The Best T-Shirt I Ever Owned
Stüssy, weed dealers and the 1990s
I used to not get jet-lagged coming back from Europe, but I suppose as you get older and more stuck in your ways, your circadian rhythm doesn’t take to being thrown off the way it did when you were younger and could just power through the impact switching up time zones has on you. I don’t think me of 15 years ago would have found myself sitting on my laptop at 4 in the morning, doing the mindless scrolling to stay awake because falling back to sleep for another hour would no doubt totally put my brain in a fog for the rest of the day, but I’m 42 and needed to entertain myself. The good old Wikipedia wormhole trick wasn’t doing it for me, the thing where you pick an entry and then see how long you can go clicking one link to another with the initial page as the start of a thread was too much reading for my tired mind, so I just did the most basic id pleasing thing I could think of and just looked at stuff I’d like to own. Old gold Dunhill lighters, vintage luggage stickers, Alice Coltrane albums on vinyl, and so on. Eventually, I found myself growing bored but not close enough to the time when I usually do my morning stretches and then have my morning coffee (I’m a big fan of routine), so I decided a little hunting for my two true grails was in order. So I started looking for them, my favorite t-shirt I’ve ever owned that I parted with when I was younger and regret now as an adult.
I’m a big believer in trying to reconnect with the clothes I used to love, it’s a way of keeping a narrative going. Certain things have always worked for me on a personal level for a reason, like baseball caps, canvas sneakers or rugby shirts. I just enjoy wearing them and always have. I can’t say this is something for everybody to try since I know there are those of us that maybe don’t care for the way we dressed when we were younger. And there are definitely limitations for me as well. I’m not going back to cutting a baggier pair of jeans just over the ankles and wearing a wallet chain that droops out of my back pocket so it can theatrically fling upwards when my friend takes a picture of me in the middle of pulling one of the couple of skate tricks I mastered, nor will I put a silver ball choker or Krishna bead necklace on again. But there are things I notice that still work for me. Longsleeve shirts, for example. I loved them when I was 16 and I love them now. The cut of a Barbour jacket or maybe some old barn coat appeals to me in a way things I picked up at thrift stores in 1997 did. I had a good understanding of what fit me when I was younger that I seemed to have lost in the tight jeans aughts, but it came back to me over the last few years and I’m thankful for that.
More specifically, there is one shirt that I could be cliche and compare to Ahab and his white whale, but that’s not really the case. I’m not roaming the information superhighway in search of this garment that have alluded me for years. I’ve had plenty of chances to buy it, but something has held me back each time. I have a lot of t-shirts, many of them vintage. I probably put too much mental energy into buying my t-shirts, but, then again, at least I’m not thoughtless about it. I try to make it a little more than just a purchase. That’s why I’ve started to think I’ve over-thought the shirt in question. I want to have the old Stüssy “Emancipate Yourself From Mental Slavery” shirt again, but just as I’m sometimes about to hit that purchase button when I see either of them in my size, I seize up and decided to close the tab.
Part of the reason I don’t get it is I will look back at teenage me wearing the shirt in Rastafarian flag colors with the Bob Marley via Marcus Garvey quote, skateboarding through the suburbs with some Noam Chomsky paperback I had in my back pocket but couldn’t totally understand and all I can think of is the Lonely Island “Ras Trent” sketch. But the shirt was right for me when I was younger and didn’t understand anything. What I mean by that is it fit me perfectly, it was my most solid go-to for three years. I have a body that is meant for somebody well over six-feet. I’m the runt of the litter. I’ve got hands that can palm a basketball and I wear a size 13 shoe. I have long arms for a guy who is 5’11, so the sleeves of many t-shirts often either look like they’re strangling my bicep—which is something some guys actually like because…it looks macho or something like that—or they fall in a place that makes it look like the shirt is a little too small for me—but it isn’t. It’s just my odd proportions. When I was still a growing boy, that Stüssy shirt was the only one that worked the entire time I had it, as my limbs started to stretch out and clothes from the previous year didn’t fit me so well whenever my birthday hit. It was also 100 percent cotton, it was incredibly comfortable and looked better with every wash as it slowly faded and the graphic peeled away.
But it’s how I came to own the shirt that was truly special. It was a trophy. I wore it with pride because its previous owner was an enemy of mine, a kid who I’ll call Jack. I hated Jack. His dad was a cop and a notorious asshole among the local skater kids. Jack wasn’t a skater and he wasn’t cool, but his dad carried weight in the town and his mom pampered him and let him buy whatever he wanted at the mall. But my guess is he came to possess the shirt through his older brother, a somewhat cool older guy who I assumed was the family failure. A known stoner who was a pretty decent snowboarder, my theory is Jack inherited the shirt from his sibling. The truly messed up thing was I never really cared much about Jack until at some point, he showed up to school wearing that Stüssy shirt I’d seen in a copy of Thrasher or Spin and wanted immediately. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to tell him to go back to wearing his Abercrombie hats and Coed Naked shirts and stop trying to dress like me and my friends. Jack had little to no impact on my life besides buying weed from him maybe once or twice when I was in a pinch, but there he was, becoming my enemy because he was wearing the shirt I wanted. I wanted to hurl the most 1990s of insults at him and tell him he was a poser.
But I didn’t. Because along with being the son of a cop, Jack was also a guy people bought weed from. In hindsight, it seems sort of genius. If your dad is on the police force you maybe have it in your head that if you get busted for selling drugs the punishment might be bad at home, but maybe daddy could take care of it and it doesn’t show up on your record. Do I know for sure that’s why Jack got into selling? No. I didn’t like the guy enough to talk to him beyond a few words here and there to probe his motivations. As far as I knew, he didn’t even smoke weed. He wasn’t really friends with any of the various stoners or weirdos in my school. He wasn’t quite a jock, either. His place in the ecosystem was local with parents of important standing in town, so he hung out with the more obnoxious-but-hard-to-define preppy-ish kids that always saw their members dominating school dance courts. If I recall, Jack was voted king of one of the less-important dances. Maybe spring fling, but definitely not the homecoming dance, he wasn’t that popular. Either way, I just didn’t like the guy and I hated that he had the Stüssy shirt I wanted.
So the whole trophy thing. Basically, I’m going to admit I’m not above low-level tactics here and I’ll risk making some of you think I was a little dick. But the truth is, I’m still pretty proud of how I came to own the shirt. It happened on a Saturday. I was riding my bike without any real destination in mind, and I ran into my friend Charlie. Charlie was the biggest stoner I knew. He had this cherubic face, sort of looking like a young Alfred Molina with perpetually red eyes and the stupidest, sweetest grin. I liked Charlie because besides being stoned all the time, the two things he loved were comic books and the Breeders. He was obsessed with the Breeders. Liker weirdly obsessed. Not that the Breeders aren’t one of the best bands to come out of the whole Gen. X college/indie rock world, but he was just into the Breeders. I don’t remember him listening to or talking about any other bands. It was odd to me, but at least it was a Deal sister project. If it was something shitty I maybe wouldn’t have liked Charlie as much. I ran into him around maybe 11 in the morning. His mom had brought him to the grocery store. He was walking around eating a bag of Twizzlers. I was there to get a soda. He asked me if I’d heard about Jack, about how his parents found out he was dealing weed because they found a thousand dollars in his sock drawer and decided to investigate further, eventually finding an Airwalk shoebox filled with weed in his closet. I’m not sure if Jack ever considered what would actually happen if his parents busted him, but the result feels sort of quaint and very ‘90s to me. I’m sure Jack didn’t feel that way about being shipped off to military school, and I don’t know if kids today live with the worry that their parents will send them to one, but I remember thinking “Man, Jack is the third kid this year to get sent to military school” when Charlie told me that. A year later, my own parents were looking at the option for me. I can’t even imagine how horrible that would have worked out.
I was processing the information when Charlie told me that Jack’s mom had thrown out all his CDs, took away his computer and was packing up all of his stuff and donating it to the thrift store in town. Maybe it was because I was so close to the most stoned kid I knew, but it took me a few more seconds to realize what that meant, that it was very likely that among all the relics of the life Jack once knew that the Stüssy shirt was going to be made available. So I made some excuse to get out of hanging with Charlie, got back on my bike and decided to skate out the thrift store sitting in a 24-7 diner in the same little shopping plaza. I had a perfect view from my table, a ten-dollar bill and nothing but time. I sat there for four hours, twitching because I kept ordering free refill after free refill of coffee, deflecting the server’s questions of whether or not I was too young to be drinking so much caffeine, and eventually I saw her pull up. Jack’s mom got out and Jack followed her. I could see her say something to him, he got out with his head down and walked to the trunk of the car, pulled out a box and carried it into the thrift store. That was my cue to jump into action. I left three bucks on the table and bolted out, walking so quickly that I made it to the store just as Jack and his mom were leaving. I don’t know why, but I gave Jack a little “What’s up” head nod. I didn’t like the guy, but it still sucked he got busted. I think there’s got to be a code among teens that getting busted sucks. It truly feels like one of the top worst things that can potentially happen to you besides never losing your virginity or never getting your license and having to bum rides from people until you’re 18.
But I couldn’t dwell on the sympathy too long. I had to keep my eyes on the prize. All was fair in love and t-shirts. Jack messed up. I couldn't fix that. All I could do was make sure the Stüssy shirt fell into the right hands. So I walked up to the person that worked at the store who was unpacking the box, sorta looked in there and saw my prize right there at the top, and gave the person an “Aw, gee. That’s a nifty-looking shirt. Could I please purchase that, my good sir?” Or something like that.
The guy looked at me and told me he had to “price everything.” I asked how long that would take. He told me he didn’t know. I asked him how much he was going to price the shirt at. He told me “Probably three dollars.” I asked him if I could just buy the shirt if he knew how much he was going to sell it for. He told me I could not.
Something clicked at that moment. Maybe it’s because I come from a long line of people that love to negotiate that instinct kicked in and I realized that there are no real rules here, nothing was keeping this guy from selling me this shirt besides the fact that I probably gave off an air of annoying, smart-ass kid. So I backed off. I said no problem and went about browsing through the store’s large collection of used copies of Whipped Cream by Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, old coffee mugs and tried on several pairs of pants, throwing caution to the wind that I might get what my friends and I called the “Village Itch” from wearing second-hand stuff without washing it first. I was trying to buy my time, waiting as long as I could until, finally, it happened. I watched as the guy put the Stüssy shirt on an old wire hanger and put it on the rack. I crept slowly towards it, waited for him to look away because I didn’t want to give him any reason to not let me get what I wanted, and I grabbed it. Two minutes later, after waiting behind a woman who was trying to get a few bucks knocked off a used VHS player because the rewind button was missing, I paid my three dollars and I had my shirt.
I owned that Stüssy shirt for about three years. During that time I went through countless band shirts, at least four shirts that said “Vegan straight edge” on them even though I was only vegan straight edge for a few months, one shirt that said “I got crabs” on the front and then the address for a crab house on the back, and a handful of others that I truly believe would fetch anywhere from $500 to a thousand dollars today if I still had them. I lived in t-shirts as much as I could, but that Stüssy shirt was it. It was the best shirt I ever owned. I loved that thing up until the day I took it off to go swimming in a river, and when I got out it was gone. It just vanished. My friends decided somebody must have taken it and that it wasn’t a big deal because I could just go back to the house and get another shirt. We were young, it was summer, it wasn’t a big deal for me to walk around without a shirt on for a few minutes.
But I’ve always thought the excuse that my t-shirt was laying on the ground one minute, and then when I went back to get it…nothing, was a little flimsy. Somebody had to take it, I assume. I don’t know who. My two friends were with me in the water, so it wasn’t like one of them stole it or had played a trick on me and just forgot to give it back. We also didn’t see anybody take it. Nobody noticed anything suspicious or anybody at all, really. We’d been swimming in a pretty quiet spot that we knew pretty well and didn’t usually attract visitors very often. One of my friends said it was probably just some random jerk who thought it would be funny to steal a kid’s shirt, and that’s probable. But all these years later, when I’m thinking about pulling the trigger on an even more vintage version of the shirt I owned three decades ago, I usually think about how dumb I’d look as a middle-aged white guy wearing it. But this last time I had another thought. It was silly, I know, but I started thinking about how I should have taken the shirt disappearing the first time as a sign. I think deep down I always felt bad for being sort of a vulture just looming over Jack’s head, waiting to snatch the shirt from him and finally getting my chance after he got busted for dealing weed. So I decided it was time to finally close the book on the Stüssy shirt for good. I wasn’t going to troll eBay or Grailed anymore looking for one. It was the past, a nice reminder of being young and dumb enough to be a white kid in the suburbs in a shirt with the Rastafarian flag colors on it and not having a care in the world.