A Little Light in the Shoulders

A few days ago I went to the wedding of a life-long friend. Up until a few years ago his family lived in the house next door, and although they have moved and my friend and his new bride began their life together in North Carolina a while back, I still refer to them as neighbors.

I have apparently lost a good deal of weight in the past year. None of the four suits I auditioned from my closet even remotely fit. When I stepped into the one I last wore five years ago to my father’s funeral, I felt like the younger sibling of some All-American quarterback in an adorable attempt to fill big brother’s shoes.

The new gray suit I brought to the tailor garnered a confused look from the man, who I assumed would need only to hem the pants a bit. I walked out of the tiny dressing room and stood in front of a mirror as he looked on.

“You picked this size?” he asked.

I knew my thirty-four inch waist had become a thirty-two in recent times. He was kind enough to informed me that in reality meant thirty, and this only after a sizable meal.

“There’s no silhouette in the rear end, it just looks entirely too baggy.”

“And here. You see? In the crotch area, it’s just not filled in. Looks like there’s nothing there.”

…

I never did possess the gift of a shapely man-ass. It’s a fact of life that stares back at me from every reflective surface I walk by, so I certainly don’t require his reminder, or this new accusation that I may be a few utilities short of a belt. What almost fit about a half an hour prior appeared to me then as a gray, Michael Kors horse blanket draped over my shoulders.

He measured and made several white tics with his chalk, pinning the pants up and the seams of the jacket so that it may fit me a bit snugger. He took another suit off one of his racks and had me try it on.

“See, you’re more the European style,” he says to me, “That whole slender fit. You know, they’re always walking around and all that over there…” he says, both sardonic and quizzical.

“If I were to wear this my stomach and butt would just stick out, like a duck.” He laughs.

I simply file this away as further evidence that I belong somewhere else, and it affirms that the desired male aesthetic in this country is some perverse, bloated mixture of overweight and on steroids- something between an American athlete and the ape that watches the door of the Toon Town nightclub in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I hate dressing up, and always feel incredibly restricted in suits. During the wedding ceremony, the collar of my shirt felt like a dog’s leash yanked at by some phantom hand. The jacket prevented much arm movement above shoulder level and my feet soon started to hurt.

At our table afterward, I see that the groom’s seventeen year old cousin, also named Adam, is wearing the same make and designer suit that I almost did. He fills it out like an ad for Ralph Lauren formal-wear, and though he in no way deserves it for a moment I hate him immensely.

Then the talking begins.

The problem with gatherings like these is that you’re put in a position to tell everyone you haven’t seen in a while what you’ve been up to. This is done in large part by revealing what you haven’t been up to.

You have to try and invent yourself on the spot; inflate something that’s barely there, puff out your chest and stick out your ass while downplaying or obscuring the 800lb. omnipresent gorilla seated next to you: that, a year out of college you have yet to have anything creative published, struggle sometimes for air in an existential choke-hold of acute writer’s block, flayed concentration and doubt while wedged in a catch-22 trying to build a professional portfolio between upper-tier publications that refuse to work with inexperienced freelancers and that lower tier that refuses to use you and give you that experience.

You try not to feel unaccomplished and terribly dull to people. The things you like to talk about are for the most part projects half written or still planned and thus aren’t set down yet, much less published- they aren’t visual, and this is a world that lauds the visual over everything else. You can pull back a sheet from a canvas to show a nearly complete painting and there may be enough there to praise. Such an effect is lost when you refresh the word processor on your laptop, or withdraw the little black notepad from your coat pocket and show your scratched notes.

So you fall back to things that bore you half to death to even think about. You try and reap some kind of meaningful feeling from soil you never really planted the seed of your soul in to begin with. Turning your head then to that patch you did, you notice that nothing has grown because all of the tilling, work, worry and effort were placed elsewhere. I.E., you forgot about all the things you really do want and love to do. What a precarious position that is…

And while their overall positive, albeit generic endorsements of what you are hoping to achieve are somewhat uplifting, you feel additionally vain and narcissistic for worrying about yourself on a friend’s wedding day.

At any rate, the bride was beautiful and radiant and the groom more jovial than I’ve ever seen him, and when they were together you couldn’t help but find yourself tagged in their radius of genuine warmth and happiness. It dulled anxiety’s sharp bite.

I really should stop worrying so much.

...

Five years ago I went off broad shouldered to college, took my measurements, weighed my strengths and laid myself down into a certain mold. In the end I suppose it was like a promise I was making, or a pledge to something. Diploma in hand they pushed through a curtain onto a misty, rickety runway...

But things change. People change. Sometimes your own sense of self is so blurred you step into something that doesn’t fit you, and having walked around in it for so long you haven’t the faintest notion that you have grown out of it or never filled out at all. You very well may be drowning in it.

Sometimes you fall prey to what is, shall we say, fashionable and practical. You are at the whims of what everyone else deems the quintessential masculine look, or the color for all seasons, or what is acceptable for someone like you to step into for an interview, or wedding, or…anything. Life becomes a suit you may allow others to instruct you in how to stand and walk in, and you drive yourself crazy trying to contour to it.

Shoulders back—ok, now…I SAID SHOULDERS BACK DAMNIT!!

Maybe at some point, instead of altering my genetics to change for it, I will have the chance to tailor this life to me. Or find a suitable environment where I can slip into something a little less constricting; something that actually fits.

I can carry a metaphor for miles and miles, can’t I?

Bottom line is that I’m dusting off the sewing machine and readjusting my priorities. I want to have a portfolio strong enough to show an MFA program that their investment in me and my livelihood as a writer is a worthy one that will pay publication dividends for us both somewhere down the line. I need to devote my energy, my heart, mind and everything in between to it, and that is what I plan to do.

For people that don’t know, it can be very difficult. You are in every sense of the word making magic- conjuring something from nothing with mere words and concentration. Slip up, stall or lose that concentration due to some outside anxiety, and the spell fails. What you are left with is a messy chimera with the head of a toad and Oprah Winfrey’s fat ass. Or a room full of rebellious mops and pails.