Free pants

Blogging about my Quarantine (which continues to a large degree in LA, 125 days and counting) got too heavy for me a few months back, but I’ve missed writing and sharing so much that I’m back with a new approach. Most mornings I walk around my neighborhood. Each time I do I’m going to take note of something I see and use it as the prompt for a very short story. Here is the first.

Monday, 7/20. 7:40am. Corner of Algoma Ave and Yosemite Dr. in Eagle Rock. A man runs across the street carrying several pair of pants on hangers, then starts to hang them on the high school fence.

Wayne wasn’t sure this would work, but he had to do something. It had been another sleepless night. It was shaping up to be another shit day. His 14-year-old chihuahua Slim kept looking at him like Dude, you’re bringing me down. And Slim was blind.

Wayne was the kind of guy that did nothing and nothing and nothing, then something really huge. Maybe that’s why Michelle left? Maybe she’d actually mentioned something to that effect when she was leaving. Wayne had a faint memory of lines like no initiative! and completely disengaged! and like a fucking log! But the truth is he’d blocked the bulk of the fight from his mind. It seemed so ridiculous at the time - not at all like the thing that would be the thing that would make her leave. But it had been five days. She hadn’t returned a single text or call. She must have been very, deeply serious about hating all his pants.

This pants issue had been raised from time to time over the course of their five years together. At first it was are all your pants like that? Then maybe you should get some more adult pants? And later you look like you’re 16-years-old because of those pants. That was a statement, not a question. Every comment after was the same. Wayne, you need new pants. Wayne, I’m buying you new pants. Wayne, wear the new pants I bought you or I’m going to lose my fucking mind.

What was wrong with the pants? That was easy. There were six identical pair of khaki slacks three to four sizes bigger than his actual body. He wore them rolled down at the waist and up at the legs. They made him look like an adult male instructor at a kids skateboarding school. Not the owner of the school. Not a dad of one of the skater kids. He was the guy the school employed because he was good enough at teaching kids how to skate and they were worried this job was the only thing keeping him afloat.

Wayne knew all that, but it’s not who he was in reality. He was actually an aspiring landscape architect and/or real estate agent. As soon as he got a job and saved some money he was going to either landscape architecture or real estate school - or, if someone offered a combined degree, both? He hadn’t finished the research on that because he was in the middle of the research on the part-time job to get to afford the school(s). And none of that had anything to do with his very comfortable, perfectly worn-in pants. They were not actually from his own high school days. They were from the Sears near his parents’ house in Bakersfield. His mom bought them for his dad. His dad said they were too fancy. Voila, free pants for Wayne. They were a blessing, not a curse.

Michelle did not agree. She was of the opinion that every problem in his life stemmed from the contents of his closet, which included those six pants and six equally wrong-sized concert t’s from the 2000s: Limp Bizkut, Fall Out Boy, Paramore, Hoobastank, Good Charlotte, and The Bare Naked Ladies, obviously.

Your entire person is trapped inside your senior year of high school! she said on the morning she left. You will get no where until they are gone!!!

The moment Wayne remembered that line, he knew exactly what he had to do to get her back. Yes, Michelle and he had almost nothing in common and she pretty clearly hated him, but this pandemic had put things in perspective. He did not want to watch all the remaining seasons of Ru Paul’s Drag Race alone, especially not the All Star ones.

On Sunday Wayne went to the Target and bought six pair of new pants. He had a kind lady working the dressing room pick them out and make sure that they fit. She confirmed that he looked like an adult man. Then on Monday morning he woke up, walked Slim, drank a can of Monster and got to the task.

Guys, I’m sorry, but it’s you or her, he said to the six khakis that stared up at him from their pile beside his bed. Then he hung each on a barren hanger inside his empty closet, hugged them to his chest and ran out the front door.

Wayne did not turn right at the corner of Algoma so he could use the cross walk to cross. Any hesitation put him at risk of running those pants right back to the house. He raced directly across Yosemite and darted up to the fence surrounding the Eagle Rock High School softball field. She’ll love this, he thought as he carefully laced each hanger through a hole of the chain link fence. She’ll drive by on her way to work this morning, see these, and instantly remember her line about me being trapped in high school. Then she’ll laugh at my clever, loving gesture and come right back home.

Wayne finished hanging the pants, then grabbed the pre-made from the back of his new pants’ pocket. He hadn’t considered the need for tape or string or anything to affix the piece of computer paper so he folded its two top corners over a piece of the fence wire and hoped for the best.

I’ll miss you, he said before he raced back across the street to wait for Michelle’s return. Especially you three with the crotch stains.

But Michelle did not show up that day.

Or the day after.

Or the day after that.

Meanwhile, the pants were long gone. They’d be snagged from their spot within an hour of Wayne’s planting. He didn’t get to see their proud new owners. By the time he took Slim for a lunch-time walk only the sign remained:

FREE PANTS, BECAUSE I LOVE YOU!

Maybe Michelle didn’t drive past the high school from wherever she was staying to her hair salon down the street? Maybe she did, but didn’t recognize the pants? Maybe she recognized the pants but didn’t understand that the I Love you was from Wayne? Or maybe it wasn’t really about his six pair of wrong-sized khaki pants at all? Maybe his style was her scapegoat?

There was no way of knowing and by this point Wayne was five episodes into the latest season of Drag Race. It was less fun without Michelle doing her Michelle Visage impression (or was it an impression…?), so Wayne decided to do the only thing he could given the situation: scour the streets of North East Los Angeles day and night for a man wearing one of his six pair of beloved bottoms and beg to buy them back.

He would start tomorrow. His only fear was the reaction he’d get walking around in his boxers… Those six new pants were complete shit.