by Evan James, Photo by Evelyn Lee

At the beginning of this millennium, a new kind of denim was becoming de rigueur—darker, rougher denim, a denim well-suited to a nation gearing up for war. “Raw,” people were calling this denim, as though the denim we’d worn before had been gelatinous and overcooked.

All I knew was that I had to have a pair.

I happened to be flying to New York at the time, and there’s no better place to be if you’re on the hunt for unforgiving pants. I stepped into a chic SoHo fashion outlet and began shouting for new jeans. Hard jeans. Raw, Machiavellian denim.

A dark-haired shop girl saw me and grinned. “I’m Sophie,” she said in a French accent that made everything sound like a question. “Come with me?”

Sophie led me down a mirrored hall of changing rooms. “Try these,” she said, shoving a pair of stiff luxury pants with a thirty- four inch waist at me. I ran into one of the dressing chambers, grateful to escape her unrelenting gaze, and reemerged looking up-to-date. The unyielding jeans fit nicely, I thought—not too snug. But Sophie wrinkled her entire face in disgust and made a guttural sound.

“No, no, no,” she said. “Much too big.” She tossed a pair with a 30- inch waist at me.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “These are so small. They are doll pants.”

“Then you will be a doll,” she said.

I slunk back to the dressing room, and after pulling on the new, circulation-restricting jeans, I hobbled out to show her.

“I can’t,” I wheezed, “Even button. These up.”

Sophie scoffed and seized the waist of the jeans, ignoring my groans as she sealed the final button. I braced myself against the mirrored wall, feeling light-headed.

“They are tight now, yes,” she said. But, she insisted, after sev- eral months of extreme testicular discomfort, the raw jeans would learn to understand my body, to conform to my physique. I thought this sounded like an abusive relationship and told her so.

Sophie narrowed her eyes. “If you are brave,” she said, “you will wear them.”

I left the shop with a new pair of pants, and a newfound sense of bravery. America was the Home of the Brave, and I lived there. My constitution was too sensitive for the armed forces, but I could certainly do battle with these French jeans.

The raw denim restricted my circulation and lowered my sperm count for several years. But Sophie was right. The jeans eventually did relax, softening like a once-hesitant lover that had finally come to trust my touch.

But over that same time period, I gained thirty pounds.

After cutting myself out of the jeans with a utility knife, I thought about the movie Field of Dreams. In that American Sports Drama that I’ve never actually seen, a mysterious voice urges Kevin Costner to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. “If you build it, he will come,” the voice says. Costner trusts the voice, and the promise is fulfilled.

Sophie the shop girl was my disembodied whisper in the cornfield. “If you wear them, they will fit,” she assured me. I just wish she’d added, “And you might want to hit the treadmill. You’re really letting yourself go.”