Wear the Suit
How a railroad worker in work boots, a failed trip to the Russian Consulate, and a walk up the Lyon Street Steps somehow led me into Nancy Pelosi’s house
Photo: Eliya Belanoff / Light Bay Design
I once ended up inside Nancy Pelosi’s house because a railroad worker told me to wear a suit.
At least that is the chain of causation I have settled on.
It began years earlier with a man everybody noticed because he dressed for one of the dirtiest jobs on the railroad as though he might be having cocktails with James Bond afterward.
He worked at the hump.
And every day, he wore a suit.
James Bond at the Hump
A railroad hump yard is basically an enormous mechanical card dealer.
Freight cars are pushed up a hill, uncoupled at the top, identified electronically, and allowed to roll downhill under gravity.
Below the hill are dozens of tracks.
One car may be headed toward Chicago.
Another Dallas.
Another Oregon.
Another Las Vegas.
Computer-controlled switches send each car onto the proper track, taking apart the train that arrived and assembling the trains that will leave later.
It is an impressive operation.
It is also dirty, hot railroad work.
This guy showed up in a suit.
Suit.
Tie.
Work boots.
Every day.
Management was mostly concerned that his tie might eventually become part of the machinery, but otherwise he kept doing it.
Finally I asked why.
His father had died leaving around twenty suits hanging in a closet.
Some had barely been worn.
His father had spent his life working jobs where there was never much reason to put on a suit.
The son had done much the same thing.
So after his father died, he started wearing them.
“I just wanted my dad to know his suits finally got worn.”
That stopped me.
This wasn’t a young guy playing dress-up. He had been around the railroad since roughly the 1970s and had close to thirty years in by the time I knew him.
I asked how many suits he owned now.
“About fifty.”
“Fifty?”
“Something like that.”
“And you wear them out here?”
“Yep.”
“Isn’t it hot?”
“Fuck yeah, it’s hot.”
He didn’t care.
Then he asked how many suits I owned.
“Six.”
“Wear ’em.”
“To the railroad?”
“Anywhere.”
“For what?”
He looked at me as though I had asked a disappointing question.
“You never know.”
“Know what?”
“When.”
That was basically his philosophy.
You have the suit now.
You are alive now.
Wear the damn thing now.
The Man Who Read
He liked teaching me things nobody had asked him to teach me.
He had worked on the railroad before everybody carried radios.
I once asked whether he was seriously telling me railroad workers didn’t have walkie-talkies in the 1970s.
“Of course they had radios, kid. We didn’t have ’em. Engine had one.”
“So how did you communicate?”
“Horns.”
Then he looked at me.
“Morse code. You know Morse code, right?”
I gave him the expression of a man deciding whether lying would shorten the conversation.
He continued anyway.
“You hear the horn when a train comes to a crossing?”
He sounded it out.
Long.
Long.
Short.
Long.
“That’s Q.”
He was right.
Then, somehow, railroad horns became a discussion about the expression no quarter, which became a discussion about the Constitution and the Third Amendment.
I raised an eyebrow.
Mostly because I was trying to figure out how we had gotten from locomotive horns to the Bill of Rights.
He noticed.
“Come on, kid. I thought you were the smart one out here.”
I asked whether he had gone to college.
“No.”
Then he added:
“I read.”
That was his answer.
Not I never got the chance.
Not college wasn’t for me.
Just:
I read.
Then he asked if I wanted to know the greatest writer who ever lived.
I said sure.
Mostly to humor him.
“Louis L’Amour.”
I laughed.
He did not.
He owned practically everything Louis L’Amour had written.
A few days later he brought me a paperback.
The Lonesome Gods.
“Read it.”
I thanked him.
I did not read it.
That will become important later.
Wear the Damn Suit
Years passed.
His strange advice stayed with me partly because I had spent years living and working in Russia, where I had developed my own peculiar relationship with formal clothing.
In the Russia I knew in the 1990s, if a man was doing anything remotely official, a suit helped.
Government office.
Business meeting.
Formal dinner.
Consular business.
Suit.
Maybe nobody required it.
But I had learned that people often took you more seriously if you arrived looking as though you had taken them seriously.
So I owned suits.
And after talking with James Bond at the hump, I stopped saving them quite so carefully.
Why was I saving them?
For what?
You never know.
Know what?
When.
Fast-forward to around 2012.
My wife and I were in San Francisco dealing with some consular matter.
By then, Ukrainian services were no longer being handled through the Russian Consulate the way they once had been. There was supposedly some Ukrainian consular operation working sporadically elsewhere in the city, but whatever we needed was clearly not getting accomplished that day.
But I was wearing a suit.
Of course I was.
We had driven to San Francisco for consular business.
You wore a suit.
Apparently this was a law I had written for myself.
Since our official business had gone nowhere, we decided to walk to the Lyon Street Steps.
And that is where the day took a turn.
The Wrong Clothes for an Exercise Video
When we arrived, some kind of fitness production was being filmed.
There were cameras, athletic women in workout clothes, and a very fit foreign-looking man who reminded me of Gilad from Bodies in Motion.
Everybody looked ready for exercise.
I looked ready to negotiate an arms treaty.
Someone joked about getting me into the workout video.
I was mostly concerned with climbing the stairs without turning my suit into a portable sauna.
At the time I was running for the California State Assembly, and somehow that came up while talking with people around the shoot.
That is one of the strange things that happens when you become a political candidate.
Someone asks what you do, and instead of saying something normal like:
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“I work for the railroad,”
you hear yourself say:
“I’m running for State Assembly.”
Now everybody has questions.
We eventually made our way up the steps and continued walking through the neighborhood.
Later, we encountered some of the same people we had talked with earlier.
They were headed to a gathering nearby.
Someone invited us.
I don’t remember anything resembling a formal invitation.
It was basically:
You should come.
Okay.
So we went.
This is approximately when the suit began earning its keep.
Whose House Is This?
The house had considerably more security than I had expected.
There were people checking people.
There were people watching the people checking people.
There were all the subtle little signals that tell you this is not someone’s ordinary weekday barbecue.
A reasonable person might have stopped and asked:
Whose house is this?
Apparently I was not that person.
Besides, I was wearing a suit.
My wife was nicely dressed.
We were walking with people who appeared to know exactly where they were going.
And I needed to use the bathroom.
At some point somebody asked who I was.
I explained that I was running for State Assembly.
That could apparently be checked.
My name really was listed as a candidate with the California Secretary of State.
Whatever question had existed about us was resolved.
And in we went.
I still had absolutely no idea whose house I had just entered.
Inside were political people, donors, religious people, candidates and assorted others who didn’t fit neatly into one party.
I recognized a preacher who was himself running for office and whom I had encountered at political events before.
For a moment I thought:
Republican event.
Obviously.
It wasn’t.
But the mixed crowd didn’t particularly surprise me.
By that point I had already learned something about politics that television doesn’t show very well.
Political parties are a little like football teams.
In public, everybody has a jersey.
Cowboys.
49ers.
Packers.
Your team is magnificent.
The other team must be annihilated before Sunday evening.
The fans expect that.
But the players themselves belong to the same strange profession.
They know many of the same people.
They deal with the same donors, reporters, institutions, problems and personalities.
Some went to school together.
Some have been friends for decades.
Some do business together.
Some genuinely despise one another.
And some will spend the afternoon attacking each other in public and later play golf.
That isn’t always hypocrisy.
Sometimes it is simply the difference between the game and the people playing it.
So Democrats and Republicans mingling privately wasn’t the mystery.
The mystery was:
What exactly had we walked into?
We talked with people.
We wandered around.
I cleaned myself up after climbing the Lyon Street Steps in a suit.
Nobody asked us to leave.
Eventually little pieces began assembling themselves.
A name here.
Something someone said there.
The house.
The security.
The guests.
And then I understood.
We were at Nancy and Paul Pelosi’s home.
I remember that peculiar internal moment when nothing around you changes, but your understanding of the previous half hour gets completely rewritten.
Oh.
Well.
That explains a few things.
Looking for Nancy
Years later my wife and I joked that we had pulled a low-budget version of the couple who crashed President Obama’s first state dinner.
Except we hadn’t really crashed anything.
Someone had invited us.
We simply had neglected to establish where we were going.
Once I knew whose house it was, naturally I started casually looking around for Nancy Pelosi.
Not aggressively.
I wasn’t opening closets.
Maybe she was in the garden.
Maybe she was talking with another group.
Maybe I had already walked past her.
I never saw her.
We had probably been there less than an hour.
The people we had arrived with were getting ready to leave.
We had a long drive back to Sacramento.
So we left.
For years afterward, I remembered the afternoon mostly as one of those peculiar episodes that happened during that period of my life.
Then one day, much later, I walked into a railroad crew room.
There were Louis L’Amour books spread across a table.
Lots of them.
I asked what was going on.
Someone said:
“You know that guy out at the hump?”
James Bond?
Yeah.
“He died.”
His wife had brought in his books.
Anybody who wanted them could take them.
And suddenly I wasn’t thinking about Nancy Pelosi anymore.
I was thinking about the suits.
His father.
The railroad horns.
The Third Amendment.
“You college kids don’t learn nothin anymore.”
And:
I read.
I didn’t want to seem greedy.
So I took two books.
The next time I was there, I took another.
Then another.
Eventually I probably ended up with twenty of his Louis L’Amour books.
And here is the embarrassing part.
I never read them.
Some of them are still with me.
Waiting.
Someday.
Which means that after all these years, I managed to turn his beloved books into exactly what his father’s suits had been.
Things saved for later.
Things waiting for the right occasion.
Things belonging to a man who had already figured out that the right occasion might never announce itself.
I used to wonder why I happened to be wearing a suit that day in San Francisco.
Now I think I know.
Years earlier, an old railroad worker inherited a closet full of suits from a father who never got around to wearing them.
So he wore them to work.
Then he looked at me one day and said:
If you’ve got a suit, wear it.
You never know.
He was right.
One random weekday, that suit carried me from a failed trip to the Russian Consulate, up the Lyon Street Steps, through an exercise-video shoot, into a conversation with strangers, past a security checkpoint and eventually into Nancy Pelosi’s house.
I never met Nancy Pelosi.
But the railroad man got me through the door.
And after all these years, I think I finally know what I owe him.
I need to read the damn book.
