How bootleg Jnco’s almost got me severely punished …

Growing up, my parents were not super rich. In fact, they were basically just getting by. 3 kids to feed, a mortgage, car payments; it was hard. But as a child, I never really wanted for anything I couldn’t live without. I always had a full stomach and shoes on my feet. It’s not like I was from the projects or ghetto at all. Just your average middle class family, I guess.

That isn’t to say there weren’t times when I was deeply frustrated with my lack of “fresh gear.” In middle school, my clothes lacked cool name brands and I was always a season or two behind what was cool. You know. In 7th grade, I got boat shoes. The same boat shoes everyone had in 6th grade, and had gotten rid of before summer hit. Yeap, one season behind. Then freshman or sophomore year, it was all about JNCO’s.

I recall being fascinated by them. I wasn’t a big fan of the goofy ass pockets, but was amazed by the intricate, skate referencing embroideries (ps. this was before I got my first CCS catalog and found World Industries, Acme, …). Of course, my parents couldn’t afford those jeans.

“$75 for jeans? I don’t think so.”

I can’t even remember if they cost that much. All I can remember is that I couldn’t have them. So I would end up getting pants that were oversized. That gave me the baggy look. I was still missing the crazy embroidery, though.

I figured, I could take care of that easy enough. I was pretty handy with a sewing needle. I decided to sew up my own graphic above the coin pocket. It actually came out looking pretty cool. There were two concentric circles. The outer one was blue, the inner one was white. And inside these circles, I sewed the uppercase letter ‘N.’ At least, that’s what it looked like. The first upstroke was green, and the other two strokes where white. I was pretty impressed with my efforts.

Of course, wearing pants with a giant XL shirt, I was the only one who ever saw the embroidery. Or so I assumed.

One day, I came home and found my mom at the door with a very upset look on her face. It was a mixture of anger, disappointment and more anger. She was holding the jeans in her hand waiting for me.

“What is this!?!” as she pointed at the embroidery.

“Oh that’s just something I whipped up.”

“Is it marijuana? Are you smoking marijuana?”

Haha. Oh man. It was rough going. For the next half hour, my mom and I had a drug talk and I had to convince her I wasn’t doing drugs, which was true. Looking at the embroidery again, I can see how she thought it was a burning joint. Ah, yes.

Needless to say, I removed the embroidery later and never added embroidery to another pair of jeans again.