New York, New Pants

I don't like shopping for clothes. At all.
I have total loyalty to my old clothes born out of determined sloth. If it ain't broke, why buy a new one? But even when it comes to buying something necessary (say, new jeans or shoes) I have a femtosecond-long attention span and I'm completely open to any and all suggestions that will allow me to buy something and flee the shop as soon as possible, up to and including purchases totally different to what I walked in for. It doesn't help that I am the size I am. I am 6'2" tall, and less than 38" but more than 36" around the middle...at the moment.

I very rarely feel like an oversized member of society. I'm a bit overweight, fair enough, but being as tall as I am, my proportions aren't so out of whack that small children point. I'm just chunky.
It seems that this means I am on the very fringe of the sizes available in stores like Gap.

Two weeks ago, despite my attempts to conceal it, it was clear to Krissa that I needed some new jeans. A bad tear on the leg put some trusty legwear out of commission, and the other trousers, on high rotation, just couldn't take the spotlight...so it was either the spotlight or my completely out-of-left-field suggestion that we do mid-week laundry that alerted her.

After 72 hours of constant and merciless mental torture, I caved. We went shopping.

The Gap seems like a cool place to shop. You walk in and things seem pretty funky. The staff are all wearing Gap clothes, the floors are polished wood, an up-to-the-second fashionable soundtrack bounces down from somewhere in the ceiling, the mannequins look positively cheery despite their lack of faces. Best of all, there are so many clothes that a shoppaphobe like myself can easily befuddle himself, buy socks when he meant to buy a suit, and be out of the place in five minutes.

Alas, this was not a solo flight. My copilot was Krissa, feared fashionista of a thousand sales, the kind of person who can monologue for ten minutes on the difference between auburn (reddish-brown) and russet (brownish-red), and, more formidably, an ex-Gap employee.

After passing through the front of the store with my blinkers on, we slipped by the checkouts. The crowds parted, and there, there before us, was The Wall Of Trousers. The display started at ground level and just kept going up, just how you would have imagined the clothes depot at the North Pole when you were a kiddiwinkle, if you were the sort of child who was weird enough to hope Santa had a Gap franchise. Pastel shelving carried towers of blue denim up, up, into the stratosphere. The mind's eye said that logically, somewhere up there, slowly blinking red lights were flashing through windblown cloud, welcoming international passengers into JFK.

I stood for a second with my mouth open, drinking in the spectacle. Krissa bound off into the women's section like a hungry cat let loose in a hamster farm, her whoops of glee echoing up into the mists.
"Can I help you with anything, sir?" said a Gap Personage.
She was a very small Gap Personage.
"Yes," I said. "I'm looking for some jeans, 38 waist, 34 leg."
She peered up, squinting into the infinite.
"Hmm."
"I think I can see some in that pile there." I pointed generally upwards.
"Back in one moment, sir."
She nipped away for a moment and came back pushing a set of wooden steps emblazoned with 'For Employee Use ONLY', but by this time I had tried to take matters into my own hands and on tiptoe I was straining for the bottom pair of jeans in a ten-high stack about eight feet in the air.
"Allow me, sir," said Gap Personage.
She climbed the four steps, stretched out as far as she could, and reached...the bottom pair of jeans in the ten-high stack.
"Was it these ones, sir?"
"Er, no...about eight up from there, I'm afraid."
"Oh."
I felt a sudden affinity for Diminutive Gap Personage. We were both having problems with our immediate environment because of our size. She strained upwards some more.
"Oh, hang on, no, they're 38 waist 30 leg. I couldn't see. It was in the light."
She was down the steps, off and away in a flash.
"Wellifthere'sanythingelsejustletmeknow!" she cried over her shoulder, accelerating into the khakis. All the camaraderie I had felt was gone. She had abandoned me.
I sighed and spent the next ten minutes contemplating the piles and the piles and the piles (and the piles) of jeans, all awaiting homes with people a great deal smaller than myself. The sizes went so low that I began to wonder if I would ever in my days notice the sorts of people who would buy these jeans, or if they lived out their entire lives below my line of sight, passing two-dimensionally through doors and walls, unencumbered by any substantial physical presence.
In the end, aided by motivational glaring from Krissa and some determined peering on my own part, I spotted a pair in my size just above the tree line, next to a feisty little glacier hanging on for dear life between Boot Cut and Straight Cut (Loose). I grabbed a tallish Gap Personage to get them for me. While he was off getting an oxygen cylinder for the climb I asked another shop assistant to tell me if there were any other jeans of that size in the store. She came back and said no, but they did do larger sizes on gap.com, with free delivery isn't that great?
I glowered at her and snatched the jeans from the descending assistant, and scurried off into the changing rooms clutching another couple of pairs that were nearly but obviously not quite my size, just for the look of the thing. I don't like to confess to Keeping Up Appearances, but I'd be buggered if I was going to have stood there for twenty minutes and then slip into the changing rooms with one thing on my arm and a 'This was all you had in my size!' expression on my face for the attendant.
Screw that.

In the event the jeans fit really well, and despite my burgeoning Gap hatred I really like them. But I shudder to think how it would have turned out had I been one size bigger.