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MY TUXEDO

"Will I ever have the chance to wear my tuxedo?", Bradley Freedman asks, plaintively, about a suit he accidentally inherited. "After all, a tuxedo in the closet seeks opportunities ..." 

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

The tuxedo is a bit too large for me now, but New York is full of tailors, right? Not that I've ever had anything tailored before. One of my friends sometimes has his clothes tailored, but he sends his garments on to his Vietnamese mother in Texas. I'd rather not send my tuxedo by post. Besides, Mrs Tran has never met me.

I own a number of pairs of jeans and trousers, and they are all different sizes. It would seem that my size is not a size at all but rather a set of matrices from waists 30", 31", 32", 33" and 34" and lengths 30", 31" and 32". None of them fit me particularly well. Some of them don't really exist.

The Tuxedo is black. Classic. It does not have a tail but it is long in both front and back. There’s a word for this style of tuxedo, but I don’t know it.  What I do know is that it is a Liz Claiborne tux made in the USA.

It came to me by accident.  A former supervisor of mine had a girlfriend who worked at Liz Claiborne and she had a tuxedo to get rid of. We discovered that it fit me—as things tend to do—“well enough”.  And so I, a mailroom temp at the time, came to own a tuxedo.

Faithful reader: Do mailroom temps ever have occasion to wear a tuxedo?

It never occurred to me to want to own a tuxedo, much less to actually own one.  Like most modern American men I wear tuxedos only at weddings. And although I have been in a number of weddings recently, the grooms invariably insist that I wear the same tuxedo as all the other groomsmen. At the last wedding I was in I still managed to stand out when, instead of giving a toast, I gave a speech. A speech is very much like a toast, except that it is much more selfish and there is no drinking. At the end of my halting monologue, I managed to forget the point of the whole exercise, and instead of saying "Toast!" I mumbled, “Um, so I guess that’s all I have to say” and sat down.

No matter. There will be more weddings. But will I ever have the chance to wear my tuxedo?  After all, a tuxedo in the closet seeks opportunities. 

Some Americans are given honorary knighthoods. I met a gentleman who owns a tuxedo just in case this happens. He lives in rural Kansas. I fear this man is more optimistic than me.

One evening a couple of years ago I found myself occupying the same space as Henry Kissinger. This matters because when I first moved to New York City I pledged that if I ever came across Henry Kissinger I would punch him in the mouth. But when the time arose I didn’t even speak to him, and I certainly did not punch him on his mouth or anywhere else. I was really caught off guard. People like me can plan to meet Henry Kissinger, but we don’t actually expect to meet Henry Kissinger. Still, I remember it being a non-tuxedo event, which was unfortunate, because if I ever do have another opportunity to punch him, I would like to do it in my tuxedo.

I will not listen to my iPod while wearing my tuxedo. This should go without saying. The iPod is a fine convenience, but we must have our limits. Yes, even in New York; yes, even today. Think of Ms Claiborne, if not of me.

What I would most like to do is wait for my current job to come to an end and wear my tuxedo to the office on my last day of work. I will wear my tuxedo and I will drink brandy, smoke a cigar and express sorrow about the passing of the good old days when men wore hats and you could smoke in the hospital and all that crap. I will gladly do my remaining day’s work, offering not Melvillian ambiguity but instead what I pretend is a Fitzgeraldian “I would prefer to do it in my tuxedo.”  On my final day in the finance department, I will sit cross-legged, the black-suited Tom Wolfe of data entry.

But most likely I’ll simply end up dressing up in my tuxedo one Saturday night and taking a rare taxicab ride to the Plaza, where I’ll stroll in and out of the lobby and lament its downfall, even though I only moved to New York four years ago. (Even if one is from Kansas, one learns quickly that it is proper to lament the downfall of the Plaza.) I will know no one and be going nowhere. It will probably be in December, when the lobby is decorated and there are crowds enough to sweep me up. 

For one night I’ll resume my old habit of smoking. I’ll stop at the bar for the more-than-occasional drink, but then back up onto my feet, inside their tuxedo shoes (I’ll have to get a pair, somehow) and tuxedo socks (kept from a recent wedding?). A ghost, I will wander in a false nostalgia. Like mourning the memory of a dream, I am nostalgic for what never was. I miss what I don’t remember and my tuxedo waits patiently to mock me for it.

Picture credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ , tifotter (both via Flickr)

(Bradley Freedman is a humorist living in New York City.)