where it meets your pants, or doesn’t as the case may be. Up and down, that's the quickest way to get yourself dressed enough to answer the doorbell. Maybe you hate pullovers: they mash your hair. So, you grab a shirt with buttons. This garment goes on from the back, not the top. Pay attention: you stick one arm in one sleeve and contort yourself trying to locate the opening to the other sleeve so you can stick your other arm in it. There’s the doorbell again — “Coming!” Then you bring the left side and the right side together in front of you and you button: button, button, button all the way down. How are your fingertips today? Kind of numb and fumbly? Oops! You’ve mismatched the buttons and button-holes and your collar looks ridiculous; you’ll have to start over again!

Where was I going with this? Oh. Shopping. It won’t surprise you that I hate shopping, especially in person. The COVID-related rise in online shopping for every little thing has been right up my alley in this respect. I don’t have to drive to the store, I don’t have to make my way across a hot or icy parking lot, and I don’t have to locate the shelf where my jeans are supposed to be, and then turn around and leave unhappy because they never have them in my size. As long as somebody still makes them, the internet is never out of stock.

Whether online or in-person, I will do almost anything to avoid shopping for clothes, because I don’t like to think about it, and I hate having to spend money that way. It feels futile in any case; I never like how I look. I wonder which came first, the hating shopping or the hating the result in the mirror. Maybe they feed off each other.

I “shop” for utility, and of course for value. In my late teens, the local Army/Navy store was a godsend. Surplus clothing was cheap, durable, permanently out of fashion and therefore squarely in fashion. Jeans themselves were the prime example; part of the uniform of ranch hands, sailors, and blue-collar workers everywhere, they were adopted by students in the sixties as a way of saving money and looking cool, while helping you live down your privileged circumstances, without you having to give up your privileged circumstances. When I entered college in 1968, the small menswear stores that had been outfitting undergraduates for decades with pricey suits, slacks, ties, oxford shirts, and gentlemanly accessories took out their traditional ads in the student paper: “Welcome to Cambridge! Do drop by, won’t you? We probably dressed your father and your grandfather, and now we’d like to get to know you, too.” Instead, you and your friends took the subway down to gritty Central Square or Park Square for some decidedly downscale duds.

So let’s review. I have trouble with my pants, and my shirts. Also with my shoes. Lots of trouble with my shoes. My shoes look dumb. So do my socks. My socks won’t stay up, or they go out at the heel too soon: too thin, too thick, wrong color, too dark, too light, too long, too short. As with shoes and socks, so also with coats, and hats, and gloves. Nothing fits, except approximately, like a dog wearing trousers. Mr. Approximately-Clothed.

I don’t buy dress gloves anymore, haven’t for years. “Dress gloves,” sheesh. Are they gloves or are they a dress? Gimme a break. What am I, going to step out to the symphony or the opera in the winter, wearing Italian leather gloves and a muffler? No I am not. All I require of gloves is that they keep my hands from freezing when I take the dog out for a walk. Is that too much to ask? Evidently it is. The cold seeps in, starting with my little fingers, the outer defenses. I have to thwack my hands against my leg to bring back the circulation, like the protagonist in Jack London's “To Build a Fire.”

Also, my hair! I have trouble with it! When we had to wear our hair short (grade school, high school), I looked like a twerp, frankly. When we could grow our hair out (college), I could pass for cool with my very Hair-like hair. When it was time to get work, I had to cut it short again. But, you know, that was all right, because I was older now and it was beginning to mat down on top, losing its waviness and curliness. Not an attractive white-blond anymore, it was becoming more like a stack of straw up there. What was happening to me? Now of course it’s thinning and losing what life it’s had. I can see that I’m going to be one of those guys with a fussy clump over each ear and a band across the back but nothing on top except a few long, wispy strands, old friends of mine who remember how it used to be and can’t seem to move on.

Also, my skin! I have trouble with it! It doesn’t fit me either. It’s as if there’s someone (me) inside who can’t get out because the skin of whoever this is, this other guy, is holding me in. It itches here and it itches there, and it bunches up where it ought to be smooth and it gets blotchy where it ought to be clear. And it’s pink! Not only am I a white guy ­— bor-r-r-r-ring! — but I’m a pink guy. “Fair,” they call it. Fair to middling. Look at my fingertips! Look at my toes! Or don’t. I'll save you the trouble. They’re pink, a very deep pink!!! I’m not supposed to walk out into the sunlight at midday without a hat and sunblock, maybe not even then. If I do, I’ll be back in the clinic with skin cancer again and this time it’ll be all my fault. I wrote a poem once, a sort-of haiku, to accompany a piece of art, still unfinished:

Skin scorches and cries
For sunblock or shade but
Life wants light hot light

Also, my mind! My mind doesn’t fit me! The fabric and the styling are all wrong, the color is not what I wanted. It belongs to somebody else! The stitching is too tight over here, too loose over there, it’s totally irritating. Can’t I return it for a refund? The garment of my mind both sends and receives the wrong signals. People will laugh when they see me.

I want to be left alone: I don’t want to be left alone: one reason why I write.