Just wanted to share this wonderful article with the rest of you. It's imagery like this that helps me find inspiration within my own writing skills..."Shirt-worthy"
There is only one acceptable way to own a Ramones T-shirt. This is to have attended a Ramones concert, sweated, bled, transcended and then purchased one at a merchandise table en route to the concert-hall exit. (Preferably at the Rainbow Theatre, London, New Year’s Eve 1977, but that’s not a deal breaker.)
The closest I ever came to owning one was when, as a minor, I borrowed my older brother’s shirt from the “Pleasant Dreams” tour, his first-ever rock concert, which he attended with the brother of the B-level pop starlet Rachel Sweet and at which he purchased this garment with his last dollars. What I didn’t realize at the time was how firmly that shirt would establish a complicated precedent. Rock ’n’ roll paraphernalia had to be hard-won, meaningful and scented with personal experience. It required a depth of symbolic thought — something like what Bob Seger probably goes through when browsing at a Chevrolet dealership. Later, I attended several of the band’s shows myself, but it seemed too easy just to walk up and buy a shirt. Or maybe it was that none of the shows were epic enough to justify it. The iconic shirt had to be earned, on both sides.
I was comfortable with the fact that I did not own one. The self-deprivation reinforced standards of cultural behavior that were important to me. Not that anyone else would notice, since no one ever notices when you’re not wearing a particular item of clothing, unless that item is your pants. But I had internal street credibility, which, in Ohio, where I live, is sufficient.
Then I had children, which involves reconsidering everything you once believed to be true. (The relative grossness of vomit, for instance. Before parenthood, vomit is not considered Something to Catch in Midair, Barehanded.) So when my son asked for a Ramones T-shirt for his 10th birthday because he “wanted one,” the request was so culturally complex that I chose not to probe it. Instead I just headed to the mall.
I’m not one of those cool detached persons who pretend they don’t know that such a thing as Hot Topic exists. I knew about the store. Totally knew. It’s like a punk-rock version of Foot Locker. But I’d never glanced inside one. Not because I was above it. More like parallel. It contained things that once defined an entire value system but that I now no longer thought about.
Entering Hot Topic required a psychological recalibration. I passed into a room padded with shirts: the Germs, Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, the Subhumans — punk-era bands that barely ascended to “underground” status and were now benefiting from the contemporary marketing of the obscure.
The tall stack of Ramones T-shirts was somehow familiar and almost heartwarming. It wasn’t nostalgia I felt. Nostalgia requires a past. This past never existed for me. I saw these shirts on other people, Californians mostly, in the pages of somebody else’s copy of Maximum Rock ’n’ Roll. These days, things that should be rare are startlingly available. Could it be, I wondered, that my children will never have to struggle? And that Hot Topic is the metaphor for this? I wanted this to be true as much as I wanted this not to be true.
I dug through the stack. It ended at Adult Small. He’d have to grow into it. I took it home, wrapped it and set it with the other packages of 10-year-old-boy gear.
He wore it for the first time to a friend’s cookout. The kids ran off to play, and the parents chatted on the patio. Soon he came running, his forearm half-covering his eyes, the conflicted gesture of a 10-year-old boy Trying Not to Cry, which, if you are not made of obsidian, will break your heart in four seconds.
“What is it?” I asked. He twisted himself sideways, pulling the tail of his shirt out to show me.
“The fence,” he exhaled over the cliff of his throat.
There was a jagged rip, maybe two inches, trailed by a thread of hem. We dads locked eyes in simultaneous understanding.
“No,” one said. “You just made it better.”
I wanted to explain that very truth — that just as emotional pain brings us closer to God, so a rip in our Ramones T-shirt brings us closer to Sid Vicious. But in a moment like that, the notion of conveying wisdom is as relevant as trigonometry offered to a quicksand victim.
“We can get another one,” I said.
Which we did. Obtaining a replacement was a mere errand, devoid of ethical-cultural implications, $20, cleanly exchanged.
And this is how I ended up owning a Ramones T-shirt, a little snug, with a rip in the bottom, and wearing it with a clean conscience. Because no responsible father ever wastes a perfectly good shirt.
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