…All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt:
Eight Memoirs on Wearing Words
Michael Martone
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Magic Marker
There was an empty box printed in black ink on the white T-shirt you were given when you registered for the Fort Wayne Basketball Camp. Fort Wayne Basketball Camp, in all caps, a picket fence of letters bordering the blank box. I was thirteen, would attend my first classes at Franklin Junior High that fall. I would play basketball there for the 7th grade team and then the 8th grade and 9th. A forward, I was growing fast. Of course I wanted to play in high school, North Side, whose coach, By Hey, had led a team to state a few years before. All the high school and junior high school coaches coached at this summer camp. Now I had the uniform, the T-shirt with the blank blank across the chest. I was instructed to take the shirt over to a table and with a felt marker, a Magic Marker, print my last name, MARTONE, in block letters in the empty space. There were many tables set up all over the outdoor courts and many boys bent over them printing their names on puckered and wrinkling cotton cloth. I remember thinking that this might be the first drill of the summer camp. The sense of where you are in a bounded space was an essence of the game we came here to learn. The ink was permanent of course, would not wash off, and the shirts would be washed each night of the two-week session. The letters faded but not enough to prevent the various coaches manning the indoor and outdoor courts from calling out the names as we dribbled or passed or picked or shot. The camp was held at the Concordia Theological Seminary, a beautiful campus designed to mimic villages of Northern Germany on Fort Wayne’s outskirts. I didn’t know it then but the architect was Eero Saarinen and the campus buildings were high mid-century modern. All the rooflines ran east to west. All the roofs pitched at exactly 23.5 degrees, the tilt of the earth on its axis, the architect signature. I wore the shirt off the courts until I out-grew it, an advertisement of a self.
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Sandwich Man
You hardly ever see them anymore, sandwich signs. I am thinking specifically of the billboard placards, front and back, worn over the shoulders by a person walking back and forth on the sidewalk near the business advertised. The Sandwich Man. Charles Dickens himself coined the term, “a piece of human flesh between two pieces of paste board.” You see the remnants of the devolved sandwich sign on sidewalks still, the A-board, a wedge with hinges, static. It folds up and is carried out the front door to be deployed all day and then carried back inside at closing. And there are the human billboards who dance twirling, spinning signs on street corners. One near me comes out during tax season for a company called Liberty Tax dressed as the statue doing a kind of tango with an oversized arrow. And there is the robot replacement of the body by the air dancing tube man, tall boy balloon. But the Sandwich Man has mostly disappeared for reasons that have to do with the changing target audience—the automobile now (catching the eye of people in a passing car) instead of sidewalk traffic. The elasticity of public and private space is constantly twitching. The private space inside a car now moves through a deserted public space. Businesses now stake their claims in jump-cutting video billboards miles from their front doors. The human body itself and its very scale expands and contracts like the air-dancing tube man tall boy. Back when the sandwich men shuffled back and forth, I wonder what they wore beneath their cuirass of words. I imagine that they still dressed in the suit of the day, shabby probably, or why take on the task of being a sandwich man? Not casual dress, I imagine. In the public space, sans sandwich, the man would be camouflaged with coat over a shirt, collarless or collared with some kind of tie. The layers of dressing, dressed for the sandwich. Only in our day would we venture out in our own camouflage of casual attire, the undershirt not hidden under that outer shirt. The words of the sandwich sign transferred onto comfortable clothing, now a second skin, on the chest and back, now spelling out our own small business, our own logos, our catchy catch phrases that now go with us everywhere.
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Primeval Emoji
I was there then. There for the first sighting of the Smiley Face—two black dots and a curving line on a yellow circle. I can insert, pressing a few keys here, an illustration and illustrate that illustration with a string of variations now, the mouths and eyes tweaked and twisted, all the shades of emotions, the gestures of gestures, wink and nod, tears and teeth. But in the beginning, it was simply the Smiley Face. It emerged, or prototypes did in the 1950s and 60s, a New York radio station, an insurance company in Worcester. But the ball really got rolling in 1971 when a Franklin Loufrani trademarked and licensed the design. That summer I went to a high school journalism camp held at Indiana University and the Smiley was everywhere there. There were pin-backed buttons as well as the Smiley design was a natural fit for the thriving ecosystem of such buttons, often political, generated by the protests of the late sixties. But the buttons were accessories, add-ons, punctuation to the statement being made by the overall ensemble of fringed vests and bell-bottomed pants. But here I am trying to return to those days when the T-shirt transmuted. Today, of course, something printed on a T-shirt has been naturalized, is transparent, has always been there. Yes, the winged cross of the peace sign also was finding its way onto shirts and jerseys. But the peace sign was somber, subdued. The graphic seemed more a sketch, impromptu, distressed, in contrasted to the bright yellow hard edge of the Smiley Face. The shirts themselves were the blank slates that sported imperatives masked as a mere suggestion. The war raged on. Riots in the wake of assassinations. Killings on campuses. Protest posters and placards in dorm rooms. The Smiley faced T-shirt was nice. Nice. If words framed the image at all there was also the tattoo of “HAVE A NICE DAY.” It was a new kind of bloody shirt that pled: HAVE A NICE DAY.
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“Book” Store
I was back in Bloomington forty some years after I graduated from IU, and I headed over to the Memorial Union and the bookstore there. I loved that bookstore when I was a student and all the times I have returned through the years. I admit I wasn’t going there for books. I was on the hunt for postcards. I wasn’t hopeful. A postcard is a kind of analog tweet and digital tweets had pretty much quashed the paper medium. I knew too from other visits to other campus bookstores that their traditional function of selling textbooks for classes had disappeared. Digitized, textbooks had gone online as well. But trade books, book club books, best-sellers, political biographies, university press books, books written by faculty and visiting speakers seemed to be holding on. The Memorial Union Bookstore had two floors and a mezzanine. Once, back in my day, there were books of all kinds in every nook and cranny of its limestoned academic gothic layout. Some sundries too, of course, stationary goods—paper, pens, and pencils—art supplies, and racks of greeting cards and postcards, and stamps for the letters home. There was a US Post Office in the building. The PO was gone, I noticed going into the hotel lobby, the mailbox by the elevators shut up. This did not bode well. I wouldn’t be surprised then when I asked the clerk in the bookstore if they had postcards when the answer would be no. What did surprise me was that the clerk did not know what a postcard was. I turned around slowly scanning the main floor of the store and up into the open mezzanine above, and all I could see were T-shirts. Racks of T-shirts. T-shirts on mannequins, splayed on hangers to display telegraphic (there are no telegrams anymore) messages—Hoosiers, Indiana, the trident of IU—and/or numerals. Yes, there were hats as well, also in crimson, cream, and jackets on the walls, even red and white striped overalls. But T-shirts dominated. I asked the bookstore clerk who confirmed that they had no postcards once I described what a postcard was, if the bookstore carried any books anymore. And the clerk was pretty confident that no, there were no books. I thought I’d browse I told the clerk. I could always use another T-shirt. I liked getting a T-shirt or two from the college or university bookstores, a souvenir, when I visited campuses to give readings or classes. Most of those bookstores did not have postcards, and they all had T-shirts. Still, the bookstores had books. Sometimes, even my books. And sometimes the clerks at those colleges or universities wanted me to sign the books of mine they had. But now at Indiana University’s bookstore the metamorphosis had been complete. Not a book in the bookstore. Or so I thought. I did find a half dozen poetry titles in a mezzanine nook behind some black-on-black T-shirts on clearance. They looked to be leftover volumes from that summer’s writing conference. They were signed. I took a couple back down to the clerk along with one of the marked down black on black shirts. I found some, I said. “Wow!” the clerk said, not “ringing” me up, of course, but indicating where I should tap my card.
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Super Man
Years ago, I read a comic story about comic books that played with the conventions of the superhero story of Superman. It took seriously the described powers of the character and teased them out to their logical end. Take x-ray vison. In the “real” comic Superman could see through anything with his x-ray vision though everything except for lead. Lead would block the penetrating sight. In the parody, this Superman would use his x-ray vision and he would see through everything until the x-ray of the vison came to something made of lead. There it would stop. Hilarious. In this world x-ray vison was only good for seeing lead. So, Superman was also invulnerable to everything (save kryptonite) under a yellow sun. And in this other version even the letters, the words that appeared in the comic’s hero’s thought and speech balloons were also permanent, impervious. They did not disappear in the next panel but stuck around. Still sensitive to the force of gravity, however, they fell from the clouds of thought and speech, a rain of letters and exclamation points, and adhered to the shirts and suits of mortal characters, staining everyone’s clothing with layers of text, palimpsest of paragraphs. It turns out that the precipitation of Superman’s uncatchable speech was his ultimate strength, his most deadly weapon, his enemies enveloped by his immortal words. So many heroes in comic books don a kind of spandex T, sporting their logos or initials on their chests like hairy heralds. But in this alternate universe, the bad guys were bound up in graphic fabric—nets woven of expositions, exhortations, explanations. They were defeated by wreaths of writing, writhing under the weight of words. I think of that satire, but also think of the static and graphic letters in just the regular comic book. In the “real” comic world, the way the bodies and the words dance around each other. How they wrestle. How they overlap. How you can see though the language. How the stories become transparent film, peeled away like the layers of skin and instructions found in the laminated pages of anatomy texts.
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I’m With Stupid
Tagged T-shirts have evolved into their own Linnaean taxonomy. The messages break down into specific genera or at least accents of fragmentary grammar and syntax. There are cartography shirts that broadcast a place or team or a school, a zip or airport or area code. There is merch that is straight-up advertisement and merch that serves as souvenir advertising, an intersection of time and place and person inhabiting the shirt. The T-shirt as consolation or participation or cheap trophy. When I watch championship games—all the major sports—the winners are doled out a shirt inscribed with the team’s name and the game they just won, donning the gear before the real hardware is awarded—I always think that somewhere in the backrooms of the stadium or arena are boxes of shirts preprinted with the now losing opponents’ details. Those shirts ready to go if things had gone the other way will never see the light of day. Oddly, if they did, they would be much more valuable than the “winning” shirt, a rare misprint, an inverted Jenny. There are other kinds. The team building shirts that serve also as uniforms, the uniforms that promote a brand. The flag embossed political candidate shirt. But I am thinking here of the novelty T-shirt, camouflaged with the slippery shading of language itself, double taken double-entendre. BULLSHIRT in bold sans serif or DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD kerned in curves on a safety yellow shirt. There is the formula I Went to BLANK and all I got was this Lousy Shirt, the blank filled in with a place or action. This formula so wide spread that you can now get the Blank left Blank of the whole first clause replaced by an ellipsis. …AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY SHIRT. I like the meta quality of these messages. The wall of text often volleys a set up line in a large point size and the punch line reduced so you have to lean in, refocus. DO NOT READ THE NEXT SENTENCE—big and bold (and again language that meta, self-conscious of the artifice) and then the fine print: you little rebel. I like you. Or I HAVE ABS— and then this in tiny print—soluty no idea what I am doing. I like the what? Novelty of these shirts that play with not only the conventions of language and figures of speech but the conventions of printing. The play takes place in some space between the oral and the written as well as what can and cannot be spoken, what can and cannot be read. Who wears these shirts where pick-up lines are etched on the body not whispered in the ear? The famous pair of novelty shirts worn by a couple, side by side: I’M WITH STUPID says the first with an arrow pointing to the other wearing STUPID. It made me think just now of Romeo and Juliet and their introductory meeting printing out a formal sonnet in dialogue. T-shirts like these mine the joke in language, in communication. The humans who wear these novelty Ts are so quiet, deadpan, a kind of mime, waiting to see what you will say in the face of gesticulating words.
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RKO
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(This photo was taken in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1977, by Jennifer Jones.) |
Fifty years ago, between the classes I was taking at IU, my senior year, I walked around the campus and downtown Bloomington asking people on the street if they would like me to write poems for them then and there on the spot, on any subject they wanted. I had a yellow legal pad and a Bic ballpoint. I think I thought of it as performance art, a satire directed at the other student poets in my poetry workshop prefacing their poems with patter about how difficult it was to write this poem, how long it had taken. I think I thought then that those confessions of difficulty were another kind of performance piece but in the classroom. I don’t know. It was a fun challenge to play against type—the poet locked away in a garret, waiting for inspiration. I think I thought too about the audience question as well. Who reads poetry? Are there people outside my workshop who would read poetry, read the poetry I was writing for class? And what was the poet’s job? And what about the cash nexus. What was a poem worth? All the question you should ask, I think, when you find yourself with the luxury of time and space to play around with words and language. In any case, it was fun to do, and a way to deescalate for a moment the anxiety of the future. What would I do when I graduated? A few of my dormmates also wanted to join in and the four of us would hang around high traffic areas offering our services. Writing the poems was not that difficult. The hard part was approaching the customer/collaborator to get the poem going. We soon knew we needed some way to break that ice, and we quickly realized uniform T-shirts were the way to go. There were shops that catered to the fraternities and sororities all around campus. That year they were filming the movie Breaking Away in Bloomington—our little group sold poems outside the stadium to the extras watching the bike race. In the movie you can see the four protagonists have made special shirts for their team: CUTTERS in red letters on white T-shirts. We had gone to the same shop as the movie company had used. You had a choice of application, silkscreening or heat-transferred, iron-on letters. We went with silkscreen as we had some graphics as well and white ink on a black shirt. We had come up with calling ourselves RKO Radio Poets, a nod to the logo of RKO Radio Pictures with a pulsing antenna. We had all just seen Citizen Kane in a film class. On the back was an old car radio dial the different scales labeled AM, FM, and POEM. We had a slogan too: A POEM MUST NOT MEAN BUT BE 25¢. The shirts worked. We had metamorphed into performance poets instead of panhandlers. The T-shirts redefining the proximity of personal space. “Would you like a poem today?” By wearing the words, we cracked a code, had stumbled into Saussure’s semiotics. We were signs, embodying the theoretical ecosystem blooming in the linguistic classrooms of Ballantine Hall on the Bloomington campus. We had no idea from “Signs,” let alone what poems were or poetry. Clad in our T-shirts, we were animated signifier and signified, scratching on yellow legal pads, making a little scratch.
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Letter Man
I lettered. I lettered in high school, Fort Wayne North Side. Not in football, basketball, or track. I lettered in speech and debate. I like to say I was in the NFL. Not that NFL but the National Forensic League. The actual athletes were not too keen on the speech and debate team sporting letters. I didn’t have the big bold block “N” they had but I did have two—a script “N” for speech and a gothic “N” for debate. Back then, in the seventies, there were hard copy catalogues from companies that specialized in selling letters. They sold and shipped patches as well that pictured mascots or tabs where names could be embroidered, chevrons and stripes, fleece stars or lower case “C” s for a captain trim. I loved looking through the catalogue with the “official” decorations that presented not as a general store available to anyone, but as something else, proscribed merchandise that somehow one needed to earn, not simply purchase. These letters needed to be awarded, presented, displayed on the body that had been a crucible. Honored hagiography! Initiated initials! What was the actual proprietary “N” of my high school? The athletes were quite certain their teams’ letters counted. The letters of the speech and debate teams, they believed, not so much. Nothing was said and the various cliches and clubs always side-eyed each other as they circulated through the hallways and classrooms. The administration couldn’t be bothered as it was concentrated then on the length of hair and skirts.
Later, in college, I didn’t letter. Well, not exactly. At Butler University where most of the residental students were “organized,” living in sororities or fraternities, I wasn’t. I was living in the one dorm on campus and working as a “house boy” at the Kappa Kappa Gamma house. My mother, who graduated from Butler, had been a Kappa Apha Theta (The Oldest Greek Letter Fraternity Known Among Women) there, had been the president of the Beta Chapter house. She was very disappointed that I didn’t pledge. I did go through “rush” to please her. I was rushed by Tau Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Chi, Lambda Chi, Sigma Nu, Phi Kappa Psi, and Delta Tau Delta (the Delts). The Delts really wanted me to pledge. My mother, the Theta at Butler twenty-five years before, had been on the debate team there. And her debate team partner had been a Delt! The Greeks were so organized they leveraged any connection to woo new members. The Delts hoped the card they held would do the trick persuading me. It didn’t. And I didn’t pledge there or anywhere. Nor did I join Butler’s debate team. I probably could figure out how to reset this keyboard to type Greek letters instead of typing out their names. The Greek alphabet has that mix of mystery and familiarity. And The letters look like letters that would be chiseled in stone as they started out there. But, you know, I never signed up, and I am typing this up quickly, thinking about the next thing I am going to type. You’ll just have to imagine the look of the Alpha, the Omega. Those that did become brothers or sisters displayed their letters all the time. There was jewelry for wrists, necks, ear lobes and decals for the car windows. But the letters were also worn on clothing and hats. Most striking were the letters printed on plain T-shirts, an understated overstatement. The shirts would be in-house colors (there are always colors as well), the letters printed bold and black mostly unless the color of the shirt could backup white ink. I liked the mountain range of Tri Delt and how the “X”s of all the “Chi”s looked like kisses or cartooned eyes of the unconscious. As a houseboy at Kappa Kappa Gamma, I had a Kappa Kappa Gamma shirt. I didn’t want to serve the formal dinners. For that one wore a coat and tie. Gloves even! I washed the dishes, scrubbed pans and pots, stored the silverware in the back wearing my Kappa Kappa Gamma branded work shirt and rubber gloves. I have worked for colleges and universities my whole life since then. On the periphery of every campus there are these little boutique factories, a kind of type house, manufacturing Greek letters and applying them to apparel. At Butler, I did end up getting my own Greek letter shirt at a nearby custom shop in Indianapolis. Gamma Delta Iota. It stood for something. Not Kappa Kappa Gamma’s “Keys to the Kingdom of God” but for unorganized men’s dorm, “God Damn Independent.” I fled then to Indiana University, IU, and finished my degree there, an AB in English Literature. And then onto Johns Hopkins for a graduate degree. My mother told all her sorority sisters that I had gone on to Hopkins, letting them assume I was there for an MD. But there, I took a degree in creative writing. I have an M but also an A. An MA as I am a master of arts, a man of letters.
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Michael Martone's newest books are Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and Table Talk and Second Thoughts: A Memoir in Flashes and a collaboration with Matt Baker, An Interview With Michael Martone. Retired after forty years of teaching, Martone lives in Tuscaloosa, Below the Bug Line, and putters in his gardens.
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