I'm Looking to See if I have a Look (Cigar Smoke 5-6-10)

I bet you didn’t know I was a fashion plate. Well, you would have won that bet. But, you know, I don’t even want to be a fashion plate. I really don’t. But I would like to have a look.

Most of my friends have a certain look to them. And it seems to fit them quite well. One guy I know lives out on a ranch, and he looks like a damn rancher kind of guy. Jeans, Western shirts, belts with buckles bigger than bull genitals and stallion-dung-encrusted boots. This guy looks the part. Jesse James would walk on the other side of the sidewalk if he saw him coming.

Another guy I know has a great, what I call urban casual look. He just looks so damn comfortable in his soft leather moccasins and cuddly corduroy pants and flannel shirts. I want to hug the guy. But I’m afraid I would become gay and have to spend all my time lobbying for same-sex marriage, so I don’t. Instead, I just tell him he looks like Pat Boone, only he looks older and poorer and uglier than Pat.

Another friend has an earthy look to him. His clothes are all in shades of brown and beige and green and burnt orange and pomegranate pumpkin. He just blends right into the damn planet. Sometimes I’m not even sure if he is really there. I’ll have to say, “Hey, Eggplant Lips, you here? Has your biodegradable ass blended into the moist, black, organic sod yet?”

Even when I was going to school up at Humboldt State College in Northern California, I never quite fit in. My look just didn’t work. All the guys looked like damn lumberjacks or outdoorsmen. They had these big, black caulked boots that would make a Hell’s Angel sob into his pillow, and they all wore wide-ass suspenders over Pendleton shirts. They had a damn look! They looked like they were ready to fell a Redwood or punch an elk in the face and skin it right there.

Me? I didn’t skin too many elk, because the elk blood and elk guts would get on my polyester pants. Yes, I’ve always liked polyester. What can I say? When I was born, the doctor told my mother, “Ma'am, you have the first baby we’ve ever delivered who is not naked. Too bad he is wearing polyester.”

I don’t think my mom ever got over that. In fact, when she breastfed me, I remember reaching up with my eager lips, searching for her tender breast, and she would turn me away and say, “Polly, my breasts are on my back.” Oh, the trauma of being called a girl’s name and searching for the breasts that weren’t there. I only got over it 37 years later when I heard Johnny Cash sing “A Boy Named Sue.”

You know, I kid about polyester. But I have always liked it. I’m not sure why. I think it’s because it never needs ironing. It’s cheap. And it’s easy to wipe mustard and spittle from it. And you know, come to think of it, I may have always had a look after all. Here I have been bitching and crying about everybody else having their own damn look and all the time I have had a look, too. I was just too envious of others not to have seen it.

And my look is more than just polyester, too. It has a lot of other, shall we say, accessories to it. Yes, I have inadvertently accessorized without even knowing what accessorizing is or does. I also like to wear SC T-shirts. Or Dodger T-shirts. Or LA Kings T-shirts for variety. They seem to go well with polyester.

And all my T-shirts end up with holes in them. Cigar-ash holes. (Stop. Don’t say it. You wouldn’t be the first one to call me a Cigar Ash Hole.) I don’t try to put holes in them. They just seem to mysteriously appear after I’ve been driving and smoking, and after I smell something burning.

I also wear a navy blue jacket that used to be a nice jacket. Sixteen years ago. Yes, it’s 16 years old, but it goes well with my T-shirts, and it’s made out of some kind of synthetic material, too, so my polyester pants don’t get their panties in a bunch, either. Polyester, sports tees, synthetic jacket. It’s starting to come together, isn’t it?

All you would need now is some really nice shoes. Kind of a shame I don’t have any. I wear black Rockford old-man shoes with orthotics in them. What’s that sound I hear? Could it be the pounding hearts of you lady readers out there? Thump. Thump. Thump.

All this fashion talk reminds of when I was younger, and I hate to say it, but I will. I looked pretty damn good in my leisure suit back then. It had pale blue polyester bellbottom trousers with a Nehru kind of button-less jacket. And a puffy shirt that would have given Jerry Seinfeld a woody. I mean, I looked pretty damn good. Really good. John Travolta walked by and fainted.

Thump. Thump. Thump.