I do love a nice leather jean. It’s not the most practical item to buy, but they are beautiful. I have had a few pairs in my lifetime, and when I find ones I really love, it’s the most exciting thing. I remember all the best ones. My favorite were these weird stiff unlined and low waist ones from Fred Segal that cost a fortune – like $600 or something, which was everything I had at the time, but I didn’t care because they were a strange French peanut color, like that candy that went uneaten at the bottom of your plastic jack-o-lantern on Halloween. I loved the pants so much I wanted to eat them and I can’t find them at all now. Perhaps I did eat them because they were the kind of pants you don’t give away or throw away or lose and yet I search my memory and my closets and drawers and those pants are history, but a figment of my leather pant imagination.
There are white leather pants I wear when I ride motorcycles, 60s style – outrageous – that glow with a toothpaste blue undertone so I can be seen by all on the roads I ramble down. These were specially made for me years ago, and the fly is all snaps and I can undo them with a hard exhale. They have a slight bootcut to accommodate the fearsome Harley Davidson motorcycle boots that are essentially also my brakes, and they are thick enough to protect me from ass gas and grass for now.
I have chaps, which I guess are leather pants too, but they are somehow less complete. Perhaps because they are more like boots with a belt attached. I have to be in the mood for chaps, like a Judas Priest mood – which I am in often (breaking the law breaking the law). I love Rob Halford – what a hot leather daddy! That is who I feel like when I wear chaps! It’s very Folsom St. Fair.
My newest leather pants were the finest ones I had ever seen in my life. The J Brand red lambskin leather skinny jeans were way out of my price range, as they were nearly $900!! This is too much money for any one thing – I mean, it’s fucking pants! But I stalked those pants online, looking at them every day, looking at them on different websites, looking at them in different currencies, wondering what they would be like to have on. I would think about the pants off and on during the day like wondering what they were doing, who was wearing them, who tried them on, who bought them, who didn’t. I was spending too much time thinking about these pants and so I just broke down and bought them.
They came in the mail and I tore the package open with my bare hands making that weird dusty filler that seems like what collects on the lint screen in the dryer explode into the air and fill my lungs. I put them on and they were perfect, just perfect. I loved the feel of the lambskin on my skin and the zippers at the bottom were sleek and kind of punk fading into new wave. I felt like Chrissy Hynde and I felt like Lou Reed and I felt like I had stepped out of CBGBs in the late 70s to smoke a cigarette in the street even though I could smoke inside, I wanted to just be alone, with the pants.
I tried not to wear the pants too much because they were so beautiful I wanted to somehow save up that beauty, not spend it all in one place. They also stretched out a lot in the knee area, so that the hips and butt and ankles would remain tight to my figure, but then these weird bags would appear around my kneecaps, but it didn’t matter because I loved those pants. I folded them as opposed to balling them up like everything else I had. I packed them carefully into my luggage for my big winter trip to New York. I wanted those pants to see the Big Apple. I was taking the pants on vacation.
When I was wearing the pants, feeling on top of the world, in a Barbour jacket and Vanson Skeleton bag, sitting alone in a café in Williamsburg, I looked down between my legs, just to admire the inseam of my beloved J Brand lambskin leather, and I noticed an odd stain. It was like a period stain, but it didn’t make any sense because I had never worn these pants during my lady time. I would never have worn them during my lady time. I was sitting there in the middle of a crowd of bored and hungover looking hipsters with ironic government issue black framed eyeglasses and unflattering/flattering topknot hairdos and pleated skirts and colored tights and expensive but pilled long sweaters and I was staring down at my crotch with my legs spread wide open and I just screamed and everyone looked at me and then everyone looked away very quickly. I actually screamed. I was batting at the stain, trying to see if it was wet or dry, and trying to ascertain whether the stain came from without or within.
I realized I looked crazy, and I left the café and went to the place I was staying and I ran into the door and tore off the beloved pants. The stain was not from the inside. There was nothing inside the pants. If I had shit my pants or gotten my period in my pants or both I would not have been as upset. I own my hole. If something comes out, its on me. But this was different. The stain was from the outside. I must have sat on something – but that didn’t make sense because if I had then the stain would be on the butt area. I must have straddled something – but I really don’t remember doing that, and I think I would remember.
The only answer is that the stain was some kind of a stigmata, a miraculous occurrence on the pants, because they are such nice pants and I love them so much, they must be holy. I thought I could make out the face of Christ in the stain. I don’t know what to do now. I put the pants away and thought about the matter. I guess since it is not an authentic period stain, I can still wear them, but they resemble a period stain so much, that people will just assume that it is a period stain. it’s like a period stain catch-22. There’s also the fact of my age, which should mean automatic immunity to all period stains, but I do look younger than I am, so I guess I am fucked here. I took the pants to my Korean dry cleaner who looked at the pants outside the crotch and said “this blood?” and she looked at the pants inside the crotch and she exclaimed “this not blood!” then she said “$30 – but I don’t know. Maybe.” So now I am just waiting for the pants now to come out of the pants hospital. Oh god. I hope they are ok.
J Brand - L8001 Leather Super Skinny (from www.jbrandjeans.com)
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