So there I was, a 10-year-old boy, forced to go to the Profits in the mall with my mother. She’d purchased a dress shirt for me and had just rung it up. While she was talking to the male sales representative, I carefully watched the male clerk fold my shirt. He’d clearly done it a thousand times, and there was just something about him. When I got home, I carefully unfolded the shirt and then refolded it—careful to do it exactly the way I had seen. I couldn’t. It took a while, and I worked and worked. Finally I got it pretty much the same way I’d seen that notable clerk do it. Ever since then, for years, every time I folded a shirt, I would spend the extra time to try to get it just right. To get it to look the way dress shirts do when an employee refolds them in a store. It wasn’t that the clerk was particularly attractive; at 10 I hadn’t even known what “attractive” meant. But I did know that he had something I wanted. Some kind of confidence.
Years later, after coming out, I found myself packing to move down to Disney to work at MGM (now Disney’s Hollywood Studios). Life was really taking off, and I was proud of where I was. I’d put the computer in the car, and packed up all my audio tapes as I was the only person left in Tennessee who did not have an in-car CD player, knowing they were a fad and would soon be replaced by in-car MP3 players. Still in my room, I’d just taken a load of laundry upstairs and set it beside my suitcase. I first packed the socks, then held up a shirt and looked at it.
I stood there, going through the maneuver in my mind. Face down. Even it all out. Have to get it perfect. Arms folded across the back. Each side folded to meet in the middle. Fold into thirds from bottom to top. I thought about the clerk. I thought about how, in one way or another, I’d tried to be him for the last 13 years of my life. The stability. The humble refinement. His practiced professionalism. Then, still holding the shirt, my own life came into view. Mexico. China. College. Disney World.
I looked at the shirt. I looked at the laundry basket. Then I dumped the basket into my luggage, wadded it all up, and with a zip, I was off.