The Stories…

The Stories…

I’ll probably never write. I mean my head is full of them—and good ones, too. But I don’t think they’ll make it to daylight anytime soon.

Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert circa 1914

Why not? Ennui came to mind but that’s not it. Not at all. Ennui to me denotes waiting for something—a protracted, slow moving state of simmer—with a barely fueled yearn for something, even if you don’t quite know what that something should be or is going to be upon arrival. And I’m so settled on this rather comprehensive definition of ennui that even if it’s miles off the mark, my definition stands.

Writer’s block would indicate that I’m a writer so that one’s out too. Boredom? Not so much. Inability to concentrate, to hold a thought long enough for it to morph into a cogent flurry of words? Now we are getting somewhere. Inertia.

My blessings outweigh my challenges and my decades old strategy of taking the proverbial plusses and minuses inventory to reground me remains a decent technique. But one thing I’ve learned in the last year and a half is that pain and suffering are unique and the degree to which anyone suffers should never be discounted, regardless of how their pluses and minuses exercise nets out. I’ll never again trivialize anyone’s pain just because I view it as comparatively trifling.

Bottom line is that I think I’m still grieving. And I’m trying hard to step into it, to participate in its coursing through, yet not wallow. But it’s cold here and flannel sheets and lush robes and shearling lined bedroom slippers are conducive to a bit of wallowing. Shut up.

So if I could write I’d finally do the promised story on this shirt from the nice people at Sebastian Ward. 

I don’t shill so you know that if I agree to write about a product, it’s gonna be unvarnished. And  I’ve already got the title. Quirky Shirts. Because they are. And of course that suits the hell out of my fuzzy-diced, “give me one of everything that you can possibly add to a garment, please” proclivities. 

I asked for a third sleeve with holes for three cufflinks and the narrow thinking, unimaginative bastards at Sebastian Ward shut me down. Thank you.

And then there’s the story that if I did write it, I’d title it Miracle Mark. About my might as well be blood brother Mark Rykken and the fact that back when I was solvent, I had Puerto make an updated version of my favorite W. Bills brown houndstooth jacket.

Rykken and I are both getting a wee bit long in the tooth. I honestly could afford to gain eight to ten pounds; Rykken?

I had a bulletproof, go-to version of this baby that my sartorial daddy, Alan Flusser in concert with Rykken, made for me a zillion years ago. You can read all about that one here. And we did that one faithful to the old Brooks Brothers model…open patch breast, patch and flap side pockets, welt seams and my ADG 3/2 tweak. Just fuzzy enough, right? But times change, and gorge, button stance nuances, and other impertanalia redefine themselves. Redefinitions be damned because W.Bill was out of this houndstooth for several years. You couldn’t make, or remake one if you wanted to.

 But then a bolt miraculously emerged. So I transferred the old jacket to a faithful buyer who takes almost any and everything ADG bespoke off of my hands for win-win prices and put a down payment on the new one. And it took me a over year to finally get it finished. Both payment and fitting.

I've always had a thing for brown/tan houndstooth. Here I am in London twenty years ago with my other daddy R.E.B. Read more about him here. I'd just discovered the vintage clothing shop, Bertie Wooster in the Fulham Road earlier that day and pounced on the 3/2 peak number that I'm sporting for the photo opp.

Then a few years later, here's R.E.B. and me again. This time its October in Ponte Vedra and I'm to be married the next day. This houndstoothian version was wool and silk. I wore it to death. Alas.

Rykken didn't seem too chafed by my dilatory-essence. He offered that the jacket spawned a few additional sales when others gandered it. And after W.Bill ran out of the wool bolt, Rykken simply offered a one-hundred percent cashmere version to his more moneyed masses. 

And there’s the story that I never did on my friend Nick Hilton I titled Nick of Time. And it was going to be a good one too. About his kindness and renaissance man-ifestations and how his wife is as lovely as she is nice, too. Nick made a couple of jackets for me a zillion eons ago and I have things to say about them but also about his dad, Norman. And the mantle Nick bears and the Ralph connection and all of the other stuff that’s been rehashed along these lines. But not by me.

How could I not ideate on a story about my good friend Hetom at Sky Shoes? The Sky’s The Limit is the working title of that one. Hetom is a trained shoemaker who, given the right circumstances, could turn out bespoke shoes right here in D.C. He won’t do that for you but he is the go to oasis of shodding knowledge inside the Beltway and I don’t know why others don’t seek his counsel as often as I do. Crocket and Jones and Alden and other unique tasty goods are there for the having.

So the blue suede C&J bluchers don’t come with suede tassels? Not a problem. When your shoe supplier is also a shoemaker, he emails C&J and requests enough blue suede to make tassels and add them to my shoddings. Aftermarket fuzzy dice on demand. Bam!

Sky's new line of almost Belgians are off the hook.

And they are almost not as expensive as the NYC originals that I’m such a sycophant about. Shut.

SteinMart and Daddy Flusser would be in the queue for round two of Alan Flusser and MyMama or vice damn versa. Why? Because the Flusser goods at SteinMart continue to be tasty, fun and just fuzzy enough to have me pounce on them.

The nylon quilted goods this season are strong and at south of forty bucks, I now own three of these quilted vests.

The FlussMart collection, for the money, is the tastiest thing in the store.

I’d also tell you about Alan ringing my phone one morning. “I’m in a car, headed to Florence to do an appearance at your hometown SteinMart. What’s the name of that barbecue place that you always talk about? And your mom…” Alan asked about going to visit my mom. I demurred, knowing full-well that my hospital bed in the middle of the den, mama would be too embarrassed to receive strangers without me there. But I’ll never forget the gesture.

My baby’s too old for me to revel you with twee little stories about our daddy-daughter vacations and silly antics. But she’s still my baby and I’m so proud of her I could just bust. Burst? Whatever.

And last night she and her dance company sisters did an open house, pre-recital “let’s give the parents an update” kind of revue thing. 

She no longer a little ballerina prancing about on stage. She’s a serious dancer and she has chops.

She was just transitioning out of believing in Santa when I first shared her with you. Thirty-six months from now and, if the Lord tarries, LFG will be off to college.

Onward. 80-G-2

Turkey Miscellany—Conroy-Meermin-and Stein Mart Serpentining

*It’s Sunday morning December 1^st. I began this little ditty on Thanksgiving morn but never got around to finishing it. I’m back in Bethesda now and LFG is again with her mom so the deafening silence of my house is just perfect for completing such drivel. Many of you know that spellcheck is the best I do with these things—clean-up wise. But I did notice that I've overused the word “ass” in this story and I’m not inclined to change it. Sometimes words…even ones that debase, cheapen or accelerate a sentence…can’t be replaced and their redundancy is immutable. Shut up.

I’ve got stuff to say. More precise stuff. Stuff that with just a bit of editorial rigor would have you in syncopating tears of laughter and joy. But precision and editorial curettage ain’t gonna be part of this pile. Mainliest reason is that it’s Thanksgiving morning and at 913am all remains quiet in my childhood home and I don’t want to be precise and rigorous. Plus I’m a little gassy.

LFG is asleep in my sister’s childhood bedroom and my big-ole baby brother is in the room that circumstances dictated I had to share with his little late to the family party ass. I’ve yet to hear my mom stir but then again, she’s been keeping late hours these days. What with all the QVC and Food Network watching and her never miss Alec’s Jeopardy and what not. My mom…this not yet finished with life gal is busy these days.

Every Thanksgiving for the last forever…forever being probably the last three or four years…I’ve said “well, this is surely the last one that mom’s gonna be healthy enough to cook her formidable spread for us”. And now that time is upon us. Kinda. I sat at the kitchen table last night watching my mom convey bark in as strong a voice as she’s ever had, all of the intricacies and process steps involved in preparing her cornbread dressing and various other loved-by-all turkey day concoctications. And she was passing the cypher not to me but to my baby brother. He was doing the doing and I was doing the watching.

And then I remembered that this reaper reprieve my mom is amidst may be temporal so I asked her to recite to me the secret code for a few of my childhood faves from her kitchen oeuvre. I jotted as fast as she would recollect and she got predictably miffed when I asked her about measures and amounts. “I don’t know. Just taste it ‘till you like it.” That’s my mom. And probably yours too…unless you had one of those mamas that didn’t cook and if you did I feel real sorry for you.

I’m an emotional coward. I’ve long since reconciled it and after fifty-plus years, have actually come to own it. Owning is stronger than reconciling for you mugwumps who have nothing better to do than read blogs with some kind of copy editor ass attitude. Ok? Ok. So I’m sitting here in the living room this morning and there’s some kinda weird comfort about reading Conroy’s book in the house where similar sounds of conflict emanated and identical conditions of gastric twisted upness escalated as my father’s car came down the driveway—usually way too late for dinner.

And the later my dad’s arrival, the more strangulated my little belly became. The strength of his whiskey breath was indexed to the lateness of his arrival. So why the comfort? Even though Conroy found some reconciliation with his father—something I’ll never have—my dad was a f_cking saint compared to this sometimes monster Santini who lorded over Pat’s life.

I’ll never be able to explain the gut twist associated with not knowing which dad we would get when the door opened…a happy, mawkish dad with a buzz or a drunker, meaner man.  And the gut twist was an odd one. It wasn’t nausea. Nowhere near it actually. It was more of a “we better shut down your alimentary tract for the next three days as you haul ass across the savannah…zig-zag like...in an effort to outrun that big-ass cat.” Kind of a serpentine scurry while being shot at a la Peter Falk and Alan Arkin in The In-Laws… “serpentine, Shel, serpentine”.  I think I’ve landed on a working title for the childhood segment of my memoirs…No Time to Dooky. 

And finally, let me offer an apology to Pat Conroy—as if he’s sitting there yearning for one. I flippantly defined all of his non-novel caliber books as filler and place holders for the real things…his more robust word candy stuff that a zillion of us have come to love. I was wrong. After finishing The Death of Santini last night, I realized that the book is (hopefully for the tortured Conroy) a cathartic and necessary opus that’s anything but filler. My childhood and my life journey in general has been nirvana compared to the Conroy clan. Shut the f…

Once again I’ve managed to turn this little ditty into a maudlin pile of whateverishness. So let’s go superficial. And Meermin shoes are as good a place as any to launch my shallow vessel. The first pair that I ordered…$240.00 bucks all-in…represented a curious itch that I had to scratch and at that price I was willing to gamble. Double the price and it would be fair, almost necessary, to ask the proverbial…“yeah but what will they look like a year from now?” Well I can tell you that I’m wearing the hell out of suede pair number one and I’m sure that a year from now I’ll say that I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth.

So early last week I queued up for pair number two. This time I’m sampling the scotch grained monks avec the ersatz Dainite sole. At this rate/price, my Cleverley bespoke days might be over. But not till my bespoke carpincho bluchers arrive. Hold me.

And after next week…my last billable week for the year, I’ll write a comprehensive story about my maiden Paul Stuart bespoke voyage with my buddy Mark "Puerto" Rykken. I figured a navy blazer was a good place to start since I’ve never had one.

Ok. I lied. Hell, I took two of them to South Carolina for Thanksgiving. It’s the little black dress of man clothes. Shut.

While I was home I popped over to Stein Mart and the Flusser goods have gone from tasty to just damn showing-ass-off. Paisley corduroy GTH jackets and of course, no pixie sizes for fellas like me. They know their local chubby market.

 I figure that the half dozen GTH cord jackets at Stein Mart Florence…smallest in-stock size...44 Regular…will go to the four, type-2 diabetes totin’, barbecue eatin’ (not that there’s anything wrong with that) effeminate heterosexual guys in town and the other two…well.

My phone rang recently and it was the Fluss himself. En route to Florence and a book signing at Stein Mart. I was touched that he asked about going by and seeing my mama and I was even more delighted when he asked me to put him on a lunch spot fitting for a Buddhist non-kosher Jewish boy from Gotham. So I sent him to Rogers Barbecue. That’s the Great Flusstini with my best childhood buddy AWH.

The onliest Flusser thing available at Stein Mart in my size was a cashmere sweater. I pounced at fiddy-nine dollahs. Bam.

So let me close out this turgid wad of irreleventia with an update on the ADG Cracker Code. It looks like I barely made the cut. Not that my DNA is gonna be too hard to map (I DO want my report thang to come back with a profile that has me sorted out with DNA including some Neanderthal, a dose of Ashkenazi and some sliver of African in there too. I mean really...I'm already interesting to have at cocktail parties and cookouts but damn...If I can say with DNA evidence, that I'm one of the first families of earth with a smidge of Yiddish and a dash of Zulu, I'm gonna be hard to stop.) but it appears that the FDA has requested that 23andMe stop selling their tests. I’m sure they’ll get it all sorted out and in the meantime, here’s to hoping that the 23andMeMinions are hard at work unravelling my serpentinescent code.

Onward.

ADG-Two. Serpentining.