Black T-Shirts and Ties

The evening dress flatters her body in ways everyone else might appreciate visually, but with my following the patterns in the fabric stretched over her hips as I hold her in my lap, softly brushing my fingertip round to her back and down her spine to meet her ass, my appreciation comes from a more visceral level, reaching from the furnace of my heart and out through candid moments of eye contact with her hidden among the alternating belly laughs and respectful silences found within our small congregation as we wind down the night. She wears my tie loosely draped around her bare shoulders as if it were a nation's flag planted into new country soil, a territorial claim, worn with the carefree abandon that comes with knowing her skin as more silky-smooth than the tie could ever be. Her arm wraps around my shoulder and plays with my suspender, casually tracing with her fingers the line of the brace as it fits snug over my chest. Her free hand holds my cigar smoldering as my left hand grasps the neck of the last bottle of champagne. The unfortunate cleaning crew is already starting to scurry throughout the hall, clearing tables and sweeping up the afterglow that we so desperately cling to.

I could see a few of my friends sitting around me, the loves of their lives - or maybe for a few, the loves of the moment - legs stretched out from hard steel folding chairs, shined shoes on their feet and shirts striving to maintain their pressed glory after a night of dancing and rowdiness at this wedding. I don't know whose wedding it is. Maybe it's a holiday party.

Whatever it is, this kind of circumstance cannot easily be found on the Iron Range.

I’ve lived the twilight of my 20s, and now it is dusk and midnight quickly approaches. I’ve never been one to concern myself with my own age; “You’re only as old as you act!” (or, heh, lately, “you’re only as old as the girl you’re fucking”). But I’ve also reached another milestone: my current is the first career I’ve had, the first job I’ve spent 5 full years at. During those years I’ve nearly lost my job as I let the bullshit of life leech my attention and energy and strength and I had distracted what remained of my emergency reserves of the above with frivolous internet inanities. I’ve had to learn what discipline means, I’ve had to set goals for myself and to do that I needed to answer to myself those easy-to-dismiss interview questions: where do you see yourself in 5 years’ time? 10 years’?

I spent years of my mid 20s in and out of a horrible relationship, learning lessons that should’ve been quick and apparent, like a student having to take their 10th grade classes thrice over and graduating years behind his age group. It then took years after that to put those lessons into practice, to take what demons I identified in the mirror and slowly start to excise them from my life. It wasn’t easy, but even a dumbass like me can learn that you can’t drown them in alcohol, you can’t smoke them away, you can’t paint over them with a smile and drown out their voices with distortion and polyrhythms.

So I’ve been making the most painstakingly slow incisions, extracting each abscess with a personal surgery stretched across the last years, slower than playing a game of chess by mail. My weight dropped after months of depression where I probably had a food-to-alcohol budget comparable to the US’s Education-to-Defense dollars. But shit, 25 pounds is nothing to sneeze at, is it? One eighth of the weight I had 6 months prior. Try as I might I could not develop the willpower to work at losing more, but dammit I could at least keep what I’ve already lost off.

I judiciously reviewed my closet’s contents. Folded upon my bed, the tower of silly, childish graphic t-shirts sagged in resignation to their fate upon the highest of shelves, probably happy they weren’t yet donated to charity. Same, too, for the myriad of black metal band t-shirts I’ve collected, hardly any of them fitting me anymore, and barely any of them from bands that are relevant, or that I’d admit to having listened. Instead, I pulled out clothes that hadn’t seen sunlight in years, giving long-awaited second chances to garments so dismissively hung to the back, some still with attached tags bearing the rough edge where some aunt or grandmother tore the price sticker off before wrapping it as a gift. Maybe those grievously unstylish shirts were hidden gems all along.

I bought some real footwear. It had started with the Chuck Taylors I needed for a wedding, and continued on to experimentation of the various styles found on fashion forums: Sperry Topsider boat shoes, Clark’s Desert Boots. I half-assedly polished up my grandfather’s wingtips, bringing a shine to their brogueing. I purchased socks so I could properly wear browns, blacks, blues, or whites on my feet.

I tried on a pair of Levi’s I had long given up on, and lo! and behold! they fit wonderfully. I’ve worn a hole in the knee since and have replaced them with an identical pair, and I also supplemented my wardrobe with a pair of shrink-to-fit 501s, the sort of jeans that come stiff as cardboard but will eventually tell the tale of their life through the fades and creases and stains of wear and tear, like your grandfather would have worn in the mines in his youth.

I drove throughout Woodbury with my accomplice in search of decent casualwear, finally settling on a buy one, get one sale at Men’s Warehouse for some sports coats and dress shirts.

I could put together a dashing figure in the mirror and get compliments and likes on my Facebook pictures and from the ladies at the office alike. This was much needed, though, as my hair was getting longer and I needed to balance it out: half Kurt Cobain, half Adam Levine. But I wanted to grow it out, partially in a personal rebellion to the multitude of styles I had tried previously in vain attempts to grasp at some new definition of self, which one time left me with super super short hair, and mostly because after spending the recent year listening to hip hop, I found again my taste for metal music and the subculture surrounding it.

Because, see, there’s one long lesson I’ve learned that I can attribute solely to Deuce: it doesn’t matter what other people think of who you are so long as you’re happy being yourself. This man wears the ugliest ICP shirts, still maintains a closet of tripp pants, and alternates between long hair and mohawks. This man also effortlessly gets the attention of a room, and of the ladies, and he never even acknowledges it, pleased to continue his one-man show and brushing off criticism like so many pieces of lint. The man epitomizes old-school cool in a Generation Juggalo shell.

So it might sound antithetical to say that I cut my long hair, lost more weight, took out my earrings, put away (most) of my metal shirts and so help me Ronnie James Dio will never wear my camo cargo shorts again. Yes, be who you want to be and be happy with it, and I’m a huge metalhead with a growing arsenal of guitars and the developing callouses to prove I play them. But I find myself happier when I’m less Slayer and more Rat Pack.

See, the wedding I needed Chucks for, and my brother in arm sleeves for my search of Woodbury’s clothing shops, is the Sinatra to my Sammy Davis, Jr. He’s the man who grew into his man-ness faster than I could. He’s gotten fit, developed a better sense of style, married a lovely woman, and has taught me lessons he couldn’t fathom. F-Dot, though he lives 200 miles away, is very much one of my closest bros and biggest influences. And even though I met him through the mentor I previously looked up to, he certainly surpassed our Dean Martin and proved to me there’s more to life than hustling a pool table. The three of us were our Rack Pack, playing pool and bombing jukeboxes, but to this day it is F-Dot that I feel I owe a large part of my life to.

It’s not just that we as stupid 20-somethings appropriated the name of a particularly well-known group of rascals (the horrors if we were younger and started calling ourselves “The Wolf Pack” and planning trips to Vegas to steal Tyson’s tiger…). No, it’s the sense of camaraderie, the brotherhood, and the social styling we share that I don’t quite find with my other brothers. These are the guys I could most easily lounge with in a jazz club or in a casino run by gangsters in 1950’s Americana.

So while everything prior to this suggests that I should be at home and comfortable and successful with shit-kicker boots, ripped and torn jeans, a bullet belt, and the hair to windmill headbang with, I’m realizing that I’m getting older, and that I can and ought to embrace a more refined version of myself.

It’s not like the punk-styled homie friends of mine, nor the nerdy people I play Magic with, nor the (successful or unsuccessful) ladies’ men I go out drinking with, nor my business casual coworkers, nor anybody else really, nor myself, wouldn't accept me for who I am, whoever I am.

The trouble is, I feel as if my life in Hibbing is as far away from the Rack Pack as can be. The love of my life will come eventually, that I’m not worried about. However, nowhere up here are throwback clubs with leather padded lounge chairs and black and white photos of famous blues trumpeters on the wall. Sure, there are some bars with a few pool tables and Guinness on tap in Duluth, but those belong to those post-college years when we clung to a frat life we never really lived. The lights and obscenely loud music of dance clubs up here are the playthings of the young; let the newly-21 year olds (or the kids with newly-acquired fake IDs) posture and pose and shuffle and shake and enjoy their youth. No, at this point I want to spend time in the sort of place where “live band” doesn’t mean cover charge to hear someone slaughter AC/DC songs, but rather a piano and a voluptuous singer in a slinky red dress and a sultry voice. The sort of place with carpets and drinks served in glass tumblers, not plastic cups. A place where “coat check” means a ticket given to you by a man in a walk-in closet, not checking to see if someone stole your Fox jacket from the back of the barstool you draped it over.

Maybe those places don’t exist at all outside of Justin Timberlake’s latest music video anymore.

Maybe someday, members of the Rack Pack, the FYF clan, the Gamer’s Haven crew, and I could all find ourselves gathered at the end of a classy wedding, the last group of people walking out of a closed dining hall, the bride and groom long gone to consummate their nuptials. Those of us with women of our own would drape our suit jackets over their shoulders and brush their hair over the collar, while others of us would hang our jackets over our shoulders with one hand, sliding on sunglasses against the dawning sun, slightly stumbling after a full night of drinking, dancing, wine and champagne.

Maybe some night we’ll find ourselves in a quiet and dark hotel bar, chatting with a bartender named Frank who wears a vest and visor and cleans the inside of a glass with a white rag while he tells us of that time he stood at a urinal next to Hugh Hefner.

I’m only (nearly) 30. There’ll be plenty of life left to learn to drink scotch or whiskey and to cavort with lawyers and doctors and investment bankers. Some of my friends are already there, some are farther behind me. I certainly don’t want to rush to become Patrick Bateman admiring the tasteful thickness of a business card, but I think I’ve taken the correct fork in the road, and I’ll make reservations for anyone who will join me in a booth on the wall at whatever fancy restaurant I come across when I get there.