The famous fashion editor Diana Vreeland once exclaimed, “Blue jeans are the most beautiful thing since the gondola.”

I used to sleep with my blue jeans on, when I finally got blue jeans that were all cotton, not half-polyester fakes with big ugly inner knee patches from Sears that stayed the wrong color blue, a blue that had a gunmetal tinge, like the after-bite of artificial sweetener, washing after washing. The jeans I slept with were genuine Levis, real sugar, and faded the way blue jeans were supposed to, holes at the knees and all.

I was 13 by the time this real thing came along, and had bought the pair at a musty cramped store down in Old Webster called Rudolph’s, which was run by a little gnome of a man with a bald head and pointy ears and a hooked nose. His wife Rose was the same height that he was, which was my height, about 5’3”. She wore rose colored house dresses and thick glasses. Mr. Rudolph wore glasses too, sometimes he would raise them to look at something across the crowded stacks, and you could see the purple indents on the high bridge of his greenish white skin.

A lot of the store inventory had been bought in the 1950s, and there was a lot of it. Tons of it — blouses, jeans, chambray work shirts, boondockers of various clodhopper sorts, print house dresses, pajamas — piled to the rafters upstairs, and just as full down in the dim cave-like limestone-block lined basement, according to a couple of my girlfriends who later worked there after school for way below the minimum wage.

Anyway, I found the blue jeans of my dreams in one of the stacks there: skinny, straight, and double-stitched on both the inner and outer leg. Like something a juvenile delinquent would wear in an old black and white movie on the Bijoux late night show. I aspired to juvenile delinquency when I was 13.

My parents never noticed that I slept in my blue jeans. I can’t remember them ever noticing anything important about me that year, except for the time when I burnt cinnamon incense from the local head shop all day and started crying. “Are you depressed?” my mother asked. But I don’t remember any comfort accompanying the puzzlement. They were always out, going to parties. When they were home, they watched Cher and her slinky TV insults while drinking Old Fashioneds.

I slept in my new blue jeans because I loved them, but also because I used to sneak out at night with my best friends, three hooligan boys. When the pebble hit the window, I was always instantly dressed, and didn’t have to make any noise opening drawers or closets. Slip on Keds, sneak down the back stairs and out the back door and we were off. Off to steal car insignias from Gremlins and Dusters and Pacers. This was before car alarms, so our screwdriving was unheralded, and I’d sneak back in with all that metal clanking in a red bandana tied to my belt loop.

My dad was a dog and my mother was a bitch. They both slept soundly.

*“You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female’.” — D.V.