I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [24]
“Yes, I’ve been wearing these pants since I was fourteen.”
And you never grew? You know, I throw out my clothes when they look like that.
Goddamnit, when I wore this kind of stuff, people felt sorry for me or made fun of me. Now it’s all the rage, and I am wearing clothes that are ironed and pressed and as neat as they can look on a slouch like me. How is it possible that I am always, always, out of sync with the times? How did I end up living in the crack, which is on the corner between now and then?
I used to just put on whatever was clean—or cleanish—but today is Christmas and my friends are cooking major dinner extravaganzas, so I need to get my act together. I know I can be a prick—yeah, I know myself really well, don’t I?—but I would like to honor their day of celebration and all of the hard work they’ve put into keeping my tummy full by looking like I have spent the time putting together just the right ensemble for such an occasion. (Yes, that’s right, ensemble. I can’t believe I just used that word in a sentence. What has happened to me?) Dressing myself, which used to be so easy, has now become a painstaking operation. As I’ve grown older, my wardrobe has increased exponentially, and I can’t figure out why or how. It’s like the clothes have been mating in the dark closet and when I open the door there are dozens more pieces of clothing in it. It’s like a cave full of randy bats or something.
I used to make fun of people who loved their clothes. Now I am addicted to clothing. How do you slowly but imperceptibly become someone you used to make fun of? It’s pathetic.
When did clothing become important to me? Is it because I now believe that clothes do make the man? What a crock of shit. Clothes don’t make anybody. The world overflows with guys who wear really nice clothes and are dicks! You know who they are. They’re all around you. At work. At school. The heads that appear on the TV screen and talk to you.
When you see them—and they are every-fucking-where—you realize that a lot of the time, the nicer the clothing, the bigger the asshole.
Maybe what I wear has become more crucial to me these days because I spend a lot of my life in front of people. The more I appeared onstage, the more I became conscious of how I was presenting myself to the public. Even when I had very little money, I started to dress up more for the stage, wearing suits or sport coats with ties. I took this fashion tip from watching idiots utter all sorts of idiotic nonsense, but somehow it was deemed acceptable because they were wearing a tie. I figured if I dressed nicer than the audience, it would calm them down and make it easier for them to handle the shit coming out of my mouth.
“Wow, he’s a pig, but he can’t be that disgusting, he’s wearing a tie—and a very nice one at that,” you might think. “He must know what he’s doing . . . he can tie a tie.”
If I were at a Clothing Anonymous meeting, I would say that my addiction began when I started playing comedy clubs. I was playing a club for five or six days with nothing to do before I had to go onstage. Now, those new employment opportunities gave me the time and the money to go shopping, something I rarely had done till that point. I spent a good chunk of the years I could have spent searching for my soul mate looking for bargains in Macy’s or Filene’s Basement, back when there was still a real Filene’s basement in downtown Boston. This may have been where I got hooked on cotton and wool, but maybe that’s part of another chapter I could write, “Addictions I Have Known and Walked Around In.”
Filene’s Basement was a massive space below the Filene’s department store. It was a cathedral of inexpensive clothing, and it was where bargain hunters came to worship. There were bins and racks of clothing as far as the