I made today a most useful discovery - my jacket size. The history of how I became a jacket-and-tie-wearing man, after having blundered my way into adulthood wearing obscenely printed t-shirts, is not worth recounting here, except to say that since I made the change at nineteen years old, the question of what my proper measurements were seems rarely to have entered my thoughts.
My poverty has undoubtedly been the cause of this. It must be noted (and do not think, fellow laborer, that I am ashamed of it) that my means of living have not increased by a single penny in the eight years bridging the purchase of my first suit - at a thrift shop, naturally - and the day of this writing. I was a hotel night auditor working for a subsistence wage then, and I am the same today; though I have in the intervening time acquired an ornamental (but quite costly) bachelor's degree, which was naively intended to bring me a higher wage. Instead it brought me more creditors and a lower vocabulary. At any rate - because my penury obliges me to either (A) purchase new clothes, which mercenary labor practices abroad allow to be produced at a high volume for hardly any money, and then sold at retail outlets for many times their material worth, or else (B) buy clothing of a better quality, made by (perhaps) happier workers, for wealthier purchasers, who then tire of them and give them away, I have rarely bought clothes in any condition but second-hand. My reasoning is that if they have lasted twenty years already, they are likely of a good enough make to last twenty years more.
The clothes that one such as I can afford to buy new are devised - like our electronics, automobiles, and everything else - to fall into tatters in a single year. Thus do persons of my class ruin themselves yearly in the effort to replace the rags that they bought the year before, thinking themselves shrewd and economical, and swallowing for another year the perversely agonizing reality that they shall never be fashionable. Cheap clothes cannot help but fit poorly. Neither, of course, can expensive clothes bought cheaply from second-hand shops, by arrogated young night auditors who do not know their own jacket size, and are too embarrassed to enter a proper boutique, where, with a bit of inquiry, and a few brief trials before the mirror, such intelligence would easily be obtained. It costs the pride too much, really, to enter such perfumed air, and pass one's callused hands through sleeves prized at a week's worth of one's wages, when one's shoes are scuffed and worn thin at the heels - simply to find out whether one wears a "46S" or a "42L." And such enigmas are rarely to be solved at the Salvation Army store, where the tag bears nothing but a single-numbered price scrawled in bold red marker, and one must try everything on with the hope of finding the single, providential article that - while yet ill-fitting - is at least less ill-fitting than everything else.
I've had done with all that now, for today - and at very long last - I know my jacket size. I wear (or would wear, could I afford it) a "36R" - meaning that my chest is thirty-six inches around and that my arms are of the usual or "regular" length. It may be of value to note that there is almost no size slenderer than this available anywhere but in specialty shops, and that in the city where I do my shopping, even this size requires the employment of a Pinkerton detective to route out among the numberless racks of the numberless department stores. For some time, I could find no evidence of a size beneath that of "38S," and was left to hope that - at the age of twenty-seven - I might still be due for a late but altogether welcome growth-spurt of two or so inches, particularly in the area of the bust. I grieved that they do not produce form-enhancing braziers for men like myself who, instead of being barrel-chested, might rather be compared to a bottle of Bordeaux.
The discovery of my true size, along with the distant possibility of finding a jacket to which it corresponds, I owe entirely to two benevolent angels: my comely and fierce mistress Lucretia, and "Robert," a noble employee of the Sears & Roebuck Company. I am sparing the latter the use of his actual name, as the wearing of a name-tag is an odious thing, and an invasion too often abused. To have one's name displayed to persons whose hands one has not shaken ought to be a humiliation reserved for fugitives; to salespeople and clerks it is a slavish malediction.
I was first acquainted with "Robert" as an observer, when, while employed as a clerk some years ago, I used to see him taking his lunch in the same food court as I, in the shopping mall to which his Sears & Roebuck store is annexed, and where it has stood for as many years as I can recall. Although I never spoke to him, he emerged to my imagination as a man of extraordinary dignity - even as his manners showed him to be quiet and humble as a field mouse. I confess that I swooned a little at the sight of him back then. He wore a dark suit of the same manufacture that he was employed in selling; his gray hair was neatly styled in a fashion betokening decades fallen past, and a curl hung above the rim of his spectacles in a way that suggested quite irrepressibly Superman's Clark Kent, as portrayed by an older, now thoroughly dejected George Reeves. He would bring his sandwiches in brown paper bags and eat them with the lethargic, ponderous movements of a man who wishes his time were up, but hasn't the strength nor the bravery to hurry himself to the void. I wished, years ago, that I could suddenly slip into the seat across from his; that I could ask him his name, ignoring his name-tag - that we could talk about our families; that we could be two men in unbecoming suits sharing a joyless communion over lettuce and cheese.
Today I met him again - or rather, for the first time - and his lapel was dusty with sandwich crumbs. I blushed to be called “sir” by him, and I counterfeited a state of distraction while he circled a rack of identical pin-striped jackets, pawing through the labels to find one that was “fitted” – that is, one on which the cut was somewhat concave about the ribcage, as starvelings like myself tend to be. I excused him from the task, seeing that the prices – even at Sears & Roebuck – were, so to speak, too rich for my pauper’s blood. I did not explain that I had only come to settle, after eight years, upon my proper size. Out of curiosity, I suppose, Lucretia asked him, “Is there any size smaller than 36R?” “Not in this store,” he murmured. He was a handsome and pitiable man; a poor man in a poor man’s suit; a man like me – defeated by capital, wading daily through the dross of it.
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