Courtney Maum

Writer
Berkshires, Massachusetts

My father’s Ralph Lauren cardigan is age-stained and moth-nibbled, the cuffs are all stretched out. Although I have no recollection of my father wearing it, it corresponds to the type of man he was when he was still married to my mother: a long-legged, rare-steak eating, tennis playing man who belonged to clubs with letter-pressed stationary in royal blue and cream. He wore Fila windbreakers and white swimsuits and he listened to the Bee-Gees. He liked his swimming pools hot.

My father is not this man any longer. The change started when I entered high school, when I was living with him and his new wife. They were trying to have babies. They were trying to re-brand. They sold the oriental carpets and the uncomfortable antique furniture my mother favored and they upholstered a sectional sofa entirely in fleece. They started using the word “rec room” really often. My dad got an eBay account and spent his free time bidding on reinforced athletic socks and synthetic fur throws. When I was in tenth grade, they upgraded from a CD player that could hold three discs to one that could hold six. They loaded it with new wave country music: Tim McGraw, Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flatts. By the time I graduated high school, they’d had three new children. My father added a turquoise bear paw to my stepmother’s silver feather charm bracelet for every one. I went off to college. I majored in Comparative Literature. And then I moved to France.

By the time I moved back to the US in 2005, my dad and stepmom had relocated from Greenwich, Connecticut to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The memories of my father as a man who belonged more—stylistically speaking—to “heroine collegiate” than “country casual” became incongruous with the person who had my old piano bench re-upholstered in his favorite pair of jeans.

The first time my parents met my now-husband, the airline lost his luggage on our flight over from France. He showed up at my father’s house in a thin shirt and a light jacket, shivering from meet-the-American-parents-nerves and a cold caught on the plane. My father came down the staircase shouting, “Diego’s gonna love this,” old cardigan in hand.

Diego put the sweater on in front of my stepmother and father. They both said it looked great. The arms dangled a little bit and one of the white buttons fell to the floor when Diego tried to button it. It did look great.

I was really jealous when my dad gave him that sweater. It suited Diego’s style perfectly, and aside from being a little large on him, it was an appropriate gift. All my life, my father never seemed to “get” me, and his lack of comprehension was manifested by absurdly impractical presents. For my sixteenth birthday, he tried to give me a Vietnamese pot bellied pig that belonged to a neighbor. Another year, at Christmas, he gave me a print-out of an item he’d won for me on eBay: a giant, wooden canoe. It was located in Ithaca, New York. “Pick up only.” I lived in Brooklyn at the time, five hours away from it, and nowhere near a lake.

I instilled a lot of meaning into the handing over of that sweater. I felt like my father recognized something in Diego that he’d never been able to connect with in me. But now that I’ve come to learn the reasons behind some of his odder presents (the pig, for example, was part of a revenge plan against my mother for getting so much alimony because she had custody of me at the time, and thus, would be the pig’s primary caretaker. It never occurred to him that I’d turn it down), I realize that the sweater was just a three-pound, thick-knit relic he wanted out of the house.

In the last couple of years, my father has started referring to me in conversation as “our oldest,” or “our daughter” when introducing me to people I’ve never met. He’ll say this with his arm around my stepmother, and I don’t interject. I’m sure it would be more convenient for them if I was their daughter. In his perfect world, I’d be the kind of girl who loves Taylor Swift and has red hair and grey eyes like his other kids. Instead, I’m a dark-haired, Taylor Swift-despising reminder of a past he can’t rewrite.

I spent a lot of time—a decade—being angry at my father because he cheated on my mother with a woman he loved more. And then I fell out of love with someone who still loved me, and I experienced what it was like to live inside the emptiest version of myself. Today, I try to find the humor in my father’s missteps. I want to forgive him.

Sometimes I take the sweater out of my husband’s closet and put it on. I move around the house in it, like a child playing dress up. Like a child playing house.

The humor columnist behind Electric Literature’s “Celebrity Book Review,” Courtney Maum is a frequent contributor to Tin House, Bomb and The Rumpus. She has just finished a novel written entirely from the point of view of the celebrity recording artist, John Mayer, called “John Mayer Reviews Things.”

Sadie Mintz at 18 years old (left) and at 105 years old (right).

Sadie Mintz

Entrepreneur
Hollywood, CA

I used to rent to the movie studios. I had a small shop that was in between two buildings, on Hollywood Blvd. It was called “The Hollywood Jewel Box.”  It was really only wide enough for one person to walk into, and I stood behind a little counter at the far end. The jewelry was displayed on shelves that had been made by digging into the red brick of the buildings on either side, and I used to be so afraid that someone would see all the red dust we hosed out of the store when we made the shelves. Mary Pickford was my landlady. I would make some money at the store, in addition to what my husband Sidney earned as a wardrobe man.  We would also rent our jewelry to the movie studios – back then, the studios did not have as much of their own costumes and things. We had two sons, both of whom we put through college and medical school by renting jewelry.

In one of the two bedrooms in my modest house in Hollywood, California, I had tray after tray of shallow shelves built into the wall.  All the drawers were behind sliding wooden doors, so it just looked like the room had a big closet. Every tray was lined with satin or velvet, and it was full of fake jewelry! Everything you could imagine: a drawer for just emerald jewelry, one for ruby, one for multicolored stones, drawers for just earrings, ones for bangles and ones for necklaces. It was like a candy shop with every kind of color, shape and size.  There was even a drawer for Indian and “native” jewelry (which my husband Sid fashioned from bones saved from our Sunday night chicken dinners).

Marilyn Monroe, Some Like It Hot

On one occasion in the 1950s, I rented several pairs of the same rhinestone earrings. Evidently they were worn by Marilyn Monroe and several other cast members in “Some Like It Hot.” My husband and I made the earrings. We were supposed to make them with a lot of rhinestones, very noticeable. These earrings were the very same that Marilyn Monroe had on in the famous LIFE magazine photograph of her, which I always kept framed on the wall.

LIFE Magazine, April 20, 1959

Years later, I sold my inventory back to the studios. I kept some things for the grandkids – I had three granddaughters, and they used to love to come play in the drawers. But I did keep those rhinestone earrings. I tried to have them sold by Christie’s or Butterfields – I don’t remember which auction house. They agreed it was the same design, but I had no proof that these were the very same earrings worn by the stars, so they could not “authenticate” them. I wonder what more information they needed since I was already in my mid-nineties and remembered everything! My eldest granddaughter even got me a clip of the video showing the earrings. These were indeed the same earrings. I ended up having them sold at auction by the Screen Actors Guild, which was more lax on the authenticity rules.

Even though I don’t own them anymore, I can still see them on my picture of Marilyn Monroe, and they remind me of the Golden Age of Hollywood, when we rented accessories and jewelry to all the stars, from Mae West (she gave me a beautiful crystal and silver decanter as a gift) to Marilyn Monroe towards the last few years of my rental business. At that time, Hollywood really was magical. The movie stars were all so glamorous, much more so than today. They sparkled like princesses, and they were so elegant. In those days, ladies had etiquette and dressed in lovely hats and, of course, jewelry. When I see that picture, I remember the Hollywood Jewel Box, and what a treasure trove it was during that Golden Age of Hollywood.

Sadie Mintz is the 105-year-old entrepreneur behind the Hollywood Jewel Box who made the earrings Marilyn Monroe wore on a 1959 LIFE Magazine cover.

David Sax

Writer
Toronto, Canada

Ghetto. Ski School. God. Country.

The Ghetto was a lightless basement apartment buried in the Kilamanjaro condominium complex, a weekly vacation rental at Falls Creek, a ski resort in Victoria, Australia.  It had low ceilings, no windows, particleboard walls, a few bare light bulbs, a galley kitchen, two bedrooms with bunks, and a bathroom with hot water that disappeared after the first month.  Jamie was a DJ and soul aficionado from the north of England, Sam a foul-mouthed Scottish pup straight from high school, and Ryo was the son of a Kyoto salaryman.  None of us had ever been to Australia before, and we knew no one. It was the Australian winter of 2000, and I was about to turn 21.  (Oh yeah, and there was Nigel, an Aussie wannabe playboy intermittently crashing every few weeks.)

The four of us, all ski instructors, moved there at the start of the season when we were denied staff housing, which apparently went to the more senior instructors, who, it should be said, were Austrians, a pure mountain race that dominates ski schools worldwide.  Cast off down the mountain (literally, the place was a couple hundred feet downhill from the other instructors), we were placed in the hands of Marni, Kilimanjaro’s eccentric owner.  A sixty something year old, surgically preserved nymphomaniac who never let her cleavage go unexposed, Marni lived in a master suite four stories above us, along with her thirty-something-year-old boyfriend JJ (an apartheid-era South African soldier), and her ex-husband John, who had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam, a professional ski racer in Aspen, and was now betting on horses via some complicated video link, looking like a pickled version of George Hamilton.

Marni’s deal was straightforward: we could live in the Ghetto, rent free, as long as we cleaned the condominiums each Sunday.  Within a week, we bonded as men who live in confined spaces often do, quickly becoming an adopted family, like the scrappy crew of an army tank rolling its way across the plains of Europe, leaving a trail of pungent ski socks, Victoria Bitter beer cans, and inside jokes in our wake.  We ate every meal together, skied together, worked together, drank together, pulled Sam out of drunken fights together, drank more together, and cleaned Kilimanjaro hung over together.  Each morning, we’d awake to Bill Withers’ Lovely Day , howling Bill’s last “dayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy” as we stepped out the door into the snow, or, more often, freezing rain.

Around the mountain, we became known as The Ghetto Crew, and soon acquired a sort of Dangerfield-esque reputation as the scruffy outcasts in the polished ski school.  We had our supporters: Jade – Sam’s girlfriend, turned caring den mother; Tony, the elder hippie ski school supervisor; Elise, the welcoming bartender.   We even had an oath of descending allegiances–Ghetto, Ski School, God, Country– patterned after the Marines’ (Unit, Corps, God, Country) which we’d picked up from A Few Good Men.

The Saturday before I went back to Canada, we made a big dinner at Marni’s place (Ryo had cooked in Japan) and afterward threw a big party in the Ghetto, filling it with Jaggermeister, smoke, and ski bums.  The four of us dressed the same – in surf shorts and flip flops – and had died our hair orange with peroxide for the occasion. I have a clear memory of Jamie, falling in the slush in his shorts, screaming “Ghetto, Ski School, God, Country!” over and over, until we had to carry him home.

The next morning, we got to scrubbing shower tiles and making dozens of beds in a haze of liquor fumes and exhaustion. Our bodies spent from the work and hangovers, with fingers raw from powdered bleach, we trudged back down into the dank of the Ghetto for our last night as comrades.  We each selected an item of clothing to trade with each other.  I got Ryo’s green t-shirt, Sam’s Scottish indoor dry skiing shirt, and Jamie’s Austrian Addidas top (which he regrets to this day).

The next winter, Sam was working in Whistler, British Columbia, and we met up when I was on spring break.  It was the first time I’d seen any of the Ghetto crew, and after a few exchanges of gossip and news, we kind of realized it was also one of the first times either of us had been together without Ryo and Jamie.  “I’ve got something for you,” Sam said, pulling a long sleeve t-shirt out of his bag.  “Marnie made these after you left, and gave them to all of us.  Sorry about the tear and blood on the arm, I wore it one night and a dog bit me.”

The white, hooded, long sleeve jersey had been designed by Jamie, with the Kilimanjaro logo, our names, and the slogan “Ghetto Crew…we cleaned ‘em up”.  I didn’t really know what to say, and Sam kinda felt that too.  The Ghetto was thousands of miles away, as were all of us, scattered once again to our respective corners of the earth.  Aside from some fading photos and minidiscs mixes Jamie made, the shirt was all that was left of the Ghetto Crew.

David Sax is a journalist and writer in Toronto, Canada, who still wears the Ghetto t-shirt during ski trips.

A photo of a photo of me wearing the Calhoun School t-shirt in high school

Stephanie Diamond

Artist
New York, NY

A few months ago I brought my Calhoun School t-shirt into my psychic class for a reading. I believe that every person is born with an intuitive sense so I’d say I was born with this ability just like everybody else. In the last couple of years I have chosen to focus on bringing my own psychic abilities to the forefront of my life.

This t-shirt is the oldest thing I own and I got it when I was in the fourth grade.  I made sure to get an adult-sized extra large so I could wear it to sleep.  The package with the t-shirt was delivered to school and when I pulled my huge shirt out of the box, my teacher, Jolly, commented that I should consider ordering another one in my size.  With a large grin I disagreed with her. This was just my size.

I slept in this shirt until it was too small to wear as a nightshirt. I began wearing it as a regular piece of clothing when I was in high school.  In college I wore the shirt inside out, as I no longer wanted to wear any advertisements on my body. When I was a sleep-away-camp counselor, I had it on all the time because by that point, it was faded and threadbare, and worn out-looking t-shirts were stylish.

That day in my psychic class, the process we were using was psychometry, an intuitive technique that involves holding or touching objects or photographs to gather information with the  idea that over time you can sense the stories and experiences connected to these objects. Using psychometry is a gateway into the past, present or future.

The teacher had us choose partners, exchange objects and close our eyes while she asked us very specific questions about our partner’s object, which we answered internally. When we were finished we opened our eyes and took turns sharing out loud with our partners. The last question the teacher asked was, “What do you see in the future for this person?” I remember that question clearly because typically when I am giving a reading I don’t retain any information afterwards; instead I let it flow though me.

My class partner spoke to me about my shirt being worn while playing soccer or doing something active that I loved, which I connected to my dance practice. I dance the 5 Rhythms which is a ecstatic dance movement meditation practice. I began eight years ago and dance two to three times a week. Wherever I go I make sure I dance. Then she spoke very specifically, and accurately, about how I create communities and am often a magnet for connecting people in a communal setting.

I haven’t worn the t-shirt in 20 years. If I were to put it on again, it would be filled with so many stories that it might just rip (or maybe it’s just that old). When I picture it in its current resting place, the read I get on it is to stop reading it and let it rest.  It has had a long life.

Stephanie Diamond is a New York-based artist, adjunct professor, and community builder whose work has been shown at MASS MoCA, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum of Art, MoMA/P.S.1, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. She started the Listings Projects, a housing and studios for rent e-newsletter that’s become a staple in the art community.

Jennifer Macgregor Dennis

Artist
New York, NY

My best friend Chrissy and I were on a nearly deserted beach in Mazunte, in Mexico, when this man comes up and tries to sell us a carpet. I was like, “Poor guy,” and I ended up buying this carpet. It was huge – about a yard and a half wide and three yards long. Why would I buy a carpet when I’m backpacking through Central and South America for eight months? But I did. And in every hotel or hostel, we would put the carpet down to make ourselves at home. We would also take our carpet with us on all our adventures. It became the magic carpet. We’d unroll the carpet wherever we were and invite strangers to sit on it and exchange stories.

After Mexico we went to Guatemala where I found a pair of hand woven trousers. I would wear them most days because, since I was traveling, I didn’t have many clothes with me. They were soft and the most delicious thing to wear.

We ended up in the hills in San Augustine, in Colombia, a tiny village and one of the most magical places I’ve ever been. On one particular day, we met Carlos David. He hair was swept back; he was macho and strong but he was also beautiful. Carlos was a horse whisperer, kind of like a guide. He could control horses, even if the people riding them had never ridden a horse before. He could control six horses at a time! We spent the day hiking with him on the hills and we took the carpet with us. That day, he introduced us to his lovely, kind friend, Jose, who was a hunchback with a really big hunch. We invited both of them to sit on the carpet with us and Carlos told us stories about the hillside. And I was wearing my pants. My magic pants with my magical carpet. I practically felt like I was flying because I was so happy. It made me feel like Aladdin.

This magical day was also my friend’s birthday party, another reason why it felt so special. Carlos David, Jose and I wound up throwing her a surprise party with some of their local friends. So Jose, with his hunchback, Carlos David who is a horse whisperer, a Colombian man who lived in the forest with a thick beard and another guy wearing a pixie hat all came. And me and my friend. What a night.

During this time I was reading The Hobbit. I found it in a bookshop just before we arrived at that tiny village and it had been years since I read it. So there I was with my magic carpet wearing my Aladdin pants, reading The Hobbit while in the hills of Colombia, meeting these men with beards and hunched backs who lived in the woods and wore pixie hats and communicated with animals.

Originally from Scotland, Jennifer Macgregor-Dennis now lives in New York where she paints and teaches yoga.

Matt Wolf

Documentary filmmaker
Brooklyn, NY

I wasn’t one of those intuitively alternative teenagers. I required some edification. Typically I was in a Gumby, No Fear, or Stussy t-shirt and oversized Gap jeans. My hair was long and parted in the middle, but I wasn’t a skater. I went to a punk show at the YWCA once, but I was too self-conscious to speak to anybody. I was just your run-of-the-mill angsty gay overachiever in San Jose, California.

A few of those intuitively alternative types gave me some tips. One being the thrift stores Savers and Crossroad, across the street from each other on Bascom Avenue and San Carlos, conveniently walking distance from my house.

I’m not sure how I made the conceptual leap to understand that new things were lame, and that old clothes were cool. But that idea sunk in, and I started wearing other people’s junk and putting the nihilism I felt on the inside, right out there for others to see.

The most important part of my identity growing up as a teenager was music. At first I found out about bands by going to Streetlight Records, and choosing music by the best album art. That approach kind of worked, leading me to Sonic Youth and Wire. And as I amassed some knowledge, other young people in the know pointed me in specific directions, one being Music for the Masses by Depeche Mode.

I’m not sure if you’d call Depeche Mode goth music. But in high school I worked at a definitively goth coffee shop called Café Leviticus, in a former bank. It was gay-owned—my bosses wore black clothes with plunging necklines, rosary, and eyeliner. I’d call them “casual Goths.” I think they also might have been shooting up drugs in the former bank’s vault, but this I cannot confirm.

Thursday nights were “gay night” or “goth night,” or some sort of blurry hybrid in between. Basically it was the busiest night of the week, and all the college-age gay and bisexual kids who wore eyeliner would congregate out front and order café mochas. I wouldn’t have ever had the courage to go by myself, but working as a barista gave me a convenient excuse to soak in the scene.

At that time I had two “uniforms”—an undersized Malcolm X t-shirt to convey my radical politics, and this Depeche Mode t-shirt that would portray my casual goth sensibility. I would later grow up to be at ease in many an alternative gay coffee shops from coast to coast. But Café Leviticus and this t-shirt paved the way.

Matt Wolf is the Director of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell.  He is currently at work on the film TEENAGE about the invention of teenagers based on a book by Jon Savage.  He recently made the film I REMEMBER about the artist and writer Joe Brainard.

Fiona Helmsley

Writer
New Haven, CT

The slip is Christian Dior. I could never afford such finery. I got it at a thrift store while I was living at a Women’s Halfway House. Most of my housemates did their shopping at the thrift store, but for my roommate, it was the first time in her life that she had ever even been in one. She viewed shopping there as another benchmark for how far she had fallen. I heard her crying in the dressing room as she tried on a pair of pants.

I wore the slip the first time I had sex with the only man I ever really planned to marry. I say really because in most serious relationships before the age of twenty-five, the idea of marriage is floated. You’re young and naïve and don’t understand how hard it is to sustain a relationship.

I was feeling shy, and paired the slip with a fur coat that had been my great-grandmother’s. I used to justify wearing the fur by saying that the animal would have been dead by now anyway. Whenever I wore it outside, I was always afraid that someone was going to step from the shadows and splatter me with paint.

That night, I looked like a lost Beale. With his preppy good looks and weakness for cocaine, he reminded me of a bad-assed Kennedy. He had a large, circular scar in the middle of his forehead from a drunk driving accident. I loved the scar, and when I didn’t, I said I thought it made his head look like a dented can.

It took me ten years to tap out to drugs. I give up, you win, and I’m not playing against you anymore. My fiancé used to compare himself to Fat Elvis who only sees Thin Elvis when he looks in the mirror. Fat Elvis who has yet to notice that the venues are getting smaller, that the seats are no longer being filled. In an interview once, Courtney Love said, “I’m not going to be Judy Garland and die in front of a thousand clowns.” The quote makes me think of my fiancé, the 1,000 clowns his own reflection in a funhouse mirror.

We never made it to the wedding. We were mismatched in all ways except for drugs. But rereading this now, maybe we weren’t.

The Beales were first Bouviers, and the most famous of all Bouviers married a Kennedy.

Fiona Helmsley is a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry. Her first book There Are A Million Stories In The Naked City When You’re A Girl Who Gets Naked In The Naked City was released in 2010.

Stephen Elliott

Author/Director
San Francisco, CA

I’ve had this backpack for seven years. I got it while on a shopping spree at the Nike employee store. How I got a shopping spree at the Nike employee store is another story, one I don’t quite understand myself. But everybody I knew got a free pair of shoes that week.

The thing about the bag is it was never released. I say it’s a prototype, which is not exactly accurate. There were a couple of them at the employee store and that was it. Price tag: $200. More than I would ever pay for a fashion accessory, or it was. Recently I bought a scooter.

The thing about the bag is it falls apart and I take it to the shoe repair. Maybe that’s why the bag was never released. People don’t believe it’s Nike until I show them the swoosh just inside the leather strap. I have to get it stitched a couple times a year. I had a canvas liner installed inside the bag but soon the bag will be too busted to contain it. Still, I keep fixing it because every week someone comments on it and I’ve never had something like that before and I probably won’t again. I mean, no one has ever commented on my shirt or my pants or my shoes. I don’t have much style. I still wear white t-shirts and blue jeans almost every day, like I did in grammar school. Though maybe that will change as well. Recently I’ve been wearing grayish and dark blue t-shirts.

I didn’t realize this bag was so stylish, though now it seems obvious. It takes me a while to recognize beauty; that’s why, as a writer, I edit so compulsively.

Now I’m not sure what to do. The bag needs to be retired, or undergo a severe re-stitching. I’ve spent more than $200 on this free thing. I can’t afford to lose my keys and wallet. I shouldn’t use the bag for heavy things, like my computer and hard drives, but I do. I don’t have another one.

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries. He founded the Rumpus, recently started Letters in the Mail, and his directorial debut, Cherry, will be released by IFC.

Sabrina Gschwandtner

Artist/Writer
Brooklyn, NY

Bathrobes are transitional. You put them on temporarily, between waking and eating breakfast, showering and dressing, undressing and sleeping.

I’ve worn this bathrobe for the past ten years, during countless daily transitions, and through major turning points in my adult life.

I started wearing it as a guest at my boyfriend’s apartment. He wanted me to feel comfortable, so he offered me a choice between two robes: this cotton, Kimono-style robe with a blue and white pattern and billowing sleeves or a tan one that’s monogrammed with his four initials. I wasn’t particularly drawn to either one, so I chose un-monogrammed because it seemed more neutral.

When we moved in together, the robe was unpacked and moved to my side of the closet. That’s when I started thinking of it as mine, and not a borrowed item.

I wore my robe less often after we got married. I guess my sense of modesty waned.

When I got pregnant, I wore it a lot. It was the only garment that comfortably and comfortingly fit during my entire forty-two week  pregnancy.

On summer nights I would put it on and turn sideways in front of our full-length mirror, feeling around for a bump. By late winter, after rejecting other clothes for being small, impractical, or uncomfortable, I would put on the bathrobe and go lie down, bypassing the mirror altogether.

I brought the bathrobe to the hospital when I gave birth. I packed enough clothes to live there for a month, but the robe is the only thing I remember wearing. I can’t look at it now without flashing back to one particular hour of my twenty-six hour labor, when I put on the bathrobe and announced to my nurse Bianca, “We have to get out of here!” We left my husband, mother, and Doula in birthing room #2 and crossed the hall to room #5, which was empty and had a better view. There I began walking in circles around the room, which birthing books call  “a spontaneous ritual,” an activity women come up with in the moment to deal with labor pain. I carefully timed each step so that my circle would last the length of a contraction. I remember starting each new circle by the window thinking, I just have to make it back to the window again…

I wore the robe so much during the first few months of my son’s life that I’m sure he thought it was my skin. He was at risk of jaundice when he was born, so I was advised to breastfeed him hourly. I didn’t have time to do anything but breastfeed and sleep, so instead of changing my clothes I just wore the robe around the clock, mostly unaware of whether it was day or night. I would pull open the bathrobe and nurse while my husband spoon-fed me chicken salad and fruit, trying not to spill any of it on our kid’s head.

Gradually my days and nights separated again, and now the bathrobe is my morning uniform. I pull it on at 5 am when my son wakes up, and during the early morning hours before his first nap, he uses it as a communication system. He tugs on the hemline and looks at me pleadingly when he wants to be lifted up. He reaches for the robe at my knees when he wants me to help him walk. And he grabs it and rolls over onto his back when he’s feeling tired. I’d like to say that after I put him down to nap in his crib I disrobe, shower, and get dressed for the day, but usually I fall back into bed and wake up an hour later with the robe twisted around me.

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a Brooklyn-based artist and writer.

Adam Shecter

Artist
Brooklyn, NY

I made this shirt when I was like 17 or 18, when I was a painfully enthusiastic teenager. I wore it all the time in the 90s. It’s the first shirt I ever drew on and wore. I was really impressed with my own drawing at the time, although looking at it now makes me shudder somewhat.

I was just deeply confident about all the work I did at that age and super excited about the art and music I liked. I collected lots of Frank Kozik posters for bands I listened to, redrew album covers, and wrote and drew pictures that I would send to my favorite bands. Once I called David Lovering from the Pixies on the phone. I had no idea what I wanted to say. I was just kind of silent, and he told me not to call him again. It gives me dumb chills to think about it now, but I think it is just part of adolescence. The same part of you that makes you think you won’t break your leg if you jump off a balcony (I didn’t, by the way – it was just a sprain).

I was proud of the ninjaman that I had started sketching. I was really into lettering, zines, and DIY (Portland!), and this was my version of a tag. I was too chicken to do it on a wall, so I did it on a shirt. Plus, ADAM isn’t such a great graffiti name.

I had a series of strange characters I used to draw, but I started sketching ninjaman in the first place because who doesn’t love ninjas? And the kind of faceplate he’s wearing let me hide the fact that I couldn’t draw faces so well.

The shirt is 17 years old now and impossibly soft. I still love making shirts. Still using sharpie, and about five years ago, I started doing airbrush too. I enjoy having this memento that I wear around the house or the studio sometimes. In public, well, not so much…

Adam Shecter is a visual artist in Long Island City, NY. You can visit his animations and interests at theworldofadam.com or check out the poster collective he’s a part of at twoup.org