I'd never set foot in a Ross Dress For Less before, and wasn't sure of the concept. I soon realized, however, that they carry overstock name brand clothes as well as junky offbrand merchandise, in small forlorn selections arranged sort of like a Filene's Basement for the Wal-Mart crowd. There's a lot of depressing Dockers-type stuff and lame failed attempts at "cool" kids' clothes that obviously didn't fool anyone no matter how old. While James pawed over racks of markdown pants I wandered around. The first thing I noticed was the aisle in the menswear department marked "Active Bottoms". I wanted to make them an offer on the sign, take it home and hang it proudly over my bed.

Their assortment seemed random and bewildering. They had a lot of pants and t-shirts, but no jackets. A huge selection of ugly men's knit shirts, the kind you see on Hindu cab drivers or on men sitting in front of slot machines in Reno. Nominal sections for some kinds of housewares, again seemingly arbitrary. Even tiny offerings of furniture. "Teak" occasional tables, and those white-painted wicker shelves that fit over your toilet. Shoes arranged by size, no pair in the correct brand box. I wandered in a daze, looking for something, anything to look at that would drive thoughts of suicide from my mind. I turned away in pain from the spinner rack full of "Gift Ideas", worthless visors with funny slogans, cheap drugstore sunglasses. For you, Dad!

And then I saw the briefs.

I'd circled back around to the men's department. There were racks with hangers. On the hangers were single pairs of white briefs. Calvin Klein 34's. Hanes 36's. They were clipped onto hangers, just like regular clothes. I looked at every pair, there were dozens. Something drew me to them, I was entranced yet appalled, deeply satisfied yet puzzled. Why were they selling individual underpants loose on hangers? What had happened to their reassuring plastic bags, their cardboard boxes, their sporty plastic tubes? It occurred to me that there is something unseemly about loose briefs for sale. Boxers were offered the same way, yet this didn't bother me or interest me.

There is something vaguely troubling about briefs when they are removed from their proper, familiar setting. The brief is the most intimate of suburban male undergarment, much moreso than the loose, shape-denying boxer. A man wearing briefs is orders of magnitude more undressed than a man wearing boxers or even those homosexual hybrids, boxer-briefs. I want briefs for sale to be hermetically sealed for my protection. I want the illusion that human hands have never touched them, or at least a reassurance that no one has tried them on. Attention to the brief is largely focused on the crotch or "pouch" area. Everyone knows that briefs that have been in the owner's collection for a time, worn every few days, display marked evidence of their "used" status by a tell-tale "ghost basket" contour, the cotton's physical memory of the owner's scrotal gravity. It is this obvious genital reminder which confers such anxiety-producing meaning upon the brief as opposed to the boxer, which is more like a thin pair of short pants we happen to wear under our regular pants.

As I pondered these amazing objects, I considered what it would be like to purchase a pair, to carry one single hanger up to the counter, place it before the teenage female cashier, smile warmly, and say "Just these for today, thanks" or "This'll do it!", never breaking eye contact, staring her down, daring her to titter and leaving her to wonder what sort of person gets in his car and drives to the strip mall to buy one single pair of white cotton briefs, to speculate about what manner of unforeseen need or event might have resulted in this quick stop at Ross Dress For Less. It occurred to me that such a purchase would in fact constitute a kind of performance art, wry commentary on a number of interesting cultural issues.