Has anyone seen my pants?

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I can find no remaining photographs that show the pants in their entirety: Just one color shot revealing a glimpse half-hidden behind stage monitors and microphone stands, and a black-and-white picture in one of my 1980s high school yearbooks. But that one only shows me from the thighs up.

That’s all there is. And that’s a good thing. The less photographic evidence the better.

Because the very existence of the fur pants was an affront to all that is good and decent and right. At least from a fashion perspective.

I would know. Because I not only wore them, I am responsible for their creation.

And I apologize.

Among my friends, the saga of the fur pants – from their questionable beginnings to their mysterious demise – is the stuff of legends.

As a 16-year-old with dreams of rock stardom living in Alaska in the summer of 1982 (and loosely inspired by an outfit worn by David Lee Roth of Van Halen), I took a pair of flair-legged blue jeans to a local furrier, and had them sew on wide, chevron-shaped bands of alternating black and white rabbit fur.

Yes, real rabbit fur.

More fur around the cuffs, and a black fur belt around the waist completed the look.

Why did I do this? Because I was convinced I was making the coolest piece of clothing ever created.

One of the (very few) joys of getting older is the ability to look back and appreciate all the absurd stuff you did in your youth that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. To be able to laugh about it fondly, free from embarrassment.

This is, of course, predicated on whatever dumb stuff you did having NOT caused grievous harm, and I can’t say with 100% confidence that the fur pants didn’t. The rabbits definitely suffered grievous harm (feel free to scream fur is murder! I’m right there with you now) but anyone who actually saw the fur pants likely suffered as well.

They really were just that awful.

When I came to Santa Cruz for college in 1984, the fur pants came with me.

I sometimes wore them on stage with the various bands I played with, occasionally wore them to parties, but after a while they’d been more or less relegated to “Halloween costume.”

And then one night a few years later as my roommates and I slept, we were robbed.

An unknown number of persons broke into our house on the east side of Santa Cruz and did a quick snatch and grab. The sound woke me up, but by the time I was out of bed they were gone. It was pretty scary. The next day, we filed a police report that included a list of the items taken: tools, a vacuum cleaner, a couple of motorcycle helmets, and …

… the fur pants.

That’s right. Someone stole the fur pants. I never saw them again.

And decades later, I couldn’t help but think it was the best thing that could have happened to them.

But time has this weird way of making once terrible things seem not so terrible. Some stuff is beyond help of course (I can’t imagine mullet haircuts will ever come back into style) but were the fur pants really that bad? Or maybe so bad they were actually good?

Could they perhaps now even rise to the venerated level of “retro”? Old, but cool? 

They always had a glam-rock vibe to them, and glam-rock itself eventually enjoyed a retro resurgence. I was never really a glam-rocker (I was more “hair-metal,” something that definitely doesn’t deserve a resurgence) but if you rocked out in the early 1980s all those things sorta blended together anyway.

I guess “blending” was maybe the idea behind the fur pants, but it just didn’t work. They never made any aesthetic sense, this unholy abominable mash-up of glam/rock/disco/pimp/punk and I don’t even know.

What was I thinking? I have no idea. When I conceived of them my brain was still a decade away from being fully developed, so at least I’ll always have that as an excuse.

But maybe I’m looking at this all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to apologize for the fur pants. Perhaps there is nothing to excuse.

I’d always heard the phrase youth is wasted on the young, the idea that kids have no appreciation for the fleeting nature of life, no sense of urgency as they dither away their days, squandering precious energy on frivolous pursuits. The older I got the more I grew to believe that.

But now I see it differently.

It is the privilege of youth to be immune from that stressful sense of urgency, to roll obliviously along without ever feeling any desperate need to cling to the sands of time as they slip away.

Because those sands do slip away. Life is short and always getting shorter. Time is relentless. Anyone middle-aged and beyond will attest.

But when you’re young, that distant future (wherein various body parts become less and less capable of performing even their most mundane functions) seems so infinitely far away, so just theoretical, that you might as well be living forever. 

THAT is the privilege of youth: A brief and beautiful freedom from the relentlessness of time.

It’s the freedom to spend your days conceiving and constructing things as farcical as the fur pants, the vaguely glam-rock fever-dream of a teenager who knew everything and nothing (like all teenagers do) blindly making his way through the maelstrom of adolescence, certain he was going to live forever and convinced he had created the coolest pair of pants in the entire history of pants.

And I don’t know … maybe he did?

I have this fantasy where I go to Moon Zooom (or some other vintage clothing/costume store) and catch a glimpse of black-and-white chevron patterns from across the room.

Butterflies in my stomach. Could it really be?

I walk over to the rack and there they are, the fur pants in all their maybe-even-too-awful-to-be-retro glory. I touch the dusty pelts, worn but still soft, whisper an invocation to the rabbits that made the ultimate sacrifice and weep inside just a little for the lost privileges of my youth.

But mostly I feel happy.

Happy how I’ve come full circle to again love something so ridiculous, happy and thankful for all the laughter their memory brought my friends and me over the years, happy as I imagine the countless other Halloween costumes and stage attire these wretched pants have probably been part of as they made the cycle from quirky-clothing-store-purchase to shoved-in-a-closet to bag-of-stuff-to-be-donated to back again.

Smile at the thought of how many different people must have truly appreciated their wonderful hideousness lo these many lost decades.

And I ask the person behind the cash register: “How much for these?”

Daniel DeLong humbly requests that you keep an eye out for the fur pants. Should you locate them, please send an urgent message to Lookout. He does recognize he’ll never be able to fit into them again. These days, his goal is to just be considered retro (old but cool) himself.