Ever been to Kohl’s? It sounds like it should be a German Hofbrauhaus but I can assure you, there’s no beer involved. No man would ever go there of his own accord. If you find yourself alone and in a Kohl’s parking lot, then you my friend are in a dark desperate place. Get help. Reach out to someone, because this kind of confusion doesn’t go away on its own. Reach between your legs, take inventory and get the hell out of there. I’d hate to see your life end up at a Dollar Tree or a Nordstrom Rack or, holy fuck, the Burlington Coat Factory.

It all went sideways for me on account of I don’t wear long pants.

If I’m not at work then I’m in shorts. The general location or the weather forecast has no bearing. I own slacks and shorts, dress shirts and t-shirts, there’s no in-between. I never understood jeans-and-polo-shirt guy, but things happen. In fact, if I was forced to pull on a pair of trousers on a weekend I wouldn’t know where to start, I wouldn’t know how to best suck in my gut, I’d have no idea what store to go to … and that’s where things went hideously wrong.

If you’ve been married for more than five minutes and for some reason want to stay married, you learn to never think out loud (it’s right there in the owner’s manual on the first couple of pages). But age clouds the mind and like all good marriages you tend to forget that the other person exists, and so what passes through the mind crosses the lips, At some point, I may need a pair or two of long pants. A simple thought muttered under my breath may have well as been broadcast on a public address system, because no sooner had the words tumbled from my mouth than a response came from across the room. Then you need to go to Kohl’s!

This is where the humiliation starts.

There’s a fairly large number of retail establishments grown men never set foot in (or should never set foot in). My reaction was, Coals? I don’t know what that is. Well, it’s not Sears because at least Sears has Craftsman tools. It’s not Penneys because even tired ol’ Penneys has a candy counter, and Wal-Mart has food and tires and Buck knives so there are male-leaning diversions that take some of the sting out of being in what amounts to a foreign country.

Kohl’s is like the Hometown Buffet of clothes and accessories, that is, they really don’t have anything you would eat under normal circumstances, but if you were old and toothless or just had some dental work done, they have soup. Apparently, Kohl’s is the place for long pants that aren’t nice enough to wear to work – to hear my wife tell it, that’s their niche.

The journey from the parking lot to the front door was like walking the Green Mile. Every fuckin’ dude in the store was with his wife, because like I said, what man would even know there was such a place? They all had their heads hung, considering their pathetic lot in life and hoping not to be seen or talked to. Most of them were older than me and lots of them seemed used to the fact that they had to wear clothes picked out by their wives. I wanted to shout out, “Hey, I don’t normally shop here and I have my own money and I don’t have to do everything my wife says and I can cut and chew my own food, and …” but I knew that might draw unwanted attention and that I’d just end up looking like the guy that doth protest too much.

I noticed a lot of men wearing sweatpants, and at one point it was suggested that I buy some (the humiliation was nonstop). I created a borderline scene as I explained that grown men don’t wear sweatpants in public and the ones that do have weak bowels and bladders, that their hands are too weak to negotiate pants with buttons and since they may wet themselves in the buttoning-unbuttoning process they have to wear outer garments that can be pulled up or yanked down at a moment’s notice.

For a store that was supposed to be all about the pants this Kohl’s thing seemed to be walking around in its underwear. There were pants alright, piles and piles of pants … for stick figures! Have you ever known or seen a man with a thirty-inch waist? Me neither, but if you come across one send him to Kohl’s because they apparently specialize in fitting men who can’t keep solid food down. At some point, we managed to find a couple of options that might fit a person with a smidge more than zero-percent body fat and so I had to try the damn things on. In the try-on area, there was a queue that had formed for the next available try-on stall and as I waited it became clear that there were multiple people in each little room. Alas, it was the final indignity, as in more than one instance, the wife had crowded into the stall with the husband and was now giving directions to and passing judgment on the poor bastard, essentially robbing these guys of their last ounce of self-esteem and testosterone. It was hard to witness.

I remember preparing a speech on how trying on clothes works … “I go into that smelly little room alone, remove my shorts and try to squeeze my big ass into these long pants. If I get them buttoned and if I’m not gasping for breath I’ll check myself in the mirror. If the light hits me in just the right way I’ll make a mental note, remove the pants, put back on my shorts and probably buy them. Should I ever wear these pants in public, you can see what they look like. There’s no modeling. There’s no witty banter about how they look and what accessories will match…”

You start to get up in age and things change, the things you have to do, the places you might have to go … have you ever been to Kohl’s?