But in this case, it has become obvious to me that, as usual, my son has chosen the impeccably trendy path. Many young guys now wear their pants so low on their hips that the tops of their boxers are visible, so I can see for myself that this is indeed the style. It's become so pervasive, in fact, that a couple of towns around the country have deemed it a form of public lewdness and sought to make it illegal.
Even if I couldn't actually see that half the guys on the street are wearing boxers, when I go shopping with Taz, it is impossible to ignore the fact that there are entire departments devoted to boxers.
Briefs, in contrast, are usually displayed in sterile little plastic envelopes hanging on hooks on one compact solitary shelf. After all, there isn't much to choose from other than size; they all look alike, and they're usually white.
But the boxers are displayed in rooms the size of football stadiums. They hang on racks, like designer dresses, and they are usually being studied and worshipped by crowds of men. I feel a little uncomfortable standing around there with Taz, to tell you the truth, and I get a few weird looks— the kind of looks that women always give the lone guy picking his nose in the bra department. But I don't care— I'm just not ready to let my son pick out his own underwear. I swear, it's not that I'm a control freak. But if I left it up to him, he'd buy the $45 Dolce & Gabbana boxers instead of the $10 Hanes, so I gotta stick it out despite the funny looks.
Now, while I draw the line at expensive underwear, I have caved in to some extent on absurdly expensive footwear. For years, I bought shoes for Taz and Sport at discount stores like Payless where you could get one pair for $19.99 and a second pair for another five or ten bucks. So what if the shoes fell apart after a few months? Kids’ feet grow so fast, by the time the shoes had holes in them, they'd be too small, anyway.
But with the start of middle school came resistance to the cheapo sneakers of childhood. Taz wanted shoes in bright colors with thick soles and shiny uppers, named for athletes, and bought in specialty stores. When he was ten and eleven, his feet were still small enough that he could find a style to suit his taste for under $50. And I could see that most of these shoes were in fact better made than the $20 varieties. So I gave in to the price tag and rationalized it on the grounds that at least they lasted a little longer than the discount brands.
But by the time he turned twelve, he was wearing men's sizes, and the types of shoes he wanted were now running a hundred bucks and up. Despite what you may have read about women being obsessed with shoes, not all of us care to spend our hard- earned money on fancy footwear. I personally have never spent a hundred dollars on shoes, and I don't think I ever will. Under $50 is my usual price range for my shoes, though I will go higher for boots or leather that looks like it will last a few years.
So why, given my own budget for shoes, would I pay more than that for kids’ shoes? Well, Taz had all kinds of bogus reasons, but the one I liked best of all was when he told me it was a safety issue. If he didn't have cool shoes, he argued, the other kids would tease him. Maybe even beat him up.
This was completely contrary to everything I'd read about expensive kids’ shoes becoming targets of theft. (Besides, aren't my tax dollars supposed to be hard at work making all the schools “ bully- free”?) I had been under the impression that if you had expensive shoes, someone might shoot you just to get them. But Taz assured me that the risk of being smacked around for being uncool was way higher than the risk of being robbed of your Jordans.
When I thought about it, I realized that this argument resonated with me to some extent. When I was a teenager, the most humiliating thing that could happen to you was having pants that were too short. I'm five- foot- nine and I grew a lot in junior high, so my pants were never long enough because I was constantly outgrowing them, and constantly getting teased about them.
“Highwater, highwater, where's the flood?” was the taunt in fifth and sixth grades. In seventh and eighth, the other kids were too cool to actually say anything to put me down, but all it took was a two- second glance at my ankles— which, if I were dressed properly, should not have been visible— followed by a one- second glance at my face to make it clear that I was utterly pathetic.
In fact, I was so pathetic that the really Cool Girls wouldn't even waste their breath teasing me. They saved their spoken critiques for their friends, who were potentially salvageable, but I was just too far gone.
At the time, of course, I swore to myself that when I grew up and had kids, I would remember how awful it was to feel like a social reject because of your clothes and I would make sure my kids dressed OK.
Now that I am a mother, though, other considerations come into play. For example, I worry that reasonable people will think I'm a bad parent for giving in to the materialism that is the curse of my son's generation. And I realized one day that part of the problem here is that Taz and I want to impress people in precisely opposite ways.
I want people to think that I'm frugal, and sensible, that my kid doesn't run the show, and that I've brought him up with good values. He wants people to think that he's stylish and doesn't worry about petty things like price tags, and that he can pretty much get his parents to do anything he wants.
Finally, I forged a compromise that allowed me to feel like I had been true to my sensibilities, while allowing him to avoid the alleged gang of kids who were just waiting to beat up people wearing stupid shoes. I set a limit on how much money I was willing to spend— $50— and I agreed to fork over that amount and allow him to put it toward whatever ridiculous sum he wanted to spend on shoes as long as he made up the balance. To his credit, he saved up fifty to add to my fifty. Together, we went to look for the shoes of his dreams.
Incredibly, though, a hundred dollars wasn't even enough to buy most of the types of shoes he was looking at. The going rate seemed to be $120. As we walked in and out of the stores on the avenue where we were shopping, I started sputtering and muttering to myself. What kind of insanity was this? Most of the other shoppers appeared to be families of modest means. They weren't riding around in fancy cars! And they weren't dressed particularly well, either— except for the shoes they were looking to buy for their kids.
“This is crazy,” I kept saying to Taz. “I've never spent this kind of money on shoes. I just can't believe how much people are willing to pay.” By the fourth or fifth store, our shopping expedition felt depressing. We'd never find a pair that Taz deemed fashionable enough in the price range I had set.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I told Taz he needed to lower his expectations, and I headed home. He decided to keep looking on his own.
An hour later he came back wearing a pair of $120 shoes. They were Jordans, of course, and I had to admit there was something about them that was truly aesthetically appealing. They had that little logo of the jumping basketball player on the heel, and they were white quilted leather with black suede trim and black laces, with a few red details at the edges. High- tops, of course, with a hard plastic silvery inset in the arch.
But how could he afford them when he only had a hundred dollars?
He said that without me to bog him down, he was free to bargain with the manager of one of the stores we'd passed by. The guy had given him $20 off the list price. Apparently, when the salesmen see a kid with his mother, they figure the kid can talk the parent into paying what they're asking. But when a kid is by himself, they're more willing to negotiate a deal. They know that without a parent's credit card, the kid can't spend any more than the cash in his pocket.
I felt a twinge of pride at Taz's savvy. I've never negotiated a price break on anything, not in my entire life. Not in Mexico in an outdoor market, not at a yard sale, not on used cars or real estate, and certainly not in a retail store.
I later learned that Taz had deals running with every store in the neighborhood. This one never charged him tax, this one routinely gave him a 10 percent discount, this one gave him stuff on credit. Most of these places were stores I shopped i
n all the time without ever establishing a relationship.
How did he do it? And what was wrong with me that I couldn't do it? The barber knew his style of haircut; I'd been going to the same hairdresser for twenty years, and each time I went in, the guy looked at me like I'd never been there before. (I'd say, “How's your godson Josh?”and he'd do a double take, as if I'd been stalking him.)
The music store guy knew Taz's taste in CDs, and the video store guy saved DVDs for him under the counter, ahead of the release date. (It sounds like ancient history to talk about CDs and video stores, but I swear it was only 2005.) One day when I went in the video store and presented our membership card to take out a movie, the attendant looked at me admiringly.
“Oh, you're Taz's mom?” he said, nodding knowingly. “He's cool.”
He's cool? MY son is cool? A GROWN- UP thinks my son is cool? I was a lot of things when I was an adolescent, but I was not cool. But if my son is cool, does that make me just a little bit cool? There was something vicariously thrilling about being the mother of a Cool Boy.
And amid all the neurotic maternal anxieties I harbored about the path his life would take over the next ten years— that he wouldn't get good enough grades, that he didn't take school seriously enough, that he might not get into a good college, that he might not get a good job, that he'd end up living back home at the age of twenty- three with me doing his laundry— I comforted myself with the thought that at least I'd never have to worry that he was a dweeb.
But all of this left me feeling a little useless. As parents, our jobs include feeding, clothing, and housing our children until they are old enough to earn money to pay for these things themselves. You assume you are the middleman between your child's needs as a consumer and the marketplace's need to sell. But what good am I, when not only am I unnecessary as the intermediary, but, in the case of the sneakers, my very physical presence prevents my child from getting the object he desires?
Not only is Taz better off shopping without me because he knows what's cool and I don't, but my being there with him in the store increases the price to the point where he can't afford it. And I'm only marginally useful as a means for paying the bills, because I'm not willing to ante up what Taz thinks is a reasonable amount of money for what he wants.
On the other hand, I have to admit that those expensive sneakers really are better made than the $20 ones I used to buy. It doesn't hurt that Taz takes good care of them, wiping the dirt off and rubbing them tenderly with sneaker cleaners and leather conditioners, spraying them with waterproofing, and even storing them in their original box. I should point out here that he is far more interested in cleaning his sneakers than he is in say cleaning his room, or even brushing his teeth.
It was different when Taz was little— and far less expensive. From pretty much the time he was born through much of elementary school, I dressed Taz in hand- me- downs. Eventually, he started to notice that an awful lot of his clothes had other people's names written in laundry marker on the labels. I can honestly say it must have been second or third grade before I took the poor kid clothes shopping, we had so many castoffs from friends and relatives in the closet.
Finally, Taz realized there was a whole world of apparel that was brand- new (not used), brightly colored (not faded), sized to fit (not whatever his cousins or neighbors had outgrown), and in style right now (not three years ago). From that point on, he pretty much refused to wear secondhand clothes. It was too thrilling to be able to go to a store and pick out exactly what he wanted.
But exactly what he wanted always seemed totally bizarre to me. Boxers and big sneakers were only part of the Look. He also liked shirts that were eight or nine sizes too big, gold chains, and, of course, pants so baggy they were falling off his butt (the better to show off his boxers).
The sneakers, by the way, were best left untied, to make it look like you just got out of prison, where they take your laces away so you won't hang yourself. My husband is a Legal Aid lawyer— who often represents inmates at Rikers Island, the city jail, and it's a little disturbing to consider how well our son fits in with his father's clients.
In addition to the overall gangsta rap look, there have also been occasional one- outfit wonders. Take the red-and- black velour track suit.
“What are you, a soccer mom?” I said incredulously when he picked out the jacket and matching pants with elasticized waistband.
But he was resolute: “That's the style, Mom!”
One of my neighbors laughed. “He looks like a Pilates instructor!” she said.
Damned if P. Diddy wasn't wearing the exact thing next time I saw him on TV. Within a few days, every kid we knew either had the same outfit or wished he had the same outfit.
Then Taz picked out an oversized white T- shirt with a picture of Wile E. Coyote on it, decorated with silver sparkles.
“Won't some big dude make fun of you for wearing that and squash your head like a cantaloupe?” I said. “It looks like the kind of thing a little girl wears to a birthday party.”
“Don't worry about it,” he said nonchalantly, making it clear that my opinion was irrelevant rather than insulting. “It's hot.”
The next day I was heading into work on the train and I saw two big muscled, tattooed, and otherwise scary- looking guys sitting across from me, taking up three or four seats apiece. Although the train was crowded and standing-room only, no one dared say, “Excuse me, would you mind moving over so other people could sit down?” I realized both of these guys, who looked like they had just been released from prison, were wearing familiar- looking T- shirts. One had a picture of Bugs Bunny, the other Daffy Duck. Both shirts were decorated with silver sparkles, and they glinted in the train's fluorescent lights each time I turned my head.
Score another coup for my fashionable thirteen-year-old.
I work in a newsroom, and I sit near the fashion editor. I mentioned the cartoon characters festooned with sparkles to her and she confirmed that Looney Tunes are big. Apparently, this was old news, and I just wasn't paying attention. But how did Taz know about it before anybody else? It's not like he reads Women's Wear Daily. It's like this stuff comes to him in a dream.
One of his most persistent visions involved the North Face brand. He and his brother begged me for North Face jackets winter after winter, but I just couldn't see paying hundreds of dollars for outerwear that's designed to withstand polar cold when our worst winter weather rarely dips below twenty degrees.
Finally, we happened to come upon a North Face outlet while we were visiting Freeport, Maine, which is famous for its outlet stores. Since the jackets were all under a hundred bucks and both boys had outgrown their coats from the previous year, I agreed to buy them big black puffy parkas with hoods trimmed in fake gray fur.
Soon after I made these purchases, I mentioned them to a colleague who lives in the Northwest. He started laughing uproariously and said that North Face is aimed at trekkers and outdoor types, not urban kids.
But he was wrong. A few months later, on the first cold day that year, every single person I saw— young, old, fat, thin, black, white, male, female— was wearing a North Face jacket, except for me.
It was like I'd stepped into an alternate universe or a science fiction movie masquerading as an ad for North Face. I was in a hall of North Face mirrors, or a crazy dream. No matter which way I turned— in elevators, on street corners, waiting on line at the drugstore— there was the logo: THE NORTH FACE in all caps, next to three curved white stripes designed to evoke the cold mountaintops that wearing the brand will prepare you to climb. I was surrounded. Suddenly, I felt cold, very cold, in my sheepskin coat and woolen scarf.
That night, the temperature plunged. I had to walk the dog before I could go to bed. It was chilly in our apartment, and I really didn't feel like making myself even more miserable by going outside. My sheepskin coat was OK, but to stay warm outside on a night like this, I needed to layer a sweater underneath, and wrap a scarf around my head, and I'd s
till get chilled. Meanwhile, the dog was giving me her Sad- Eyed Lady of the Lowlands look. I sighed and got up to find my boots.
Then I saw Taz's North Face hanging on a hook by the front door. He was in his room, doing his homework. I slipped the jacket on, zipped it up, and put the leash on the dog. Quietly, I opened and shut the door, gave the dog her pre- bedtime stroll, and discreetly returned to the apartment. As I unzipped the jacket, Taz came out of his room.
“I didn't say you could borrow that,” he said.
“I paid for it,” I said defensively. “My money, my coat. And I only wore it around the block to walk the dog. Besides, I was cold. And it's really warm.”
He smiled. “You shoulda bought one for you when we were in that store,” he said.
“I shoulda,” I conceded. “Shoulda, woulda, coulda— didn't.” (I once heard Hillary Clinton say that in response to some accusation, and I've found it comes in very handy as a way to explain a great deal of human behavior.)
You've probably figured out by now that I'm the type of person who doesn't buy new clothes to stay in style. I buy new clothes when my old ones are so worn out that I'm almost embarrassed to donate them to the Salvation Army.
It's not that I don't want to spend the money on new clothes, although, I admit, I am a cheapskate. It's just the way I— and lots of people I know— were brought up. I've only had three winter coats in the last thirty years, and I plan to get a lot more years out of the one I have now before I get another one. (And if I can keep sneaking Taz's North Face instead of wearing mine, I'll get even more years out of that sheepskin.)
Besides, I know what would happen if I were to buy a North Face jacket. They would immediately go out of style. My purchase would have the opposite effect of my son's. Instead of everyone suddenly starting to wear what I'm wearing, they would immediately abandon what I'm wearing. And then I'd have to get new coats for Taz and Sport in whatever Taz deemed the next big style to be.
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