Hoisted by his own foulard

I’d rather sit on the beach and think about neckties than sit in an office and actually wear one.

For me, though, neckties were the path to a beach chair, at least in an overall sense.

One of my jobs as a teenager was selling shirts and neckties in a department store. It was a low-budget store in a poor area. Our clientele typically bought ties only for church Sundays or for the occasional funeral, wedding, and so on. Many of my customers didn’t know how to tie a necktie, though they were usually too embarrassed to volunteer this information. But once I doped this out, I’d offer to pre-tie the tie for them and show them how to slide the knot to loosen and tighten it.

This little service was a mere afterthought when I first did it. But it wound up being a great way to build a loyal customer base. Though any given family might not buy a lot of ties, they’d often buy a few shirts now and then, along with wallets, belts, and such.

I dubbed this gig the “necktie effect,” having stumbled across a truth that sales gurus often mention: An effective salesperson isn’t merely selling an item, but is actually solving a problem, or at least addressing a situation, that the customer has. The actual item on the shelf is just one part of a bigger picture.

So you don’t buy a tie to buy a tie. You buy a tie to wear a tie. In other words, you don’t just want an object, you want an experience.

What does this have to do with beach chairs? Well, pretty much everything if you’re selling tourism services on Saipan. Tourism is experiential by its very nature. This is something that I meshed with, thanks largely to my necktie days.

So far, so good, right? Right. But there’s a dark side: If you live by the tie, you can also die by the tie. Indeed, while the road from the necktie effect to the beach chair life was smooth enough, forging a path in the other direction wasn’t so easy.

One fateful day, an old pal called me from the mainland. He told me he had tossed my hat into the ring for a company that was looking for someone with my qualifications. The job was commutable from Saipan, so I could spend part of each month making good coin in the big wide world, and the rest of the month goofing off at the beach.

I dusted off my best suit and zoomed off to a big city for an early-morning interview. I arrived the night before.

As I dressed for the big event in my hotel room in the morning, I had a shocking discovery: I had forgotten how to tie a necktie.

Apparently, my years in the tropics had melted the necktie-tying section of my memory.

I went from befuddled, to frustrated, to nearly panicked. Every minute that ticked down was putting me closer to the disaster point of showing up late for the interview, which in itself would become a moot point since I’d just rather not show up at all in that case. I mean, if you’re going to go down in flames, there’s no use adding unnecessary humiliation to the heap.

I already had enough humiliation to contemplate. I imagined myself as a beachcomber living under a coconut tree, feeding on discarded packets of Chicken McNugget sauce and patching holes in my zoris with losing Lotto tickets. Passersby and tourists would see me mumbling to myself, but I’d be oblivious to them, and to the rats making nests in my unkempt hair, as my mind would be caught in a perpetual loop of playing, and re-playing, the scene of my epic necktie failure and my fall from grace.

Yes, a horrible specter, to be sure, especially if all you can scrounge is the Creamy Ranch sauce but you’re a Honey-Mustard man. Fortunately, fate spared me. A dimpled half-Windsor knot finally materialized, probably owing more to muscle memory than brain power. Whew!

The day got better from there. Still, I shall never forget that morning and how I almost got hoisted by my own foulard.

You’ve got to give neckties credit for one thing: They last forever. I’ve got ties that are 35 years old. I reckon that a decent silk tie has the half-life of Carbon-14.

The aggregate worldwide balance, then, is biased toward accumulation, not attrition. Sure, with some deft tropical footwork it’s possible to mitigate one’s exposure to neckties, but trying to escape them entirely isn’t fighting mere fashion, it’s more like fighting physics. Every great force can work with you or against you, so take your pick.