Illustration by Ryan Greis
I am looking good. I am looking better than I have ever looked in my life: New wingtips, freshly shined. Well-scrubbed mug, recently shaved and lightly patted with aftershave. Where I’m going, the men like aftershave. I learned this last night. Where I’m going, the men respect aftershave. Below my aftershaved mug, a brand-new white spread-collared, French-cuffed, Egyptian-cotton shirt, knotted with a creamy silk tie of bloody, positively carnivorous crimson. The neck that wears this tie is not weak or vulnerable. It is not indecisive or womanly. It is not gulping, though it wants to. No one can look upon this neck and suspect that it awaits the thin blade.
I have been scuttling through New York City, land of the wimp-eaters, so I wear armor. Not the shirt and the shoes and the tie. They are mere accessories.
The armor is a simple item, of fine worsted wool, exquisitely fitted, loosely draped. It is pearl gray, a shade so clearly masculine and unambiguously lupine that it defies anyone in this unforgiving metropolis to make me as a terrified and confused Midwesterner who bumped down at LaGuardia less than 24 hours ago and whose life is unraveling so fast that he has insomnia every night and stomach cramps every morning.
At the moment, my scuttling has temporarily ceased, and for the past four hours I have been looking good in the GQ offices in midtown Manhattan, where I have been summoned from half-a-continent away for a job interview. Here, I have been looking good, and I have been sounding good.
“Sure, the Big East is tough,” I proclaim to three likewise lupine-suited, lightly aftershaved men, “but anyone who isn’t picking at least one team from the Big 12 to make it to the Big Dance this year is going to be very surprised.”
I like the way this sounds, so I repeat the last two words: “Very surprised.”
I talk about different brands of vodka and the middle infield of the Yankees. I talk about Andre Agassi and Bridget Fonda. I talk about serial killers and Caleb Carr, Mario Cuomo and who serves the best steak in town. Man talk.
“We’re glad you could get up here on such short notice,” Art Cooper, the editor in chief, says. Actually, he rumbles. Art stands 6 feet tall, has the paunch of a Samoan chieftain and is famous in publishing circles for, among other things, his voice. One of his writers once described it as “having been soaked in jazz and whiskey”—which sounds almost nice, until that voice makes you want to curl into a ball and rock yourself into oblivion. Art is known around GQ as El Jefe, the Big Man and Himself. I have heard many descriptions of Art. “A big teddy bear” is one. “Brutal and sadistic” is another.
He’s glad I could come up here on such short notice?
“Me, too, Art,” I say. I like the way this sounds so I repeat it. “Me, too.”
Then he asks a question:
“Is this a downtime in your production cycle?”
My first test.
With all the sounding good and looking good, I haven’t gotten around to mentioning that two days earlier I was fired from my job as editor in chief of St. Louis Magazine. In the midst of all the vodka talk, I haven’t told the guys that I haven’t had a drink since a stint in rehab seven years earlier—or that I’ve been strongly considering a return to the bottle. With all the bonhomie and sports chatter, it hasn’t seemed like the right time to bring up the fact that the notion of living in New York City, of working here, fills me with a terror so black and fathomless that my hands have broken out in blisters and that the skin on my fingers has completely peeled away, which has prompted my wisecracking dermatologist back home to suggest that
I forget magazines and pursue a career in safecracking.
I finger the rich and luxuriant lapels of my pearl-gray suit with my whorl-less digits. I haven’t looked at the suit since this morning, in the smoky mirrors and dim light of the Royalton Hotel, where GQ has put me up. It is the smallest, darkest hotel room I’ve ever set foot in. The velvety worsted wool offers no answers. I’ll stick with sounding good.
“St. Louis Magazine is always on deadline,” I say—words that wouldn’t offend a gentle and house-trained grizzly or Genghis Khan. “It’s just something magazine editors get used to.”
“Heh, heh, heh,” Art says to me, and to the other lupine-suited editors. “I like this kid. I want to know more about this kid.”
Heh, heh, heh? Are those the baritone rumblings of a friendly, shaggy pet or the menacing growls of a ravenous beast? Art seems like a nice guy. I have heard that if Art likes you, GQ is the best place in the world to work—but if he senses weaknesses, or fear, the story goes, you’re as the titmouse to the hungry ferret. Himself, the story goes, can’t stand weakness or fear. I look at Art and I think of the Man-Thing, the comic-book hero whose adventures I followed with monklike devotion before my daily marijuana addiction progressed to cocaine and downers and alcohol, at which point I stopped following anything with monklike devotion. The Man-Thing was teddy-bearish, too, and kind, and gentle. The Man-Thing, like Art, had a nuanced reputation. The Man-Thing possessed a preternaturally developed sense of empathy and could feel if you were happy, or sad, or confused, and if that happened he would try—in his Man-Thing–ish, preverbal, giant green slimy way—to help you. To know more about you. Heh, heh, heh. The only trouble occurred if—or, more likely, when—the Man-Thing sensed that you were afraid, because, as the cover of every Man-Thing comic book ever published promised, “Whatever Knows Fear, Burns at the Touch of the Man-Thing!!!” The problem was, the Man-Thing was 9 feet tall, oozing brownish-green ichor, with three penile probosci protruding from his/its head, so it was kind of hard not to be afraid—which made for some complicated and unpleasant situations involving mixed signals, bruised feelings and seared flesh.
I stroke my lapels, try to keep the quake out of my voice.
“Heh,” I say to Art and the guys.
“Heh, heh.”
“Marty, take this kid to lunch,” Art booms. Marty Beiser is the managing editor, the number-two man, as quiet and steady as Art is bombastic and volcanic. “I want you to get to know this kid.”
I may be paranoid, but I’m not stupid. Marty reports to Art. Art will decide my fate. Getting to know me is the last thing I want Marty to do.
So, as we stroll through the cloud-covered canyons of Manhattan toward Marty’s favorite Indian restaurant, I riff on the genius of Whitey Herzog. Over chicken vindaloo and naan bread, I expound on the glories of Elmore Leonard’s Westerns and Jim Thompson’s neglected masterpieces. Sports and crime are very manly. Consequently, I continue to sound good.
I make sure to tell Marty that I play basketball five times a week, that my girlfriend back home is a college professor. An active lifestyle and a successful sweetheart are necessary and much-admired accoutrements of the GQ man, I learned in my dim hotel room last night, as essential as quirky cufflinks (which I’m wearing, naturally; Big Boy, holding a hamburger, is emblazoned on their shiny metal surfaces).
But let Marty get to know me? I think not.
I don’t mention that I am so well-versed in GQ’s manners and mores because I spent seven hours the night before, squinting through the gloom of my dim and glamorous hotel room, at the year’s worth of magazines I had borrowed from my girlfriend; I had never read the magazine before because most people in Missouri think GQ is only for homosexual men and I don’t want anyone at the newsstand to get the wrong idea. None of that sounds good.
I don’t mention that, for the year she has been buying me magazines, I have been cheating on the professor with her favorite graduate student. I don’t mention that the advertising executive who told the GQ editors about me is the former boyfriend of a low-level publicist I slept with when she was living with him, or that at approximately the same time I also slept with that woman’s boss, a high-level publicist, or that when the low-level publicist discovered my love letter to the high-level publicist, she accused me of being an “amoral creep,” which I found disturbingly accurate even as I was admiring the low-level publicist’s way with words. I don’t mention that sexual misconduct has been part and parcel of my journalistic life and has sped my professional trajectory over the years while, I suspect, hastening a descent into whatever hell is reserved for philandering and deceitful and stomachache-plagued, insomnia-suffering would-be writers with no fingerprints.
After lunch, we emerge into a blinding spring midday. The sun has drenched the island of Manhattan in vernal glory, and, to my relief, I’m still looking good. Looking good, having just sounded very good indeed. Remarkably, not even feeling so bad. I touch my lapels again. Not out of need. From strength. I glance down at my suit.
What I see makes me dizzy. I squeeze my eyes shut momentarily. Jet lag? Doubtful. It’s less than a two-hour flight from St. Louis. Bad chicken vindaloo? No, it’s only been five minutes. A trick of the light? I look again, and my bowels do a rumba. My pearl-gray suit isn’t pearl gray. What had looked so fashionably predatory in the Dillard’s at the Galleria and in the dim smoky mirror of the Royalton and in the fluorescent lights of the GQ offices and in the cloudy spring morning is now something else.
My suit is lime green.
Marty is saying something, but I’m not listening. How can I listen? I’m wearing a clown suit!
Midtown Manhattan at lunchtime is filled with suits: Black suits. Charcoal suits. A few brown suits, because the effects of the Reagan years still linger. I scan desperately, trying to find another suit the color of mine. I can’t be the only one wearing such a hideous, heinous hue. Can I? Is it possible that the department store in my hometown is so absurdly backward, so absolutely out of touch that it’s pushing suits that no man in midtown Manhattan would be caught dead in? I look, and I look, as Marty continues to prattle on about whatever he’s prattling on about. Sports? Crime? Spread collars? Who cares!
Blue, black, gray, black, black, blue, gray. An optimist in khaki. But no lime green. Not a single lime green, not a single ... wait! A flash in the corner of my eye. I turn. And there, luminous salvation! Another lime-green suit, approaching from the side. The color is unmistakable. Never has a shade made a man more grateful. I want to throw my arms around the other man in the lime-green suit, to touch lapels. I want to smell his aftershave. And I will, as soon as I get a better look at this natty, courageous peacock.
Then I get a better look. He’s fat. He’s fat, and he’s short, and he’s sweating. Flop sweat. He looks like he just got off the Greyhound from Des Moines. That’s what I’m thinking. Me, a Missourian in Manhattan for less than 24 hours, and already I despise men from Iowa. He’s 5-foot-6, a short, fat, sweaty man from Iowa, and I hate him. I don’t want to share the same city block with him. He’s Wimpy from Popeye. He’s a joke. He’s bald, too. And he’s looking at me. I recognize the look. It’s pitiful and beseeching. The fat, bald loser is looking to me for reassurance. I bolt.
“Steve!” Marty cries, and I feel him grab my arm. I can’t believe he’s touched the lime-green suit. Is he colorblind? (I always meant to ask him that but never did.) “Are you OK?”
In my haste to escape the corn-fed village idiot, I have lurched into the street and almost been run down by midtown traffic.
“Oh yeah, sure, Marty, I’m OK. I’m OK.”
I think I repeat this a few too many times, because Marty squints at me with something like concern. Or fear. Or confusion. I think I’m hyperventilating. I am not looking good.
For the next three blocks, I try to focus on what Marty is saying, to pretend that my suit isn’t the same color as the highlighter favored by 11-year-old girls who scribble trembly hearts atop their small i’s.
But I can’t shake the feeling that people are staring at me: Behold the rube. Gaze upon the Midwestern dope. Get a gander at the guy who thought he was looking good, only to have his true iridescent and idiotic self, his indecisive and self-deluded and womanly self, emerge in the light of day.
“Steve?” Marty says. “Steve?”
“Uh, yeah,” I say. I haven’t heard anything he’s said for the past half block.
“Why don’t I take you back to the office now, and you and Art can have a sit-down.”
Art? El Jefe? The editor who can smell weakness five miles away? The publishing legend who, like the Man-Thing, senses fear and can’t help himself—is compelled to dispatch mewling cowards like me to their gruesome, fiery deaths?
“Uh, sure,” I say. “Heh.” I pray that the fluorescent lights at GQ are as dim as I remember them.
I command myself to stop worrying so much. I tell myself it’s a pleasant day. I silently repeat this phrase to myself: It is a pleasant day! I tell myself some other things, too, strings of words the psychiatrist from the rehab center encouraged me to call upon in times of fear, or self-loathing, or despair, I am my own worst enemy being one. Things aren’t so bad being another. This, too, shall pass being yet another.
So I walk down the street, muttering to myself. It is a pleasant day. I am my own worst enemy. Things aren’t so bad. This, too, shall pass.
And they work. Maybe my suit’s not so bad. After all, I’m the only one—and maybe the fat guy from Iowa—who knows what a shame-filled, secret-hoarding fraud I really am. I need to get over myself.
Then I hear laughter. Too much laughter. What could throngs of New Yorkers in the middle of midtown be laughing at? I don’t know a lot about this city, but I know that spontaneous eruptions of glee are most likely to occur in the company of a fellow city dweller’s suffering and humiliation. The thought cheers me. I could use a little glee. After the past few minutes, I deserve a little glee. My self-soothing mantras are okay, but I crave some human distraction. Where is the poor dope?
It’s difficult to see anything but laughing faces. Laughing faces attached to suits of many dark shades. And some dresses. I look around and it seems to me that the laughing faces are looking in my direction. They are looking straight at me. This is impossible, of course. But it doesn’t feel impossible. It feels more and more possible.
I will not look down at my lime-green suit. I will not look down at my lime-green suit. I will not look down at my lime-green suit.
It is a pleasant day. I am my own worst enemy. Things aren’t so bad. This, too, shall pass. It is a pleasant day. I am my own worst enemy. Things aren’t so bad. This, too,
shall pass.
“Don’t look now,” Marty says, “but I think we’ve got company.”
That’s when I see the mime, walking next to us. Let me be more accurate: walking next to me. Taking long, loping strides. Like me. Holding his head a little bit stiffer than is absolutely necessary, like me. (I’m holding my head like that so I won’t be able to behold the limeness of myself.) Moving his lips nervously as he silently mouths words and knitting his forehead into a comical knot, like me.
I hadn’t realized I’d been muttering to myself. I stop the mantras, try to relax my face. The mime’s face goes blank. I slow down, try to appear less panicked than I feel. The mime slows down, too. Much hilarity from the crowd, more peals of laughter. I turn to him with pleading in my eyes. He turns to the crowd with the same expression. A baby seal begging Mr. Hunter please not to do it, not the club. I have never heard such laughter. Even Marty is laughing now. Why did I ever leave Missouri? I will propose to the professor as soon as I land back in St. Louis. I want a drink. I really, really want a drink.
This, too, shall pass. This, too, shall pass. This, too, shall pass. Have I ever heard such laughter? THIS, TOO, SHALL PASS! Only 40 feet ’til the curb, ’til we turn the corner outside the mime’s territory and away from the laughing New Yorkers. I ignore him. I ignore the laughter. I ignore everything. This, too, shall pass. The mime stays with us.
And then we’re turning toward safety and I take one last look at the mime, peer once more into the face of savagery—and then something surreal happens, something that’s never supposed to happen.
The mime speaks. The mime speaks!
And this is what the mime says. This is what the mime says as I, a man whose uniform has failed him, whose many uniforms will continue to fail him, yet who will wear any disguise—any—to avoid standing naked before the world, listen. This is what the mime says as I step off the curb and toward my future in New York City as a desperate, conniving, poorly camouflaged impostor.
This is what the mime says. He says it out of the corner of his mouth, to me:
The mime says, “Nice suit.”
