Leather

Eve Marx

Word Count 944

In the 1980’s, I was living in New York City, walking around in crotch-grazing mini-skirts styled with big, cheap scarves I found at a store called Reminiscence that I twisted and tied into halter tops. In the fall, as the weather turned, I found myself staring longingly at the gay guys dressed in leather parading up and down Christopher Street. I liked the look. I wanted it. I struck up a conversation with a man outside the Haagen Daz store one night. I asked where he got his leather pants, and he said they were custom-made. A week later, I walked into The Leather Man to be measured for my very own leather pants. The person who measured me convinced me to have them made with a flat-fronted side zip. Two weeks later, they were ready, and they fit like a glove. They were unparalleled in their authenticity and construction, and I never wanted to take them off. 

I had a habit of choosing jobs that allowed me freedom in what I wanted to wear. No pussycat blouses for me, or pantyhose, either, which ruled out a lot of office work. At one job, I was reprimanded for wearing open-toed shoes. 

“This isn’t a beach, Miss,” the office manager said. I didn’t stay long at that job. I started another job at a magazine where the dress code was super limber. I wore a short skirt, cowboy boots, and a jean jacket to the interview, and they still hired me. This was right after I was shot down for a job I thought I wanted at another magazine because, at my final interview (I’d sailed through three), I stupidly wore a sleeveless dress, and the woman interviewing me inquired about my unshaved armpits. 

“Is that a political statement?” she said. 

 At the magazine that did hire me, my boss often wore leather pants. This emboldened me to wear mine to the office, which I started doing two, maybe three times a week. The thing about a great pair of leather pants is their versatility. You really can wear them every day. They go with every sweater and jacket in your closet and every tee shirt, every blouse. They look good with sneakers, Italian loafers, boots, and high heels. If you spill something on them, you just wipe it off. Leather pants never need to go to the cleaners. To keep mine in top shape, I passed a rag with Lexol leather cleaner and conditioner over them every other week. So you can imagine how annoyed I was when my boss — let’s call him John; his name was John — told me one day the office wasn’t big enough for both of us to wear leather pants.  

I told him he could take his off. 

This started a war between us. It was a war I wasn’t sure I could win. I continued wearing my leather pants, and he continued wearing his. He started to gripe and complain about everything I wrote, and since a good portion of my job was writing, this became a problem. He said my prose was predictable and boring. He said my writing voice was corrupted from all the trash I was reading. A corner of my desk was fully inhabited by a slush pile tower of unsolicited manuscripts I was expected to read. 

I continued to wear my leather pants to work, but the pressure from John was on. I retaliated by doing dirty, nasty little things, like unscrewing the bottom of his phone (this was when everyone had a landline) and putting tiny turds from my dog’s morning shit inside. Although he complained something on his desk stank, he never figured out the source. The odor problem caused him to walk around his office dramatically sniffing. He had a habit of doing coke in his office, and everyone else on the staff thought that was why he was sniffing and why his nose was so runny.  

One afternoon when everyone else left for the day, I was still at my desk in the bullpen, and John was in his office with the door shut. He was doing cocaine. All of a sudden, he rushed out into my area, holding a handkerchief to his face. It was bright red and sodden with blood. Finally, he’d caused real damage from his habit, and blood was running down the back of his throat. He was scared and in need of medical attention.

I was so solicitous. Let me help you get a cab, I said. I helped him into the elevator and through the office building lobby and flagged down a taxi. John gave the driver the name of the hospital emergency room where he wanted to be taken. The last thing I saw as I shut the cab’s rear door were his leather pants, stained with blood.  

John never came back to work except to pick up his things. His boss, one of the magazine’s publishers, asked me what happened that day. I described the cocaine and the nosebleed and how I helped John into a cab. 

That was very kind of you, his boss said. 

John’s replacement started the following week. This guy was even worse than John, although he didn’t wear leather pants and had no coke habit. His claim to fame was he wrote a book about the Berrigans. He was an awful bore, and basically, almost every word he uttered put me to sleep. I left the job six months after he was hired, and I never looked back. 

I still have a lot of my old leather. 

I wish I still had those pants. 

Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex