This is what David Sedaris says about them, from Buddy Can You Spare a Tie?
My most recent mistake was born the weekend of my brother’s wedding, when my father convinced me to wear one of his bow ties. “Come on,” he said. “Live a little!” When worn with a tuxedo, a bow tie makes a certain kind of sense, but I wasn’t sure that I trusted it on its own. The model my father chose was red-and-white-striped, the size of a luna moth, and as he advanced I backed toward the door.
“It’s just a strip of cloth,” he said. “No different from a regular tie. Who the hell cares if it falls straight or swags from side to side?” My inner hobo begged me not to do it, but I foolishly caved in, thinking it couldn’t hurt to make him happy. Then again, maybe I was just tired and wanted to get through the evening saying as little as possible. The thing about a bow tie is that it does a lot of the talking for you. “Hey!” it shouts. “Look over here! I’m friendly, I’m interesting!” At least that’s what I thought it was saying. The bow tie left me feeling uncharacteristically breezy, and by the end of the evening I was thanking my father for his recommendation. “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “A guy like you was made for a bow tie.”
A month after the wedding, while preparing for a monthlong cross-country trip, I bought a bow tie of my own and discovered that it said different things to different people. This one was dark-blue paisley, and while a woman in Columbus thought it made me look scholarly, her neighbor in Cleveland suggested I might be happy selling popcorn. “Like what’s his name,” she said. “The dead guy.”
“Paul Newman is dead?”
“No,” she said. “That other one. Orville Redenbacher.”
Name association was big, as were my presumed interests in show business and politics. In St. Louis, the bow tie was characterized as “very Charlie McCarthy,” while in Chicago a young man defined it as “the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.” This sent the bow tie back into my suitcase, where it begged forgiveness, evoking the names of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Senator Paul Simon. “Oh, come on,” it said. “They’re Democrats. Please let me out.”
Political affiliation aside, I know what the young man meant. It’s a pretty sorry world when wearing a bow tie amounts to being “out there.” I’m just not sure which is worse, the people who consider it out there that someone’s wearing a bow tie, or the person who thinks he’s out there for wearing it.
I wore my bow tie to seventeen cities, and in each of them I found myself begging for affirmation. “Do you really think it looks okay? Really?” I simply could not tell whether it was right for me. Alone in an elevator, I’d have moments of clarity, but just as I reached for the knot, I’d recall some compliment forced from a stranger. “Oh, but it looks so adorable, so cute! I just want to take you home!”
I’m told by my father that when I was an infant, people would peek into my stroller and turn to my mother, saying, “Goodness, what a . . . baby.” I’ve never been described as cute, so why this sudden, strange outpouring of affection? What was the bow tie saying behind my back? And how could I put it in contact with twenty-year-old marines rather than sixty-year-old women?
It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look, he set down his fork and stared at me for a few moments, saying, “A bow tie announces to the world that you can no longer get an erection.” And that is exactly what a bow tie says. Not that you’re powerless but that you’re impotent. People offer to take you home not because you’re sexy but because you’re sexless, a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle. This doesn’t mean that the bow tie is necessarily wrong for me, just that it’s a bit premature. When I explained this to my father, he said that I had no personality whatsoever. “You’re a lump.”
He sees the bow tie, at least in my case, as a bright string wrapped around a run-of-the-mill gift. On opening the package, though, the receiver is bound to be disappointed, so why set yourself up? It’s a question my father answers in the pained, repetitive voice of a parole officer. According to him, you set yourself up in order to exceed those expectations. “You dress to give 100 percent, and then you give 120. Jesus,” he says, “you’re a grown man. Haven’t we been through this?”
As I had years earlier with Chuck, I offered my Halloween defense, claiming it was my destiny to dress like a hobo.
“Aw, baloney,” my father said, adding that if personal style were determined in early childhood, we’d all be wearing diapers and rubber pants. He was being sarcastic, yet, still, I felt that unmistakable surge of enthusiasm announcing the twin births of experimentation and trouble.
It was originally published in Esquire but is now a chapter in _When You are Engulfed in Flames.__
