i purchase a suit and instantly feel more powerful
Twelve years of Catholic school, of mandatory daily self-swaddling in a suit and necktie, weaned me for decades of the desire to wear a suit or play dress-up. I associated suits with sexual hysteria and face-slaps by nuns. Plus, I've never been able to figure why those nooselike devices called neckties exist except to remind males that if they misbehave, they might be lynched.
Whenever I'd hang with my public-school brethren, I envied their tie-dyed clothes, their doctrine of Free Love, and their Frank Frazetta-artwork-emblazoned roach stones. I sensed they were freer than me, and I reasoned it was because they didn't wear suits.
But though nothing inhabits a pair of jeans better than my ass 'n' package, there is something tres undignified about nearing fifty while stomping around in jeans, wifebeater, and engineer boots. Plus, with the shaved head, people get the wrong idea and assume I'm involved with some sort of youth gang, when the last gang I belonged to was the Boy Scouts.
So I recently purchased a used grey suit for ten bucks and invested another sawbuck in alterations and dry-cleaning. Within seconds of donning it, I became coated in a magical aura of authoritative dignity. I wanted to bust drug dealers and file motions before a judge.
People treated me differently, too. Instead of some thuggish Nazi ex-con, they espied perhaps a homosexual investment banker or a wealthy alternative coke dealer. These are the things I could be if I'd only shed the self-destructive slumming persona like a molted snakeskin.
A hundred years ago, even the lowliest sharecropper went about his daily business in a suit and hat. And even though people didn't have frozen yogurt or Tivo back then, they had sartorial style, an elegant sense of haberdashery which shames the modern-day monkeys clad lazily in sweat pants, baseball caps, and grimy T-shirts.
My suit suits me. For twenty bucks, I went from prole to plebe. Blow me, will you?
