Free Plus One by Christopher Noxon Page B

back over the top of the door. The fabric was the color of deep space and springy to the touch. He stepped into one leg and then the other and tugged, yanking the pants over his knees, where they stopped mid-thigh, budged tight. He stretched out and leaned against the wall, elongating his torso. The jeans moved up a few inches, but to get them on he’d need to get down on the floor and transfer his weight from his midsection upward in a yogic exercise of breath control. Fabric squeezing his legs like the sleeve of a blood-pressure cuff, Alex held his breath, wiggled spastically, and tugged on the belt loops. This, he thought, is how it must feel to have an epileptic seizure.
    After a few minutes, the jeans settled into what he guessed was their proper place. He stepped out, and the swinging doors of the changing room flapped shut behind him, a gunslinger stepping in from the range. The salesgirl stepped forward with an approving nod, then reached down and brushed his hip with her finger.
    â€œGood line,” she purred.
    His internal organs had realigned, and he’d lost feeling in his toes, but he couldn’t argue with the view in the mirror. He had legs! A whole lower body, with a not-so-bad curve of the calves and a pleasing divot near his hip. To think he’d spent his entire manhood in sensible Levis and baggy khakis, when there was always this underneath—an actual form!
    He wasn’t sure what was more outrageous—the price or the instructions for care. (Washing machines and dry cleaners were out. The best way to clean them was in the ocean, “like every month ortwo.” Alex knew his life was changing, but he didn’t imagine those changes would involve periodic trips to Malibu to frolic in the surf in his new French jeans.)
    Before today, it never would have occurred to Alex to wear a pair of pants like this. He was not a skinny jeans guy. But he was equally certain he was getting these pants. Things were different now. Normal was over. He’d had his fill of normal. He was ready for the skinny jeans.
    Back in the changing room, before he could get the pants off, his gaze settled on the wall, which was decorated with old punk rock handbills, stickers, and ticket stubs. A familiar checkerboard pattern appeared on one of the shellacked pages, below a magic-marker cartoon of a kid with a Mohawk. Alex looked closer.
    He knew that shaky lettering anywhere. It was the third issue of R.I.P. , the short-lived punk rock ’zine sold on consignment at a record shop on Melrose Avenue in the early eighties. This particular issue contained an interview with the band Minor Threat, a review of the latest Buzzcocks LP, and an energetic if not quite lucid screed against Reaganomics. The whole ’zine was written, published, and distributed by an enterprising and stupidly confident boarding school kid from Ojai named Alex Sherman.
    He quickly did the math. Twenty-two years had passed since the afternoon Alex had put out issue #3 of R.I.P. Twenty-two fucking years. He clicked a picture of the wall.
    Then he slipped his khakis into a shopping bag and strutted out, heading home to show his wife of nine-and-one-half years his new pair of skinny French jeans.

Four

    O n the drive home, Alex fast-forwarded through the ’zine’s lifespan; he saw it flopping out of the innards of a refrigerator-size photocopier in the office at the Crestwood School, stuffed in Alex’s backpack on a trip to the city, dropped off at Vinyl Fetish on Melrose, added to a confetti of flyers and stickers beside a cash register, tossed into an orange plastic bag, stashed in a basement, stuffed in a box and forgotten for years, then finally unearthed—and here its trip took its weirdest turn—by a decorator tasked with adding some authentic street-creddy ambiance to a pricey new boutique, a shop that Alex would never have even thought to enter before today.
    But there he was. And there it was, so