My PTSD (“Post Traumatic Suit Disorder”)

Reading Clayton Touter’s recent story in Pittsburgh Quarterly — “Buying A Suit. A Primer” — took me back to being traumatized by Brooks Brothers at 13 in the mid-sixties… 

Per his quote of Michael Bastian of Brooks Brothers which invented the “off the rack” suit: “If you don’t know your proper size, the first thing you should do is work with an experienced salesperson who can help you try on a few things in different sizes to find your best fit.”

All true enough except that I was mortified that I wasn’t an off-the-rack fit. I admit that I was slightly overweight and asthmatic when approaching my Bar Mitzvah at Tree of Life Synagogue.

By that time, I had been used to traveling with my grandfather to what was then the Wholesale District on lower Fifth Avenue, between the Crosstown Boulevard and what was Fifth Avenue High School. A thriving workplace abuzz with jobbers and peddlers has long ago dried up and been displaced by first the development of Chatham Center, and then the PPG Paints hockey arena. My grandfather was one such peddler who bought and stored work clothing in the basement of the avenue’s Charlie Klein store.  He would load a variety of work clothing, including blue jeans into his bilious green Rambler sedan, resplendent in custom-installed, clear  plastic seat covers, selling his way door-to-door to the region’s working families, anywhere from the South Side to the outlying mining downs.

Years later at the start of my legal career I remember facing off against a Kaufman Department Store heir in divorce proceedings. I quipped: “You know something? Both of our grandfathers started as peddlers with push carts. The only difference between them is that your grandfather’s pushcart turned into a department store and he converted to Christianity. However, my grandfather didn’t get beyond the pushcart and he stayed Jewish.”

My mother and I would go downtown to the district with my grandfather to purchase pairs of blue jeans for me. Levis weren’t available wholesale, so I was left with wrangler jeans and was told by the salesman that my size was “husky.”  The term made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but I convinced myself that it wasn’t a big deal.    

My prior designation as “husky” would prove to be nothing as emotionally disabling compared to my getting a Bar Mitzvah suit. My mother and I drove down to Smithfield Street’s Brooks Brothers, where I was dazzled by the elegant dark mahogany paneling and rich royal blue carpeting with salesmen dressed to the nines as if they were corporate executives. We were escorted to the second-floor, past droves and droves of suit racks, eventually for me to step up on the tailor’s measuring station, complete with front and side mirrors.

The tailor approached me with his customary tape measure around his neck and wrist pad full of pins. He measured my waist, pulling the tape tight, and matter of factly said “Robust.” I blurted out “Robust…. what does that mean ?” I gave my mother a terrified look, having never heard the word before, figuring that it meant what it sounded like: “Rowewww- bust.”  Why not “elephantine,” “humongous,” or “gi-normous?”  The tailor explained that it meant that I needed to wear an expanded category of suit that Brooks Brother carried, not exactly “off the rack.”  I was crestfallen. 

Having been Bar Mitzvahed in that robust suit, the term has ever since haunted me, every time that I have returned to or read about Brooks Brothers, notwithstanding my eventual loss of weight and resumption of regular status.