As promised, here’s the bonus essay for my darlings on the bi-monthly newsletter list by the same name as this site. If you’re not on the list and you’d like to be, drop me a line at:
bigwordsmailbag@yahoo.com
I’m very disturbed about having the site moved but I have to say that wordpress is much more user friendly. If I can get off my ass, I’ll do my best in the coming weeks to post more pictures and audio from recent events, appearances and promotions. In the mean time, here’s ‘Pat Bateman Dressed Down’, a sartorial meditation on my complete and utter lack of style. If you’re here, please go out of your way to tell a few friends to visit and kindly leave a comment post if and when you have the time. I give a lot of material away for free and your two cents makes it all worthwhile. Have a wonderful weekend,
Tom Waters
Pat Bateman Dressed Down
I hate to break this to you, but clothes have nothing to do with making the man. It’s got more to do with a coital omelet your parents prepared somewhere in the vicinity of nine months before your birth than what you drape and zipper over your body in the morning. My fashion sense has become deplorable. Einstein with his four or five identical suits had more flair and panache than I do. For god’s sakes, Bobcat Goldthwait with his straw cowboy hat and awful, kitschy t-shirts has more flair and panache than I do. I just don’t care anymore. It’s not a part of my life that I invest any time, thought or money into at all. It doesn’t matter. I’ve got no one to impress and nothing to prove. Eighty percent of my wardrobe consists of shirts and pants I bought during back to school trips with my mom’s credit card when I was in high school and half of that should be thrown out or donated to Good Will for the tax write-off. The other twenty percent are a sad, strange amalgam of free vendor t-shirts I’ve gotten from work and the occasional poorly informed purchase I’ve gotten over the years. I could really stand to buy more underwear, but I guess that’s a guy thing.
I have four pairs of boxer shorts that I’m very attached to and I’ll end up wearing those until they biodegrade off of my body or someone buys me more, whichever comes first. I stopped wearing tighty whities two or three years ago at a girlfriend’s insistence that they weren’t sexy (she was right) and never looked back. There’s a freedom and a looseness to boxers that the constriction of briefs can’t top. The only downside is that boxers are medically proven to make you more fertile, but I get around that by bashing my genitals with a nutcracker once a morning just in case. I went through a brief (no pun whatsoever intended) transitional phase where I wore boxer briefs but that ended when the two or three pairs I owned degenerated into the fabric equivalent of swiss cheese. I was walking around in tattered, hole-ridden stripes, clinging to the dream that they were serviceable pieces of underwear. Guys really are awful when it comes to underwear. We’re too lazy to buy new pairs and too old for our mommies to buy them as gifts. It’s ironic that when you’re old enough to appreciate getting socks and underwear for Christmas, you no longer get them.
If I can avoid wearing socks, I do. I can’t stand them. I’m a textbook scorpio, and I don’t like anything constricting around my extremities, those being my wrists or my ankles. Unless I’m getting paid at work or the snow is so high that it tumbles into my shoes, I don’t wear socks. When I have to wear them, I stick with Gold Toe brand socks. They’re soft, short, and semi-comfortable. And that is not a product placement. Gold Toe did not pay me to approve or endorse their product. Okay, I’m lying. This essay is brought to you by the surprising comfort and stability of Gold Toe socks! Buy them for the big, stupid gold patch at the end of your toes, keep them for the maneuverability. My feet need some space to breath, which makes my shoes and sneakers stink to high heaven. I have one pair of black Converse All Stars, one pair of tan casual shoes, one pair of black work shoes I bought from Pay Less, and one really weathered pair of ’smoking shoes’. My last pair of Converse All Stars lasted five years, which was three years longer than they should have. They really stunk. Depending on my diet, my shoes can really smell in the summer, and baking soda only delays the stench for a brief time. One year during a sleepover at a friend’s house, my friend’s parents snuck out into the living room while we were sleeping and went on a guerrilla mission to put foot powder into my sneakers. That’s how bad the odors my feet throw off can get. My feet are sweaty, smelly and hideous. I have taken to using a pummis stone on them in the bath tub, though.
I wear my black work shoes until the same front spot in the treads tears, wears down, or springs a hole and then I walk across the plaza during work and buy a new pair for twenty bucks. The last pair split down the middle on the bottom before I noticed that they were no longer serviceable. I used to spend sixty dollars and up on work shoes but they lasted three months at best, so I started getting Frankenstein monster kicks from Pay Less. They look like black clog shoes for a science experiment, but they’re comfortable. Are you noticing a theme here? Guys only care about comfort and affordability. The smoking shoes got started when I lived at home and had to go outside every time I wanted to have a cigarette. Now I’m in the habit of keeping my old casual shoes so I can slip them on to take out the garbage or go outside for brief periods to grab something from my car or sit outside and have a smoke. ’Nuff said about that.
I never used to wear jeans but at some point I flip-flopped on the issue. I wore more corduroys in high school than jeans and then during college my friend Lindsay told me I had a great ass for a guy so I wore them more often. Now they’re like a uniform on my days off. I usually keep two pairs on deck and the right knee always tears, wears out, or rips in dramatic fashion when I ’take a knee’ to grab something on the ground. I still have three pairs of black, whitewashed, button fly Guess jeans that I bought from my friend Scotty for ten bucks. When was the last time anybody mentioned Guess jeans, eh? The same friend Lindsay still makes fun of them for being ‘tapered’, whatever the hell that means. Jeans are all purpose. They’re good for heavy work indoors or out (neither of which I ever engage in), they come in handy in a pinch when you want to make a quick errand run and you’d rather not be naked, and it’s easy to wear the same pair five times in a week without noticing. I even wear jean shorts in the summer. Five minutes after I get home from work, I throw a pair of jeans on. My neighbors in the apartment building must think it’s all I own because that’s all they see me shambling around in, and they wouldn’t be too far off for thinking that.
The other end of my day off uniform are my black vendor t-shirts. I have a full row of free black t-shirts I’ve gotten from the film and video game industry over the years. I’ve got four really comfortable Namco shirts: two ‘Dead To Rights’ shirts and two ‘Kill Switch’ shirts. I stopped playing those games five years ago, but the replayability on the shirts just keeps on trucking. Capcom makes some really nice shirts, too, so I have an entire line of Resident Evil shirts with artistic smears of blood, leering zombies and bleeding dogs that I wear out in public. I still have three ’Mission Impossible’ t-shirts from the first movie with the Apple logo on the front and an ’Expect The Impossible’ tag line. I’m a walking advertisement in tackiness.
Half the clothes in my closet don’t even fit me any more, and I’m hanging on to them and keeping the dream alive in desperate attempt to convince myself that I might be a 32 waist or a large shirt at some point again in my life. I’ve got button down shirts that weren’t in style when I bought them, missing buttons with holes in the front pockets that I can’t bear to get rid of. It’s probably a psychological issue at this juncture. Or pure laziness. I have six sweaters even though I hate wearing sweaters (too staticky), and I went through a short sweater vest phase that I abandoned for short sleeve shirts. I embrace the short sleeve! Short sleeve button downs are great for throwing over a t-shirt to conceal girth, they’re good for work because they don’t get in the way, and on the odd occasion when I wear long sleeve button down shirts, I roll them up to the elbow anyway.
I’ve got four coats. Three of them should be in a garbage can and the other one is a lime green barn coat that’s good for the spring but I won’t wear it because it looks like a sail on my body. I feel like David Byrne in the ’Stop Making Sense’ Big Suit with that goddamned coat. The other coat is a black leather jacket I bought on sale after Christmas in 1997. That was nine years ago. The inside pocket is corroded to the point that it’s a loose flap on the inside of the coat and the zipper broke off on the front of it two years ago. The leather has hardened into a rigid, non-malleable starchy affair that won’t move without a sledgehammer or a rolling pin. My winter coat is a charcoal trench that my big brother handed down to me five years ago. All the pockets are shot, but it’s an expensive coat even if it is old and I look damned good wearing it as long as I keep my arms flat to my sides. The arms are too short for my gawky height, so if I move them so much as a millimeter half of my forearms pop out and I look like a fat guy in a little coat, to coin a Chris Farley phrase. I have one suit coat that I save for weddings and formal occasions. I guess that’s one thing I would like to buy is a three piece suit. At my age, I believe I should have one by now.
Hats are the only articles of clothing that I put any thought or time into. I have a lot of hats by any standard, and most of them are baseball caps. I’m proud of my hats. I’ve got a batman logo hat, a Jack Astor’s hat that was given to me during one of my book promotion stop offs, a Hennessey’s Irish Pub hat that I talked the bartender into giving me that I cherish since the bar closed down and it remains my favorite pub of all time, an N-Gage hat that I got for free at work (with an ‘anytime, anywhere’ tag line), a Don’s Atomic Comics hat with the atom bomb logo on the front, and a handful of other caps and fedoras. Since I sometimes go eight to ten weeks between hair cuts, they come in handy on days off when I don’t feel like slopping gel into my hair so that I don’t look like a mad scientist when I leave the house.
While I’m on the subject of clothing, Tommy Hilfiger and his entire clothing line can take a flying fuck off a short pier. The same goes for Baby Phat, P Diddy and all the other celebrity-turned-fashion-designers-for-young-white punks-who-listen-to-urban-gangster-rap-and-think-they’re-thug-because-they-spend-hundreds-of-dollars-on-clothing-designed-to-take-their-money-because-they-have-no brains-and-no-core-identity. White kids who listen to gangster rap need a back handed pimp slap in the face. You’re not fooling anyone and you’re not Eminem, so give it up and dress like a person. Wife Beater white t-shirts are not acceptable for wear in public and they don’t make your pale, bony girl arms look any bigger, you sad Vanilla Ice wannabe. You’re not black, you’re not from the street, so stop trying. I’ve got nothing against the culture, but don’t try to be something you’re not.
And I can’t stand sweat pants. Sweat pants are outlawed in my home, and I’ve banned my girlfriend from wearing them around me. Women think sweat pants are ’fun’ to wear around the house because they can relax in them and they’re ’cozy’. Sweat pants are not attractive and they’re not acceptable to go grocery shopping in, ladies. I explained to my girlfriend that when a women starts wearing sweat pants, it’s the tip of the iceberg. It’s a sign that she’s given up on looking attractive and pretty soon their ass grows into the sweat pants and before you know it, they’re not wearing makeup in public anymore. Maybe that’s sexist, but deal with it. I’ve been in a relationship for two years and I still groom once or twice a day and make a hollow attempt to keep my weight down, so the least she can do is keep the sweat pants in the drawer. Sexy sweat pants aren’t allowed either. Even if the ass is embossed with ’Juicy’ or some other rubbish, they’re still sweat pants and unless you’re Carmen Electra or a high school lacrosse team, you don’t look hot wearing them.
When you get older (unless you’re a rock star, a fashion model, or a talk show host), the latest styles and trends don’t matter to guys. When I read GQ or Esquire, I either skip the fashion spreads altogether or glimpse briefly and think ‘Look at that frigging nancy boy in his tweed vest!’ and skip to the next article. I’ve got more important things to spend my money on than new clothes and more important things to think about than how my ensemble with reflect who I am. If you can’t look past the person and find out who they are, then you’re not worth knowing. My ‘Kill Switch’ shirt still has a five year Renessaince to enjoy before it disintegrates along with my latest round of boxer shorts.
Black is the new black,
Tom ‘dungaree’ Waters
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