Two weeks ago I mentioned my favorite T-shirt. Last week I wrote about a sport jacket. Obviously I’m getting low on material and am reduced to ransacking the closet for column topics. Skipping over my old French Club sweater and Bullwinkle baseball cap, I guess I should say something about my thing for neckties. Of which I have 44 coat hangers full.
But first, let me explain that I’m no Imelda Marcos. She’s the widow of that former Philippine president who was known in the ’90s for his extravagant lifestyle. They say that Mrs. Marcos has owned more than 2,700 pairs of shoes. That’s more than 5,000 individual shoes, which is why every morning it takes her three days to decide which pair to wear. She’s so far behind that yesterday she picked out some ballerina flats to go shopping in August of 1992.
Compared to Imelda then, at only 569 neckties, I clearly do not have a problem.
It all started the first year in high school. I was trying to figure out my own sense of style, how I wanted to present myself. Since I had stopped channeling the Count, and since my Pee Wee Herman phase in 1985 had been mercifully brief, I was still searching for an identity.
I found it at a flea market in Decatur, Ga. Dad and I were out on our weekly yard sale hunt, and in the back of this dark junk shop, I stumbled onto my destiny. There, on a rusty coat-hanger next to some old overalls, was the tie. It was wide. It was fallow brown. It had a gaudy repeating pattern of the Atlanta skyline on it. My memory may be playing tricks on me, but I’m almost certain there was a beam of sunlight coming through a broken window pane in the flea market, shining right down on this polyester beauty.
I wore it to Rockdale County High School the next Friday, and the New Clax was born. The tie was just tacky enough to stand out among all the Reeboks and Members-Only jackets, and it brought me exactly what every 14-year-old boy needs. No, it wasn’t deodorant. It was attention. Stares, giggles — even heckling. It didn’t matter. It was still attention. By the following Friday, I had found another obnoxious tie. Soon my collection was snowballing.
It got to the point that in the next four years of Fridays, I never wore the same tie twice.
I was mostly drawn to the classics, especially those loud silk ties of the 1940s. I idolized Harry Anderson — the magician-turned-judge on the TV sitcom “Night Court,” who wore fedoras, tweed sport coats and vintage ties with hand-painted palm trees. Who knew that years later I would meet the man himself and even own one of the ties he actually wore on TV. I’ll bet Imelda Marcos never wore any celebrity pumps. But I digress.
Occasionally my ties matched the rest of what I was wearing, but usually not. I was too busy keeping track of which ones I had already worn to worry about coordinating colors. I’m sure there were days my mother had to avert her eyes when I left for school. But every week my friends looked forward to Fridays to see what new tie I would wear. There was just not much else to do in Rockdale County.
This dorkiness culminated in an epic showdown. A week before I graduated, I picked out four of my most hideous ties — the kind from the 1970s that were so wide they could almost double for a shirt. I gave one each to our principal and three other school administrators, who had all chided me about my fashion sense over the years. I dared those guys to wear them. Then, on the last day of school, while I was taking a final exam in English, there was a knock on the door. All four men came into the classroom, wearing these awful ties. They asked my teacher, Mr. Cope, if they could interrupt the exam for a presentation. The quartet hummed a bar to harmonize and then broke into song. It went like this:
“We’ll miss you, Michael Claxton,
We hate to say goodbye.
We’ll miss you, Michael Claxton,
But we won’t miss … those ties.”
Then each man handed me a brown paper bag. Inside was an ugly tie from his own closet. Without further word, they left, leaving poor Mr. Cope to restore order. It was an unprecedented event in the annals of Rockdale High. As odd as it was, I had indeed found a way to stand out. At least it was no worse than Ricky Piedrahita, who once stood on top of a table during lunch and sang “I’m a Little Teapot.”
And you thought I had problems.
