Home Six Part II

Rent A Wreck - Suburban Kids With Biblicial Names

Home Six continues with Part II below, Part I can be found here.

"Haven't you got anything slimmer? Jesus fuck, everything is so bloody dumpy," Low ranted to the clerk from the other side of the change room door. She put him at ease, allowing him to speak with his usual excited rhetoric that he saved for girls that he thought were cute. Low had spent plenty of time with her before they hit the fitting area, having led her to every display of jeans in the store, perusing leg widths like some kind of manic in search of a religious experience. Her name was Tina, she thought Low was annoying, but didn't mind spending the extra time with him since he was more interesting than her average customer who had just finished gorging themselves on all you can eat shrimp at the restaurant next door, and were now in search of cargo pants or khakis to wear on some harbor cruise wedding reception. She was losing her patience though, and just wanted to get back to the till so that she could use the phone to check her voice mail and see if her boyfriend would be picking her up when she was off in a half hour, so she grabbed the tightest pair of pants in the store which happened to be a women's jean and slung them over the door for Low to try on.

"Wait, try these. All the guys I live with wear them. They have a real tapered leg, I can't fit into them but you're a pretty tall drink of water, so I bet they'll look hot," Tina said.

Low's outstretched arm grabbed them like he was accepting a weapon that would be used in some sort of ceremony that would place him and the young clerk in the upper echelon of men's fashion. There were others like him, he thought. A secret society of skinny pant wearers refusing the men's typical boot cut, or slim fit, all of which inevitably bagged around the ankles and looked terrible.

"Now this, is what I am talking about," Low said, impressed with his ability to wear women's jeans. It was a victorious moment in fashion, and Low at that moment officially banned himself from men's jeans forever, at least men's Gap jeans, because he knew that the right jeans were always available if money was not a concern.

Waiting at the side of the road for a cab was different than standing in a fitting room at The Gap though. It seemed like Low had been standing there forever, making himself available as fodder for the drivers in their cars who never had to worry much about being eyed up on the street like that. Normally it wouldn't be much of a concern, but Low was drunk, and the pants felt tight, really tight, and he was beginning to question his quest for the skinniest pants in the city as just that, an attempt at satisfying some obsession that he had dreamed up over his morning coffee rather than something that actually looked good. He thought of himself as an abnormality standing there, clearly over dressed for his surroundings, but as uncomfortable as that made him feel it was a rush to think that he looked different than everyone else, that people were shocked at the site of him even though the reality of the situation was nothing of the sort. His sense of priority was completely fucked. His life was a mess, an absolute drunken mess, yet he had put so much energy and thought into what he would wear that day that he only managed to magnify the real issues that were waiting for him to ponder when he would eventually stand still. He was waiting for a plane because he was going home, to the city that he spent most of his youth in. For a person that was dogged by the past and consumed by history the way he was, it was a dangerous place to be.

Continue to Part III