13 Is the New 18 (6 page)

Elon sighed. His posture was one of Defeated Dad.
He walked out to the car, muttering under his breath about how our family was falling apart.

Sport by now was starting to get interested in the MTV Awards; Jamie Foxx was arriving, and we'd all seen
Ray
together. Elon would be devastated if we lost Sport to the show, too, so I grabbed him by the shoulder, then pushed him out the door. I took one longing look back at the screen, where some beauty I'd never heard of was describing her glittering, skintight gown for the camera after she stepped out of her coach.

“Are you coming?” I heard Elon shouting from the parking spot outside our room.

“Coming!” I said.

The park was just a few minutes’ drive from the hotel. It was, indeed, pitch black out. We were in the middle of nowhere. I started wondering if Utah had a horror writer along the lines of Maine's. We almost missed the turnoff for the park, but the sign suddenly appeared in our headlights. Elon pulled in to a parking area where we could see the sky framed between several tall ponderosa pines, their beautiful shaggy branches framed black against the dark blue sky.

It was indeed a glorious sight, thousands of stars swirling in front of us. The Big Dipper was easy to find, and we could pick out the shapes of other constellations, too, though we weren't sure what any of them were called.

“I feel like I could pick the stars right out of the sky,” Sport whispered to me.

I hugged him. It was so nice to still have one little boy in the family.

We didn't stay too long. And when we got back, the MTV Awards show was still going strong.

We all stayed up late watching it.

Even Elon.

have learned many things from my thirteen- year-old. One of them is that style goes right down to your underwear.

If you pose the boxers- or- briefs question in my house, my husband will definitely say briefs. Elon is a tighty- whities Fruit of the Loom type of guy. Always has been, always will be.

But even though I weaned Taz from diapers to briefs, somewhere along the line he gravitated to boxers. And not just any boxers, but boxers in the wildest patterns imaginable. Colorful paisleys, dice and dominos, quotes from movies, green hundred- dollar bills, red- and- white hearts, even a picture of Al Pacino in
Scarface.
(“Say hello to my leetle friend!” Great slogan for underwear, huh?) Once I bought him some plain blue boxers— what was I thinking?— but he never wore them. A friend is preserving her adolescent son's array of patterned boxers by making a quilt for him out of the ones he has outgrown.
She envisions him taking the quilt to college, and I can totally see this becoming a trend.

“Nice quilt!” some girl living down the hall of the dorm will say. “Was it made from the fabric of, like, family heirlooms?”

“Nah. My mom sewed it using old boxers from when I was thirteen.”

Some fashions, of course, I can see with my own two eyes, like when all of a sudden everyone has the same hairdo or the same boots. But under normal circumstances, you wouldn't think it would be so easy to tell whether your kid's underwear is in style. After all, you don't usually see what type of underpants the average person is wearing, and unless someone is running for president, you don't normally walk up and ask whether they prefer boxers or briefs.

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 in 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.