Suit Guys are commodities brokers or equities traders or something else that requires lots of yelling into phones and playing with $10 billion of other people's money. They make about $200,000 a year, and report $16,000 of it for taxes. They encourage people to succeed for themselves - by never giving to any charities.
These are assumptions, of course, and in most cases they're wrong assumptions. I know they're wrong because once a week I'm a Suit Guy.
Since I started working in Manhattan again, I've had regular occasions to attend commercial real estate events. A lot of the real estate business is done through networking. There are ground-breakings and anniversary parties and lectures, where half the attendance is there to get two minutes with their prospective next meal ticket. When one deal can land you eight figures, you want as many licks at that transaction Tootsie-Pop as possible.
Everyone's dressed in conservative suits for this. The never-changing clothes the cartoon me would wear is ironed-to-death khakis and a green button-down shirt, but I don't want to stand out at these things so I wear a suit. It's hard enough to blend in being younger than the average attendee. I don't need to wave around that half these guys have kids my age. I'm just over the hump of feeling like a suit is for a special occasion; now it's just the randomly-scheduled flipside to casual Fridays.
Blending in at these occasions, however, means standing out for the rest of my day. The world has realized you don't need to be sweltering in three pieces of dismal gray wool in order to be a good employee. Older employees get to wear comfortable clothes, since they don't need to impress anyone anymore. Younger employees get to wear the only clothes they own. IT departments get to wear sandals and Black Sabbath T-shirts. In the middle of these comfortably-dressed people is me, in dismal gray wool.
Some of the events I get to drive to, which isn't any sort of sartorial challenge - unless it gets hot in the car and I have to do that straightjacket maneuver to escape the jacket while keeping the seatbelt on. Most of the events, however, are in Manhattan or downtown Newark or Hoboken. I get to those places by the PATH, and I'm usually the sole guy wearing a suit.
The PATH train is unknown to people outside urban New Jersey. It runs under the Hudson River between six New York stops and seven Jersey stops. (Neato trivia: there used to be five or six different private subway lines in New York. All of them merged to become the city-run New York subway system, except for the PATH train, which was excluded because it ran interstate.) Since I live by one of the stops in Jersey City, my commute to midtown Manhattan is a quick 35 minutes door to door. People who live on the Upper East Side have a longer commute to Midtown than me.
It's a fight to get a PATH seat when there's a crowd. I need to estimate where the train doors will be when the train comes to a stop, and stand in front of that spot on the empty platform. When the doors open, the first dozen people entering each door get to sit. Everyone else has to stand, and cling to a couple steel poles. Doing this in regular garb, you're just one of the herd. There's no elderly guy or pregnant woman in these crowds, so no one's more or less deserving of a seat.
As Suit Guy, however, you feel an additional patina of obnoxiousness. I'm dressed like someone who lights cigars with hundred-dollar bills, and then puts them out on stacks of fifties. Suit Guy probably spends more on male grooming products than most people spend on rent. Fighting for a seat in this atmosphere gives the impression that this is how Suit Guy lives his life: grabbing every advantage he can, taking from people who haven't been given his advantages. Never mind that the guy in the Yankees T-shirt could make more than me: he's not wearing the uniform of the New York Pension-Liquidators.
Several people work the PATH trains for spare change. Panhandling has been greatly curtailed by the NYPD, but since the PATH trains are the jurisdiction of the Port Authority cops, any NYPD crackdowns stop at the PATH turnstiles.
One regular character is Teddy. He's got the same speech every time he enters a car. "Hi everyone, my name is Teddy ... I AM with the Bergen-Lafayette Coalition to Help Feed the Families That Are Homeless Shelter. [The organization's name changes from day to day, which it can do since it doesn't exist.] We on the trains today because we very low ... with FOOD ... at the shelter and we need you help. Anything you give goes to FOOD, juice, milk, bread, soup, for the families and the children that are HOMELESS."
More recently, there's been a second guy on the trains. His speech is about wanting to be back painting cars instead of asking for money. He lingers for about twice as long per car than Teddy, and seems to stick around in each car until he gets a total of $5. He used to give a speech about snakes being those who deny God when God comes up to you. He doesn't give it any more, probably because he was insinuating he was God.
It's tough to consider yourself a decent human being while denying someone in need. I can rationalize that any money will probably go to drugs or alcohol, which it might. And if I give money to everyone in need, I'll be in need before too long. And I can say that I go to a homeless shelter every week to help out, which I do, but that's not making me feel better right now, with a guy in the PATH car I'm intentionally not looking at.
The strategy for these guys is to look intensely interested in your book or magazine or shampoo ad on the wall, and then try to blend into the background. That's extra hard when I'm Suit Guy. Suit Guy's got a different car for every day of the week. Suit Guy had one of his underlings fired because they wore the same cologne one day. And now Suit Guy's ignoring homeless guys. Suit Guy's going to be spitting on orphans before too long.
Coming out of the PATH station, there are two people giving out free newspapers: AM New York and Metro. These are bad papers, with reprints of heavily-edited newswires, very little original content, and front page stories of Jessica Simpson whenever humanly possible. No one would even pay for these versus the Times or Daily News or even the Post, so they have to be given away - aggressively. One person from each paper is planted on the stairs, giving out one of the papers, and a second person is further up the stairs giving out the other paper.
Ordinarily, I'm one of the majority passing the papers up. Suit Guy, however, only read the Wall Street Journal, and even that is pinko for not rallying to abolish Social Security. Plus handling anything touched by a street urchin such as is giving away these rags is below Suit Guy's breeding. So those two people find me snobby, for the half-second I walk by them on the staircase. I can tell. Suit Guy can smell disgust; he smells very little aside from disgust.
Going along 34th St. there's usually a few people handing out flyers. Some clothing store is going out of business, or a tanning salon is having a sale, or a comedy club is sending its wannabe comics to hustle a few butts in the seats. And who's got more disposable income to blow than Suit Guy? Of course, as Suit Guy I blow all my money on - well, blow. Suit Guy's not addicted or anything, he can just afford a lot so he uses a lot. In any case, my suit is as good as a sneer and a kick in the teeth to indicate I've got no sympathy for the clothing store going out of business.
Last week was one of my Suit Guy days. Cold weather's a good disguise for Suit Guys, since suits gets disguises with overcoats. I had a breakfast in downtown Newark to go to, then the afternoon in the office. I had my coat over the suit both ways on the PATH, and took my suit jacket off when I got to the office, so there was very little residual damage of this Suit Guy outing.
Dinner was a corporate Christmas party - this is separate from the company Christmas party, which was informal and a lot of fun. I didn't know how to dress for this corporate party, but the Newark breakfast forced my hand, so I had to be Suit Guy at the party.
For twenty minutes, though, no one could tell if I was a Suit Guy or not. There was a huge line at the coat check. Huge in this case was eight people long, but when it doesn't move for 20 minutes it feels like a tar pit. The coat check woman had her arm in a cast, and thus couldn't hang up coats. One would wonder why this woman was at this post, or why she simply didn't step back and let people hang up their own coats, but she was here and helping out single-handedly no matter how much it inconvenienced us.
Once our coats were hung up and I was Suit Guy to the world, I realized this was a party of Suit Guys. Everyone here was dressed to impress. There were even a few rarely-seen Suit Girls. This was the first time I was meeting these people, so I had nothing but my Suit Guy assumptions. There were thus whole rooms full of people who had bought their way into Ivy League schools, coasted on Gentleman's Cs, then had their accountants throw enough tax shelter money at the universities that they were given honorary doctorates. They each had some 24-year-old they were living with, had no intentions of marrying, but wouldn't be telling the 24-year-old until she got bitchy. Twice a week they were also visiting some 22-year-olds, who would hopefully become their new 24-year-olds once the 24-year-olds got bitchy. Everyone was for the flat tax.
On the way out, I slipped my coat off the hook by myself, so as not to trouble the one-armed woman. I was about to get the coat on, retiring Suit Guy for the night, when she shrieked "You could tip, your know! It's Christmas!" Minor concern for the welfare of others was translated into minor disregard for the welfare of others. Was a roomful of Suit Guys too much to handle?
The woman shrieked the same tip stuff at every single person I talked to about the party. Maybe she just liked guilting dollar bills from people, but maybe it was the Suit Guy effect. Being in that room made me feel out of place, and I was pretty sure most people there were normal schmoes like me.
Most people in America think of themselves as middle class, a designation that doesn't presently cover Suit Guys. It did 45 years ago, but back then everyone wore hats, too. If I had a Porsche Boxster and a Cayman Islands bank account, then maybe I'd be OK with the erroneous perception or occasional stink eye that Suit Guy gets. But if I was Suit Guy, I just flat out wouldn't care what other people thought of me - or of other people in general.
Party at Suit Guy's house on Saturday. It's at the Hamptons place, so take your choppers out there; Suit Guy has two helipads on either end of the house. Invitation only.