Bottom Out

His long hair was plaited intricately and then arranged carelessly into a tail at the back of his head, an architecture of effort made to appear effortless. One nail painted robin’s egg blue flashed a diamond sticker in yesterday’s afternoon sun like a tiny jeweled trout fly.

I watched as he bent, casually as a grazing horse, and snorted a line off the back of something balanced precariously atop the arm of a comrade.

His drawers were oversized pseudo-denim, cut off somewhere around mid-calf. This is the sort of garment manufactured to resemble blue jeans in the same way a hotel painting resembles a lake.

There is, in fact, almost no such thing as honest denim anymore. True raw denim (the stiff, indigo-dyed, selvedge kind) is now a niche article, woven in small mills in places like Japan, Italy, and a dwindling handful of specialty operations in the United States. What most of us presently call “denim” is an economical blend of cotton, stretch fibers, chemical softeners, distressing agents, imported thread engineered overseas, pre-faded, pre-softened, and in many cases pre-ripped, so the aesthetic of wear precedes the act of wearing.

Not only had these particular pants given up even the modest ambition of covering the whole leg, they also stopped short of fully committing to the responsibilities traditionally associated with the back side.

And all I could think about, despite the theater of the moment, was the tremendous private stress of having to keep one’s pants at that exact precise elevation across the rear end.

Not up.
Not down.
But hovering.

A narrow band of cloth was performing well beyond its design specifications. Nothing more than a sudden sneeze stood between his fashionable indifference and catastrophic ankle-collapse.

Every step would be a wager.
Every staircase, a crisis.

Imagine always teetering on the edge of someone else’s definition of “cool” and utter humiliation were they to slide south from their post toward the ground, pooling there like wind-tossed sails.

This may be why I like a higher rise, not only because I am conservative in many settings, but because I have enough to keep track of already without spending my afternoon manually supervising my britches.