First Day of School Nightmare
August 11, 2011, By Craig J. Heimbuch 3 comments
I was trying to be so cool. So fashionable, or as fashionable as a first-grader can be mindful of being. I wanted to impress, to show off. After all, I had left, moved away, and now I was back.
Growing up in North-Central Wisconsin, you don't often get in early on trends. Not in the mid-80s anyway. With the internet, facebook and MTV, it's a little easier. Geography isn't the barrier it used to be. Now, you see something on the Web or in a magazine and you hop on Amazon to buy it for yourself. But, back then, things took time to percolate and proliferate.
Had we stayed in Wisconsin, I might never have been exposed to 80s fashion. The Cheese State, my beloved homeland, might have been content with four 1950s then a kangaroo leap into the 90s. But we left. Just as I was reaching school age, my dad was transferred to Santa Barbara, California. It was temporary, a two-year adventure in coastal living. This was during the height of the Valley Girl craze—all rubber shoes and scrunchies. Leggings. Michael Jackson, Olivia Newton John. "E.T." for heaven's sakes. For two years, I was the kid who talked funny. I'm sure in later years my California friends will think back fondly to the kid who sounded like an extra from "Fargo." My sisters were among the only brunettes in a five-county region. I once had a friend point quizzically at a garment hanging in my closet and ask me what it was. I answered with a certain amount of stunned bewilderment, "It's called a scarf."
For two years, we spent Christmas day on the beach and talked to friends back home digging out of six-foot snow drifts. It was nice, what I remember of it. But, eventually, the time came to return to the land of brats and Brewers, so we packed up the family roadsters and made the cross-country drive from the serenely constant climes of California to the four-season land we had all missed so dearly.
I remember being excited to see my friends—Mike, Mindy, Phedalas. The school year had already started, so I would miss out on all the strange wondrousness of those heady early days at Riverview Elementary. The kids had already settled into a groove. I would have to take it all at once. The new school, the new faces, the new experience of being a full-time student. Having gone away and come back, I felt a certain need to share the cultural wonders my journey had afforded me. I was feeling a bit like a 19th Century explorer having headed off into the great unknown of the Indian countryside. Upon return, that explorer felt a need to share in the things he had seen and experienced. It was his right, but also his duty.
Parachute pants were my duty. I had to share them.
Contrary to what the name may imply, parachute pants were not the preferred lower body wear of members of the 82nd Airborne. Rather, they were pants made of the same silky nylon material as parachutes. Of all the sartorial curiosities of the 1980s, these were my sole dalliance. I remember them clearly. They were red—as was the custom—with all manner of zippers and snaps stitched at exotic angles into the fabric. They made a very slight swishing sound as I walked and had the bonus curiosity of being convertible pants. With the simple unzipping and snapping of a couple of closures, they would change from pants to shorts and vice-versa. How novel. How deliciously cosmopolitan. There could be little question what I might wear on my first day of school. That had been decided the moment they were purchased, the instant I realized we were moving back to Wisconsin.
I don't remember getting dressed that morning. Nor do I in any great detail recall the first few hours of class. I remember sitting next to a friend in class who remarked on my ochre skin and wondered why I had a tan in late September. "California," I told him. "It's always sunny there." I absorbed the admiring glares of my denim-clad classmates as I swished down the hall to fetch the milk cart for daily snack time. And when the bell rang for recess, I remember my classmates pushing the limits of the no-running rule to get outside while I sidled at a manly gait. No rush. Recess waits for cool like this.
I'm not sure if you've ever encased your body in cheap nylon, but there's a certain lack of breathability that can grow rather uncomfortable. In fact, wrap your legs in cheap nylon and step out onto a sun-warmed blacktop playground and it feels as if you have put your legs into a steam room and are letting them parboil in advance of a good roasting. It took perhaps five minutes for my legs to get uncomfortably warm and sweaty. One boy, a neighbor, noticed my discomfort and began making fun of me. Well, I thought, I'll show him. I asked the recess monitor for permission to use the restroom and went back into the school with the intention of unzipping my highly engineered pants for greater outdoor comfort. I remember walking passed the posters of that year's Caldecott Award-winning books on my way to the first floor Boy's Room, the pleasant swish of my pants reduced to a chafe-inducing slurp of nylon and sweat.
This will only take a moment, I thought, as I took a seat in a stall and began unzipping my leggings. In all fairness, this was the first time I had attempted to take the bottom portion of the legs off my pants while wearing them and certainly the first time I had tried while they were wet. It took a bit of doing, but the first leg came off in a matter of moments. I was frustrated that the first had taken so much recess time, but figured I had learned about the process and the second would go more smoothly.
I tugged on the zipper and it moved perhaps two inches before stopping. I tugged again, nothing. Again, again and again. Still, it would not move. I tried to reverse the process, put the legs back on and, still, nothing. Tiny beads of sweat began falling from my forehead as I worked the zipper to no avail. I tried taking the pants off, but found the zipper fly to be stuck. Eventually, I began to weep. I grunted and cursed the pants for whole minutes and, when the bell rang and recess ended, my frustration turned to pure panic. It was no longer about being fashionable and urbane. This was a test of wills.
More than 90 minutes of stricken effort passed before I was found in the restroom by a male teacher who had been sent in by my own. Looking back, I can't imagine the panic that must have rippled through the staff of the school. There I was, a brand-new student, a first-grader, and I had disappeared from the playground not to be seen again. I can only imagine the conversation that must have taken place between my teacher and the principal:
Teacher: He's the new boy.
Principal: What's he look like?
Teacher: He's wearing ridiculous red pants.
Principal: I think I heard him earlier.
Teacher: He's gone.
Principal: Gone? Oh my.
Teacher: Should we call his parents?
Principal: No, I'm sure he'll turn up.
When, at last, I was returned to my classroom, my classmates were in music downstairs. My teacher, the nicest person I have ever met, was frantically restocking books on a shelf. She hugged me and asked where I had been with genuine concern in her eyes. I tried to tell her all about my misadventure.
"Where are the pants now?" she asked and I realized, for the first time, that I wasn't wearing any.
"I threw them away," I told her.
"Probably for the best," she said. She retrieved the sweatpants from the bag of extra clothes my mom had sent in with me that day. She let me help restock books until my class returned. When they did, she even helped deflect the questions of my fellow students.
"What happened? Where's your pants?" they asked.
"Boys and girls," said my teacher. "It's not polite to ask."
They began chanting under their breath—'Craig peed his pa-nts, Craig peed his pa-nts." Under any other circumstances, this would have been social massacre, but given the truth of what had happened—that I had gotten myself trapped in my own insane pants—I thought being branded as a pants-wetter wasn't that bad.
I just wished I could have swished my way home, returned triumphantly, but after the day I had, I decided it was probably best to leave high fashion for more urbane and sophisticated kids. The next day, I wore jeans.
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