A weekend or two ago, my brother & I ventured to the city to buy some new clothes.
Mike was looking at a replacement shirt which made him look like a surfy lumberjack–
*Leigh breaks into a song like every Python-fan would*
Ohhhhh… I'm a lumberjack… and surfy, hey
I sleep all night and I work all day
I cut down trees, I surf and jump, I avoid the tourist tees
Sometimes I take a wipeout, and have salty sea for tea
–what was I saying? Oh yes….
So Mike & I went to General Pants in Bondi Junction first, a place that seems wasted if you could imagine a shop that has loads of things along the walls but people working there who obviously couldn't give a fuck and are happy to insult your intelligence on a regular basis.
Mike asked them if they had a smaller size of a particular shirt. The girl looked at him with blank eyes, her long sandy blonde hair seeming more intent on circling just how shallow those eyes really were. She disappeared for a few minutes and came back with a striped shirt that was obviously not the one Mike had asked for as it was… a different brand.
"No," Mike said, "this is a different brand."
Unsatisfied, she went back and looked again.
She came back and said "this one has stripes," assuming Mike didn't care about the brand and only wanted stripes.
What the hell? Was this girl an idiot? It wouldn't surprise me if the answer was yes, but was it the policy of this store to insult the customer's intelligence?
Oooo… you mean to say that brands are irrelevant to customers and we only want patterns & colours! My my my! How schweet!
We asked her to check if it was in the city and after getting a "yes" though a "yes" that I wouldn't have left a jelly mold on, we moved on.
To the city! The place where parking will cost you an arm and a leg if you don't read through the terms & conditions of every freaking sign! The place where people don't go on long weekends for fear of uncertain death and boredom! The city!
General Pants in Pitt St. Mall did have what Mike was looking for after he got the pretty & nice sales girl Angelina to find it for him. She didn't even know it was there.
So as Mike was trying it on, Angelina came over and asked me if I was considering buying some jeans. Surely enough, I was standing in front of the jeans rack so it made sense that I was. Oh sure, I appreciated looking at the jeans in all their denim-y integrity, but gazing at the tightly woven bits of cottony fabric couldn't hold my interest for more than seven or eight seconds so "buying" or "trying on" was at the very least a firm possibility.
Even with my stingy-ass wallet.
Angelina was gorgeous. Tanned skin with beautiful legs sticking out from short khaki shorts (or short jean shorts… memory on clothing isn't brilliant). She had long hair and a smile that actually radiated. She seemed warm, she felt warm; she lacked the whole fake reality that many salesgirls at these sort of stores seem to drag around them as if its their real presence and you shouldn't be looking for anything more.
Mike came out and told me to try some Nudies on. Angelina suggested I try a brand on that had a nice cut and a tag with the word "Star" followed by a letter I neither remember nor care to. The pants weren't anything to write home about so why should I.
What followed for the next thirty minutes was the most unusual type of shopping I've ever done in my life: jean shopping.
Jean shopping is more complicated than anyone could ever imagine. You look at the woven cotton pants and think it should be easy, hope it's just a matter of trying it on and then paying with whatever money you have left over from lunch and random bouts of pornography, but no… it is far more devious.
For that thirty minutes, I must have tried on around ten pairs of pants. Angelina & Mike were my fashion consultants for the day, a title I'm glad they had because I usually think I look like a monkey in a blender.
Okay. Wow. "Monkey in a blender." Note to self: never use that saying again. It does not conjure an image of something attractive.
In any case, jeans were passed over the top of my compiled & naked chip-wood door, something of which I was neither (hardly compiled & only pant-less, an image I'm sure you wanted). I tried on mostly Nudies, a few randoms, and then a pair of Lee jeans that oozed comfort.
You know the sort of comfort. It's like putting on a pair of socks and instantly knowing that these are the socks you want to have babies with. It's like finding that perfect pizza and knowing instant bliss, the prospect of finding that all too perfect gummy bear or the Gummy Venus de Milo to Homer's drooling mouth.
I loved them… except the colour. The regular blue stone-washed whatever the hell it was… that wasn't me.
So in came the dark blue with orange stitching like my Carhart's that's feel a lot like I'm carrying a loaded AK-47 at my waist and legs. Too came a pair of dark blue-black boot cuts that were a little tighter on me than I'd otherwise have liked, but I suspect I just need to go back to Billy (Billy) a little bit sooner.
Success! Succ-freaking-sess! I had found my jeans.
And then Angelina passed over a pair of Nudies I liked… but didn't… but did… and didn't.
But did.
The Grim Tim's were what they were I think; a pair of simple light blue faded jeans that had some sort of elastication built into them which made the jeans stick and taper to my legs. Probably not such a brilliant move around my thighs but my legs would rock. They wouldn't rock the $300 price tag and today I would come away with two Lee jeans for $300 as opposed to one pair of Nudies (with elastic!) for the same dosh.
Oh and Angelina? She was hot… and nice… and sweet. I shall treasure talking to her for… oh, at least ten more minutes. Or until I see her again.