Attempting Normal (20 page)

I didn’t know if he flew there or if there was a series of some
sort of Rube Goldberg devices that he used to get on top. Maybe there was a bunch of mice and they were flipping each other up. I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t know and I took it as a line drawn in the sand. You have baffled me; I can’t understand how you did this. It’s disgusting and it’s obviously antagonistic and I’m going to fucking kill you.

So I put a sticky trap out and I got him and I suffocated him. I didn’t let him suffer too much.

I felt awful.

I wouldn’t call myself an animal lover. I can anthropomorphize almost anything, sometimes inanimate objects. But when I build a relationship with a certain animal, of any kind, I grow to respect it. All I ask is for them to show up for their side of the relationship.

After I decided not to unleash the fury of my demented cat onto the crippled hummingbird, I went out to see how badly it was hurt. I walked out the front door and looked at the bird and it looked at me. And then it took off.
Zzzzzzzzzz boom
, gone. It had been sitting down there for like five minutes. What the hell was that about? Why didn’t it just fly away in the first place? Was it stunned?

Then I thought it was probably feeling ashamed of itself. It hit the window. It was probably just sitting on the porch thinking, “I’m an idiot. I can’t fucking believe I hit the window. I hope Goose and Maverick didn’t see that. I’m just going to lie low, let this blow over, maybe they won’t bust my balls later at base. I don’t want to be that guy, the guy that hit the window. It’s bad enough we have to fight for the stupid fake flowers and the sugar water, and I have to be the guy that hit the window? I’m just going to hang out and lie low—whoa, it’s the supplier guy? I’m out of here.”

He flew away humbled. And I think that’s the message here. That’s an animal fable about humility. If you survive your mistake, you must learn from it. Accept that you’re fragile, vulnerable, and sometimes stupid. Realize that you’re not immortal and you’ve got to take care of yourself. And then laugh it off and fly away.

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Recently I went to the Levi’s store in San Francisco, which I believe is the original Levi’s store. The source. There is something about the Levi’s label that is imprinted deeply in my mind and heart. I don’t buy Levi’s that often but when I was a kid it seemed like they were the only pants. You had your Lees, your Wranglers, and then the Calvin Klein invasion, but Levi’s represented something with integrity, something American, but American in the best way possible. Something of value that lasted. Now everything turns to garbage inside a couple of years. Planned obsolescence has forever denied us the ability to believe in workmanship, institutions, and lifetime guarantees. This is true with everything from pants to marriages. And obviously life itself.

When I was a kid and my mom bought me Levi’s they were stiff and uncomfortable for weeks. Then over time and multiple washings, they’d fade the way you wanted them to and start to contour themselves to your body. They became more than your pants.
They were your skin. They grew with you. They saw what you saw, absorbed your pain, mistakes, spills, and slides. They scarred and ripped with you. It seemed like they lasted forever. Some part of me can’t understand why I ever got rid of that pair of Levi’s that I had in seventh grade. How did I lose track of those pants? I would wear Levi’s until they were just tatters. I don’t know if I am romanticizing, mythologizing, or being nostalgic. I assume all three. That seems to be how the brain breaks things down after a certain age.

I went to the Levi’s store because I had heard that good jeans were back. That they were making them like they used to. They cost a lot more but if you want some emotional time travel and believe that denim in its raw form can make you feel whole, it’s going to cost you to buy that two-legged vessel to a simpler time.

So at the Levi’s store I wanted to try on these new stiff jeans. The clerk helping me was a chubby fellow with a handlebar mustache. I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous. Anytime I see one all I can imagine is the guy twisting away at the waxed curls in his mirror like a villain of self-avoidance. If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat, and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked like he was interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly, while being chased through a time tunnel.

The mustache asked me what I was looking for and I told him I had heard that Levi’s was making real jeans again. Like the kind I grew up wearing. He said they were but they had to be treated a very specific way. He then told me he was wearing them. I looked down and he was packed pretty snugly into his pants. It
made me uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, but I wanted to hear him out.

He told me that his jeans, made with new shrink-to-fit denim, had never touched water.

“You never wash your pants?”

“Nope. I’m going on a year.”

I thought, “What does that even mean? You never wash your pants? Don’t your pants smell like balls? You probably smell like a ball factory! Do you have immaculate balls? Balls stink if you give them time and now you’re wearing your pants for a year? Do you have friends? Does anyone want to hang out with you?” I thought the
mustache
was alienating. I stepped back from him. I didn’t catch a wave of bad-ball smell coming off him, but how could it not be there, waiting, a miasma circling his body, if he doesn’t want to wash his pants?

I held up the pair of stiff jeans and said, “Well, what do I do with these?” The mustache got very serious.

“What I usually do is I buy them a size smaller than I wear.”

This is ridiculous because they are supposed to shrink to fit so you are supposed to buy a size bigger. I can tell I’m not going to wear my pants like his. So he says, “You put the pants on and you get into a bathtub with them. Then you get out of the bathtub and you towel off and then you wear them around, wet, for as long as it takes them to dry. That way they are contoured perfectly to your body. After that you don’t wash them, ever. If they get skanky you throw them in the freezer.”

I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything to the point that I am always a little disappointed and I think that everyone else has the perfect thing even though clearly the mustache did not have perfect pants because they smelled like balls. I assumed. The entire undertaking sounded ridiculous but I am weak and searching
and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.

I’d tried before to find perfection and had my heart broken. I love my Red Wing boots. I bought a pair of Gentleman Travelers in oxblood color and wore the hell out of them and then bought another pair of the exact same shoes. I had a glorious moment when I bought those boots, standing in the shoe store thinking, with complete sincerity and faith,
Holy shit my life is going to be okay with these boots. Everything makes sense
.

There is an ideology that comes with Red Wing boots. I get to bring them to the Red Wing store whenever I want. They will polish them. They will oil them up. They will fix whatever needs to be fixed. If it’s a manufacturing problem they will fix them for nothing. I’m going to have a lifetime relationship with my Red Wing guy. I built an entire belief system around these fucking boots.

I was a few weeks into this new pair before I admitted to myself that there was something wrong. I didn’t think they were the right size. I was walking around and they felt a little big. I should have bought them a little tighter.

I’d invested in the company, in the boot. I’d invested money and now I felt my feet just moving around in the boots. They were not hurting. They were not rubbing on anything. They were fine, really. But because everything in my life at that moment was chaos and I was exhausted, my brain saw it as a fine opportunity for obsession. My brain loves obsessions. If it can make me hate myself, then it’s all the better. So now I had these boots on my feet that basically as I walked were saying, “You’re an idiot. You are an idiot. It’s not our fault, we’re a good boot! You didn’t think it through. We’re not for your foot. You’re not a Red Wing man, or a man at all for that matter. Now we’re being dragged along by
you and your bad disposition because you didn’t think it through. You’re making us look bad.” I had little haters on my feet. I know they are good boots and I know it’s not their fault. All I was doing is thinking about my fucking feet and whether or not the boots fit right. I became completely consumed with it.

In the end, I had to admit defeat. The boots went on a shelf. Nothing made sense.

This time, it would be different. The day I got home from San Francisco with my new Levi’s, I went online to do a little research. What if the guy was right? Sure enough the consensus on the Internet was that to make these jeans perfect, you put them on, get into a bathtub full of water, and then let them dry while you wear them around. I ran the water into the tub. I don’t ever take baths. I can’t remember the last time I did and now here I was, taking one with my pants on.

As I was lying in the tub with my new gray Levi’s shrink-to-fit pants on, my natural feelings of desperation and stupidity were mixed with another emotion: hope. My life had narrowed in this moment to one small, attainable purpose, the pursuit of perfect jeans, and I felt excited. I also felt empty. This is what my life has become? Don’t I have better things to do? I am a forty-eight-year-old man in a bathtub wearing pants thinking I will be a better person for owning a pair of highly personalized jeans. It was in that moment that it hit me. These pants are just pants. They aren’t going to do anything special.

That guy with the fancy mustache at the Levi’s store was a carnival barker at the Dunk the Clown game. The clown was the me who bought the pants and the bullshit that came with them. The pitcher with the ball whom I was taunting was the me who knew better. I took the pants off and enjoyed the bath. In the tank, again.

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