The t-shirt conundrum

This past summer I was recovering from some sort of Nazi medical experiment that left me both weak and delirious and I found myself unable to accompany my daughter on a college visit to New York City. Instead, she took a bus and stayed with one of my oldest friends who I will call Mayonnaise Bill.

Mayo-Bill and I met about 30 years ago, which is odd because in various parts of this blog I claim to be 28 years old, but for the sake of complexity, I will leave that part a mystery. Mayo-Bill and I are like brothers, except that we are not. He is a talented artist, a free spirit unencumbered by neurosis and happily married. I am none of those things. What we share in common is a deep and true love for one another.

What we also share in common is a competition for sending one another t-shirts that sometimes have meaning, but often times are just a way of expressing that one of us is thinking of the other, or wanted to show the other that we are here or there, or that one of us was in a scummy thrift store in a city that has scummy thrift stores. Those shirts were usually sent by me to him, but he has sent me care packages of t-shirts that were previously owned from places where t-shirts were not well respected.

Mayo-Bill is a photojournalist, so lately, he has had the upperhand in finding t-shirts from exotic locales. When I was a working journalist, I would send him shirts from interesting places, say the Exxon Valez clean-up site, or from a member of the Green River Task Force. I sent him a signed Jesse Jackson for president t-shirt from 1984, beat that.

We have a long history of this and to be honest both he and I are truly competitive people, in art, in stories and certainly in t-shirts. Sure, I often find myself in seedy thrift stores and when I see a t-shirt that looks particularly disgusting, I think, I will package this up and send it to my friend Mayo-Bill and he will smile. Sometimes I will get a small package and the return address will be Brooklyn and I will know it is something special. Last year when the earthquake ruined Haiti, a few months later I received a package out of the blue, with a couple of t-shirts for restaurants in Port Au Prince. He had been sent there to cover the mess and cleanup and had somehow managed to scavenge some shirts.

This past fall I found myself in Seattle, which to me is nirvana for strange and wonderful t-shirt pickings because there are a lot of unique companies and events that happen there and a lot of people who seem to refuse to accept the gift t-shirts that companies give away as promotions. If you happen upon some of the cities thrift stores, you will find bins and bins of new t-shirts from companies like Amazon.com and Microsoft, new shirts, never worn by their spoiled and pampered employees, too good to wear the shirts that proudly proclaim, “Amazon, a super place to send shit to Obese people in Kansas”, or something like that.

So, while there, I found my good friend a veritable lifetime of classy shirts. I had outdone myself this time, seriously. In the past I had sent shirts that were torn, or abused, or ruined in some way, but I thought he might find them useful. In the latest offering, there were some great shirts with great messages and all were in amazing shape. To top off the great finds, before I sent the package I had a film to shoot in Washington DC and while working I stumbled upon a church bizarre and found a “combat photographers” t-shirt for sale for a dollar. I included that in the package. I knew I had stepped up my game and since he had recently somehow accidentally fathered a baby of some sort, I knew he was too busy to compete, so after 30 years, I could finally claim victory in the t-shirt competition.

I sent it off a couple of months ago and I never heard a word. No thank you, no screw you, no nothing. Now, don’t get me wrong, neither of us have ever really acknowledged the others t-shirt gifts. Over the years, we might say something like, “you’re going to Paris? I expect a shirt.” Something like that. A few years ago he flew with the Vice President to Iraq and I of course, a bit jealous said, “my friend flew to Iraq with the vice president and I did not even get a god damned t-shirt.” I never got a t-shirt. A few months later I did get a t-shirt from Afghanistan, as if that would somehow make up for the lack of an Iraq shirt. It was from a soldier, still sweat stained and kind of disgusting, but I pinned it to a wall and I keep it there to remind me of something more important than t-shirts and silly competitions.

Yesterday I was out cycling in the icy cold and when I got home there was a package laid out in front of my door. It had a return address from Brooklyn and my heart raced. I went inside and opened it and immediately I pulled out some sort of skanky rancid shirt that had some sort of greasy stain on it and when I held it up to light I could see small holes already in the fabric and I thought to myself, this is how you compete with what had to have been my best t-shirt package ever? Then I reached in and pulled out the second shirt.

”Dammit,” I said loud enough to wake my daughter who was again passed out on the kitchen floor, which is starting to become worrisome, no so much that I will do anything about it right now, but I will make a mental note of it and possibly email her mother and see if she would like to set up a time in the future to discuss possible treatment therapies. Out of the package came a pristine Occupy Wall Street shirt, a simple silk screen original piece, with a protester perched on the Bull from Wall Street. Simple. Beautiful. Classic.

I stepped back from the package and thought that quite possibly he had stepped up his game. I set the Wall Street shirt down and reached back into the package. Out came another white t-shirt, this one with a political polemic about the American injustice system and how it abuses those with no money. It is beautiful in its poetry. Plus, it is not stained or beaten in any way. Damn, I thought. Two shirts, both somewhat political, both undamaged by the riff and the raff and both of a caliber he is unknown for and certainly deeply in competition with any of the silly jingoistic pablum shirts I had sent from corporate Seattle.

There was another shirt in the package.

I took a breath and reached in. My hand grasped a mesh fabric and I will stop right there. One unwritten rule with my dear friend is cotton only. Unless I am sweating in it, I don’t wear fabrics made from some sort of nuclear reaction or however they make those sorts of lycra inspired clothing. I just don’t. I have never sent Mayo-Bill a blend of any sort, nor has he, until I pulled out a soccer jersey from Cameroon and lost my shit.

Quite possibly the best shirt/soccer jersey ever made, certainly the best one I have ever touched/laid my hands on and now, all of a sudden, I am at a loss for words. It is a green jersey, from the small nation of Cameroon, where Mayo-Bill’s beautiful wife is from, so dammit, I am going to guess there is some authenticity to it, which is going to drive me deeper into despair.

I am a cheater at heart. I believe we compete to win and winning is everything. For 30 years my friend Mayo-Bill and I have had a pretty subtle competition, the t-shirt war as I am sure it will soon become known by future historians. Sure, I have sent him shirts with various DNA samples and he has sent me shirts from crime scenes and war zones. All were sent with either humor or love, so we could forgive one another any sort of infection or disgrace. When my drunken daughter saw the green jersey and lusted after it as though it was yet another iced vodka tonic, I knew Mayo-Bill had basically not only shot the game winning swish, but turned, got in my face and said, “you got anything to say, sucka?”

Well, Mayo-Bill, actually, I do have something to say. As you know, as a young boy both my parents worked very long hours at the Clinic for Orphaned and Circus Freak Children. Because they were gone all the time, they hired a fat teenaged boy to guard, feed and teach us Latin. We called that slobby maladjusted boy Aunty Newt because all he ever did was tell us stories of the brilliant Barry Goldwater and feed us these god awful cookies called Fag Newtons or some such.

Well, Mayo-Bill, game on, because Aunty Newt is now the Republican Nominee for president of the United States of America and dammit, unless he wants me to tell the world of his teenage maturbatory habits, I am going to score me some Surpreme Court t-shirts and win this god damned competition once and for all. Just know going in, there is no way in hell I am touching Clarence Thomas t-shirt with a ten foot pole.
Game on. Sucka.