When I was a kid and my mom bought me Levi's, they were stiff and uncomfortable for weeks. Then over time and multiple washings, they'd fade the way you wanted them to and start to contour themselves to your body. They became more than your pants. They were your skin. They grew with you. They saw what you saw, absorbed your pain, your mistakes, your spills and slides. They scarred and ripped with you. They seemed to last forever. Some part of me can't understand why I ever got rid of that pair of Levi's that I had in seventh grade. How did I lose track of those pants?
So I went to the Levi's store in San Francisco because I had heard that good jeans were back. That they were making them the way they used to. They may cost a lot more, but if you want some emotional time travel and believe that denim in its raw form can make you feel whole, it's going to be worth the purchase of that two-legged vessel to a simpler time.
The clerk helping me was a chubby fellow with a handlebar mustache. I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous. If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked as if he were interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly while being chased through a time tunnel.
The mustache asked me what I was looking for, and I told him I had heard that Levi's was making real jeans again. He said they've always made real jeans, but they had to be treated a very specific way. He told me that his jeans had never been washed.
"You never wash your pants?"
"Nope. I'm going on a year."
I stepped back from him. I didn't catch a wave of stink coming off him, but how could it not be there, waiting, a miasma circling his body, if he didn't wash his pants? I held up the pair of stiff jeans and said, "Well, what do I do with these?" The mustache got very serious.
"What I usually do is I buy them a size smaller than I wear." This is ridiculous, because they are supposed to shrink to fit, so you are supposed to buy a size bigger. He said: "You put the pants on, and you get into a bathtub with them. Then you get out of the bathtub, and you towel off, and then you wear them around, wet, for as long as it takes them to dry. That way they are contoured perfectly to your body. After that you don't wash them, ever. If they get skanky, you throw them in the freezer."
I thought the whole pitch was ridiculous, but of course I was secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect pants. I am secretly obsessed with the idea of perfect anything. I am weak and searching and desperate, just once, to have a perfect thing. So I bought the pants.
When I got home, I went online to do a little research. Sure enough, the consensus on the Internet was that to make these jeans perfect, you put them on, get into a bathtub full of water and then let them dry while you wear them around. I ran the water into the tub. I don't ever take baths. I couldn't remember the last time I did, and now there I was, taking one with my pants on.
As I was lying in the tub with my new gray Levi's shrink-to-fit pants on, my natural feelings of desperation and stupidity were mixed with another emotion: Hope. My life had narrowed in this moment to one small, attainable purpose, the pursuit of perfect jeans, and I felt excited. I also felt empty. Was this what my life had become? Didn't I have better things to do? I was a 48-year-old man in a bathtub wearing pants, thinking I would be a better person for owning a pair of highly personalized jeans. It was in that moment that it hit me: These pants were just pants. They weren't going to do anything special.
That guy with the fancy mustache at the Levi's store was a carnival barker at the Dunk the Clown game. The clown was me, who bought the pants and the baloney that came with them. The pitcher with the ball whom I was taunting was the me who knew better. I took the pants off and enjoyed the bath. In the tank, again.
Marc Maron is the host of the podcast "WTF With Marc Maron." His memoir, "Attempting Normal," from which this essay is adapted, was just published by Spiegel & Grau.
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
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