Mr. Threadbare

Before Mr Threadbare was named as such, he was a fastidious, one-time rather renown tailor with the given name of Ira Burrand. In tandem with his fellow tailor and on-off lover Jasper Munet, Ira ran the upmarket tailoring and altering shop Bespoke Bostonian in a side road off Newbury Street - the shopping area of choice for the wealthy and dapper citizens of Boston, Massachusetts.

Ira and Jasper ran Bespoke Bostonian like old male lions; each prowling the territory as if it were his own, each waiting for a kill – in the shape of snaring each member of Bostonian high society who entered their shop - to bicker and growl over, before inevitably ending up equally bloody-mouthed, having shared not only the kill but winding up with fresh cuts to add to the map of scar tissue liberally scattered throughout their aged hides. To be a tailor was to subject your body to the tools of the craft; scissors, needles, machines, all of which could and did cause injuries to the two. Sometimes at the hand of the other.

The two tailors took it in turn to open up BB each morning and each would arrive a half hour before the other in order to light and warm the store. It was Jasper’s turn to open up one punchingly cold November morning, and as Ira made his way along the cobbled street to their shop, clacking his walking stick in rhythm with his painstakingly crafted baby buffalo leather brogues, his gait nimble and flawless despite the icy cobblestones beneath his stride, he was looking forward to the warmth of their store.

But as Ira turned into BB’s side road, he frowned upon noticing there was a distinct lack of light was seeping from its storefront. His frown deepened when he saw that along with this, that a large package had been placed in the recess of the door. He was not expecting a delivery this particular day, nor would he accept any of his suppliers simply leaving any kind of package in such a place, exposed as it was to not only the damaging potential of Massachusetts’ winter elements, and at the mercy of the city’s undesirables, with their penchant for theft and vandalism he begrudgingly endured as part and parcel of living in a metropolis.

When he was close enough to see that the package was actually a person, his face scrunched in pickled rage.

“Fucking vagrant,” snarled Ira, under freezing plumes of breath. The anger he felt at seeing his shop entrance sullied by some insignificant, inelegant down and out far outweighing any compassion that one may feel at the discovery of a fellow human’s frozen suffering. He immediately scanned the side road to see if anyone else was in the vicinity, and fiercely poked the unfortunate soul with his stick.

“Hey, hey you,” Ira growled. His focus, supreme at very close quarters, mediocre at anything further, sharpened sufficiently for Ira to realise that the form was Jasper’s body.

Ira’s dropped his mask of scorn; and whispered, “Oh.”

Ira gracefully knelt by Jasper’s supine and rictus form and felt for signs of life, of which there were none. Jasper had gone and died on him.

Ira regarded Jasper’s immaculate beard and terror-stricken face, which were already glazed with the morning frost. His pale blue eyes stared pointlessly at the sky and his mouth was agape and black inside. Ira was pleased to see that Jasper had neatly folded his leather-gloved hands over his failed heart as if clutching at it desperately would be to be showing a distinct lack of class in his demise.

Ira took Jasper’s final face in his hands.

“Couldn’t have waited until you were inside the store,” he said kindly, before kissing him once on each frozen cheek.

Ira whispered, “Well, it seems that Dr. Mattingley was onto something. He was rather insistent that you have that pacemaker fitted, wasn’t he, you silly old bastard?”

Using his stick as a pivot, Ira rose to his feet and checked up and down the street for fellow proprietors making their own way to commence a day of commerce. No one was around. He stepped to the door and saw that Jasper had managed to slip his key inside the lock.

Ira deduced that Jasper’s heart had given as he tried to turn the key. Ira stepped over the corpse, opened the door; propped it open with his stick.

After a final glance around, Ira placed his hands under Jasper’s armpits and hauled his dead lover inside, past the rails and displays of impeccable clothing and materials, into their workshop area.

“Rest a while now,” whispered Ira, patting Jasper’s breast and preparing himself for the heft of lifting the body up onto the workbench. He stared down at the body for several more minutes, before emitting a long, ‘Hmm,’ and curtly nodding his head.

“Well, guess I’m Mr. Threadbare, now.”

The two old lions had a mutual, sworn, enemy. The brutes.

**

For in spite of all the sophistication they had stitched to the store, Ira and Jasper would, at least once per week, have to deal with a brute barrelling into BB trailed by a foulness of his utter inelegance. The two had slaved relentlessly to build up Bespoke Bostonian’s clientele list from Massachusetts’s finest. Latter-day Kennedys, Pulitzer-winning novelists and world class sommeliers were among its clientele. Esteemed stage actors. High-ranking mafioso. Those whose were sufficiently wealthy to be associate Professors at Harvard in a mutual name-dropping capacity.

But they were plagued by the brutes- sportsmen, Internet tycoons, lowly mafioso, those whose bank accounts and wallets were monied by the hamburger-guzzling, Samuel Adams’ drinking, bicep-tattooing underclass that pervaded Massachusetts’ masses. In they would come with their stink of fried onions, marijuana, perfumed by the litre with exorbitantly-priced aftershave of ersatz refinement. They were usually tailed by an assortment of hangers-on; ribald, low-slung panted sorts, who were shamelessly tactile among the impeccable finery that dressed the rails and mannequins and hardwood shelving about them.

The kind that had the old lions scurrying for their Istros aromatique fragrance spray the second they had vacated the store, artfully persuaded that the BB diary was full for the next twenty-three months and they simply couldn’t fit them in, despite the tactless prices these buggers would attempt to bribe them with.

One such kind inordinately tall, bald-headed black man, who had overcome his lack of red hair or rummy odour, to become a noted player for the “Boston Celtics” basketball team visited the shop – on a Friday -that the tailors decided that enough was becoming enough.

The two would agree after they ridded BB of his entourage that he would have been a fascinating subject to tailor for – his thighs were muscular and defined, his powerful torso sans-fat, his eyes almond-like in shape and the irises coloured with the complex hues of their favoured Esmerelda Gesha coffee, whilst he was clearly wealthy and even rather pleasantly fragrant.

But the man’s hangers-on – similarly coloured men, who referred to one another as “dorg” or “homes” and repeatedly professed a fist to Ira and Jasper as some kind of ethical greeting, whilst sauntering about BB in a peculiar, slack-limbed gait, describing the beauteous clothing about them as “dope” or “sick” as they pulled the garments from their places and unfurled them – did for his chances of having a bespoke, Bespoke Bostonian suit to pull around his mighty limbs.

A man who kept company with brutes such as these was undoubtedly a brute himself.

The man had been pleasingly taken aback when Jasper had told him that they simply couldn’t possibly take on a fresh commission for the foreseeable future. His eyebrows had knitted, his face perplexed. He was clearly unused to his ability to manipulate a large, orange ball not being recognised as cultural currency with which to barter his way through the world.

After a deeply unpleasant exchange of views, the man had – very nimbly, given his imposing stature – turned on his enormous feet and called his associates away from soiling BB’s garments with their bodily oils and odours. “Guess my money aint good ‘nough for some folk. Aigh, c’mon dorgs, let’s leave… fucken… Statler and Waldorf here to it”

The fellows had bounced away, leaving Jasper and Ira to hold their poses – side by side, hands crossed in front of them, courteous yet unflinchingly prim looks of arrogance painted on their faces- for a few minutes, before closing the store and deodorising every last inelegant molecule that the men had touched or juxtaposed.

The incident proved to be so extremely unpleasant that they decided not to reopen BB at all that day. Instead, they began their weekly ritual rather earlier than usual and retired to the back room. As Ira selected the wine – a ten-year old South African red -Jasper set the glasses on the coffee table.

Within an hour, they were roaringly drunk and were reliving their brutish day. They started their recap with sternly-stated concerns.

“Think we best ought to conduct a stocktake. Fucking thieves all around, I don’t care if one of them has money.”

“I’ve said it before; clients by appointment only. Only, dammit!! We should keep the fucking door locked!”

The wine worked through their blood soon enough, and they moved on to their would-be client’s associates’ vernacular.

“Dorgs!? Dorks!? Dogs!?.. Homes!?” What on earth were they calling one another, ha!!”

“Ah guess mah money aint no good…” – Jasper said this, and in a pretty good Alabama accent. It did not replicate the man’s actual tones at all – he had spoken in a flowing, New York tongue – but this only made the two old lions laugh the more.

By the time they had drained the bottle and thoroughly reddened their teeth with the wine, they were laughing hysterically.

“St-St-Statler and Waldorf, ha!” They both agreed this was a good one. They were big fans of the Muppets.

They went to Ira’s apartment together that night. The next day was a day off, and they woke up sombre, sore-headed with a dose of regret at their evening. In the midst of all their laughter and ten-year old South African red wine, they had forgotten that the brutes had sullied BB forevermore. Had sewn their putrid seed into its very essence, regardless of their de-brute-ing regime.

They lay in bed, barely speaking all day. Ira went out mid-morning and fetched the Sunday papers and coffee, and they moodily read through each hefty section, each brewing his own personal take on things.

“It’s not like we invade their… fenced playgrounds, and… deflate their basketballs, huh?”

“There’s so many fucking chain stores for them. Why can’t they pick up some… fucking threadbare thing at one of those?”

“They should go to Leaworthy’s shop. He’ll serve any fucker with matching shoes, that fucking polyester hack!”

As the coffee took hold, their anger increased.

“We should throw our garbage through their car windows. See how they like their expensive things sullied with fucking trash!”

Ira had said this, and Jasper had harrumphed. Thought it over.

“We should make them a suit sometime. One of them. One of those greaseballs, maybe. But sew our fucking shit into the lining. Huh.”

Ira giggled. “You know, I like that.”

*

The thought stayed with them over time. They were old men, each into his eighth decade. Retribution would be outlived by time if they just let the idea slide.

After a tough and brutish week – three brutes in six days – Jasper had had enough.

“Fuck this,” he growled as Ira poured a seven-year old Chilean white. “We’re going to be worm food before long. I can’t let it happen. I can’t be buried in a $25,000 suit and be eaten by fucking worms.”

Ira snarled, “Huh, You think I want that? To be laid there, worms eating my suit, with all these threadbare cunts striding through town? Why, I want to infest them with my putrid, rotting flesh. Why, I want to…”

Jasper’s face lighted with a smile. “I think you got it, Ir.”

He stood. “I THINK YOU’VE FUCKING GOT IT!”

Having bonded with their particularly aggressive desire not to have their burial suits eaten by worms, the two old lions agreed that when one of them died, the other would dismember his body, store it in a chest freezer. And when a brute sullied their shop with his – its – sickening odours, manners, appearance, lexicon; they would courteously agree to the sartorial neophyte’s laughably crude requirements and alter or prepare a suit to its exact requirements, with a free BB addition: a thawed part of a dead old man stitched into the lining, hidden in a secret pocket. Anything.

And as a retort to all the polyester hacks – it wasn’t just Leaworthy, there was any number of these bastards about – they agreed that in the event of the other’s death and the survivor’s ensuing adventures, they would rename themselves “Mr Threadbare.”

***

Having heaved Jasper’s body onto the workbench and tenderly watched his lover’s body settle, Mr Threadbare moved swiftly. He turned on the heating and lighted up the rest of the shop. It was almost a quarter past seven now, for heaven’s sake, and he had not even ground his coffee yet, let alone gone through his diary for the day.

Ira was a busy man, and now he had an extremely delicate piece of tailoring to do.

Whistling an old showtune that both were pained to admit that they cared for, Ira filled the kettle with water and began spooning coffee grounds into the antique cast iron grinder that they had shared the use of each morning in the shop for several decades.

Already planning the intricate, bespoke methods and equipment with which to undertake his new tailoring project.

With Jasper’s death, Mr. Threadbare was born.

And on this same Friday – things always seemed to happen in BB on a Friday – a brute walked in. This young and arrogant man, barely thirty years old, swaggered into the shop as Ira was in the back, assiduously washing the grounds from the grinder and his mug whilst occasionally glancing at Jasper’s corpse. Jasper was nude, Mr Threadbare having stripped him a little while after drinking his morning coffee

“Hello… hello… anybody in this fucken’ place,” the man barked. Ira pursed his lips, wrenched a handful of pubic hair from his dead lover, co-founder and co-owner of Bespoke Bostonian and brought himself elegantly to his feet.

“I’m sorry, sir, I was busy with some work out in the back,” said Ira to the back of the ribald brute, who had a hideous cotton blue suit draped over one arm that was somehow less repugnant than the effort wrapped about his hulking frame: an over-skinny charcoal polyester, tattered threads hanging from every seam he could bring himself to look at. Ira smiled his most condescending smile and walked soundlessly to where the hulk stood, facing a row of finest Savile Row shirts that had recently arrived from London, and proffered his small and elegant right hand to the brute, pubic hairs and all.

The brute stretched out a paw, instinctively. They shook, Mr Threadbare swallowing the nausea that the brute’s enormous, perspirant mitt had caused him.

“The hell is…” started the hulk as he looked down at his hand and saw dozens of silky, curlicued grey hairs dashed about his sweaty palm.

“Ah, forgive me, sir,” replied Mr. Threadbare. “I am working on an extremely delicate cravat repair for a particularly exclusive client of mine which needs the utmost attention to detail; I must have gotten a few strands of this ultra-fine silk threading caught in my hand…” With this, Mr. Threadbare abruptly ended his apology with a giggly chuckle before his cheery façade dissolved and he met the brute’s large, black eyes with a cold stare of his own.

The brute’s coarseness diminished a little. “Uh, yeah okay, whatever, Mister,” he drawled in a voice suddenly shorn of the hubris it’d had on arrival, whilst wiping his hands of a dead man’s pubic hairs.

“Ah, anyways, I got this suit here and the pants are a stretch too lawng in the leg and the fuck… erm, the jacket… is down past my knuckles, huh? Can you fix this up for me today?”

Mr Threadbare dissolved his hard look “May I?” he enquired politely, holding out his hands. The brute passed the suit to Mr. Threadbare, who hid his features behind the garments and let the pants unfold to the floor with a pompous sneer upon his face.

He regarded them as if they had been hauled out of the sewage works.

“Of course, sir. I shall be delighted to get working on it straightaway. Now, if I could just take your measurements, I’ll see what I can do for you.”

With that, Mr Threadbare whipped his measuring tape from around his neck and good-naturedly went about measuring up the brute, who was regaining his earlier smarm and arrogance, and asked, “So it’s just you here, huh, pal?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. My business partner has left to … explore things he never had a chance to whilst he was… working here,” said Mr Threadbare, trying not to breathe in the stale stench that was radiating from the brute’s axilla as he took his measurements.

The brute shrugged. “Okay, fair enough. I guess you can’t spend ya whole life with sewing machines and scissors, dressing up men being an old faggot tailor and all…”

Mr Threadbare issued a steely gaze at this. The brute responded by showing his palms and airily quipping, “No offence, right?”

“Oh certainly not sir. No offence has been taken whatsoever.” Mr Threadbare withdrew his measuring tape. “I think I’ve got all I need, sir. I’ll be sure to do what I can to make the suit as perfect for your good self as can be. I think you’ll find I’m quite adept with scissors, sewing machines and my own little secret ways of making sure my customers are delighted with my efforts.”

The brute looked confused and huffed up a disgusting sound from his lungs. They agreed a price and date for the alteration’s completion and the brute promptly exited BB, thankfully taking his wheezing gait and his boorish manners with him, unaware that his awful suit would soon have an extra-special trinket. A reward for being the first one through the door since Bespoke Bostonian privately morphed into Mr Threadbare’s Putrid Flesh Insertion Shop.

The severed, penis, cut into pieces, of some old ‘faggot tailor’ sewed into the hem of his diabolical, Walmart trousers.

Mr Threadbare giggled and thought about his evening wine. It was Friday, after all.