The Scrivener: A Big Man
"Should you pluck up enough courage to walk up to a Cash-and-Wrap counter, and interrupt their deliberations, they have a special technique of making you feel that you are in the wrong building or, at least, talking to the wrong person...'' Brian Barratt writes about department store sales staff - and Intimate Apparel.
A family of Aunts and Uncles lives in every large department store. The males wear grey suits, and walk apologetically between the interminable rows of electrical appliances and reduced price bed linen.
They never speak; they merely read pieces of paper, look worried, and nod to each other. None of them is identifiably the Father Figure. Each of them seems to be an Uncle, visiting for the day and not quite sure of their position in relation to the hordes of Aunties who dominate the scene.
The Aunties are the ladies who stand in small groups, huddled in private conversation or busily checking smaller pieces of paper. They don’t merely nod, they gesticulate.
Should you pluck up enough courage to walk up to a Cash-and-Wrap counter, and interrupt their deliberations, they have a special technique of making you feel that you are in the wrong building or, at least, talking to the wrong person. But, occasionally, one of them longs for contact with the Outside World and will be tempted into conversation beyond explaining that she does not know why the item you wish to buy is out of stock.
Many years ago, I decided to be brave and buy a pair of underpants — or an underpant, as my Irish friend insisted on calling them/it — from such a lady. She was immediately friendly, and extended our discussion of the merits and demerits of the various types of gentlemen’s intimate apparel that surrounded her. They don’t call them pants, or undies, or even jockey shorts, in such places. They are Intimate Apparel, I’ll have you know.
Being of merely medium height and somewhat podgy build, I looked at the photographs of muscular males with generous bulges, on the more exotic packages, and suggested to the lady that I could never look like ‘that’ in any of the garments.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘my husband wears these,’ waving a small packet containing a quasi-French garment that appeared to consist of a piece of elastic and a little cloth bag, ‘and he’s a big man’.
I pondered the photograph of the athletic young model barely containing his family planning kit in such a small piece of pink cloth, and said, ‘It would be indecent of me to wear such a thing...I really think I should buy my usual standard, white, decently cut, briefs’.
She was not to be defeated. ‘I bought some of these for my husband, and now he won’t wear any other kind’. She nodded encouragingly, almost gloatingly. ‘And he’s A Big Man’.
Visions of frightening ithyphallicism converged on my timid brain. I hardly dared think of what she herself wore within the privacy of her department store black skirt. I tried to change to subject by observing that the smaller men’s underpants were, the more they seemed to cost. But the ultimate salesperson won the day.
She convinced me, by implicit hints that I was possibly more impressive in the nether regions than her husband, who was, after all, A Big Man. As I was in no position to prove her right or wrong, I succumbed to buying an item of intimate apparel that certainly did not merit being called a ‘pair’.
Mind you, I opted for modest Methodist dark blue rather than phallic French pink.
© Copyright 2003, 2005 Brian Barratt
Adapted from an article previously published in Bonzer!
