That Shirt

The best part of a recession—and I know some of you are feeling me out there—is the sales. Desperate retailers plus desperately trying to move stock equals some really good buys, when one stumbles upon them. It was last week, when the Mont and I were window shopping our way around one of those department stores that mysteriously seems to hang on for month after month despite never having any actual customers, that we happened upon a cluster of sales racks of designer clothing that had been steeply discounted. I mean, the original prices had already been cut in half, and the store was inviting us to remove an additional eighty-five percent or more.

Unfortunately, it was also the kind of store that stocked very little in my spindly size. From the small section of the rack I plucked a shirt that normally for which I’d never fork over legal tender. In my head I rapidly did some calculations, then double-checked them on my phone’s calculator. “What do you think of this one?” I asked the Mont. “It’s a ninety-dollar Perry Ellis shirt. Now it’s six dollars.” Even my depressed wallet could afford six dollars.

He looked up, then startled back. “AIEE!” he shrieked.

I blinked a few times. Sure, the shirt was a little . . . well . . . loud, with its busy pattern of cornflower blue poppies on a bright white cotton background. Yes, it was the kind of obnoxious shirt one ordinarily sees on party boys out for a night of shots and tapas. But I liked it. “I’m buying it,” I told him, ignoring his eye-rolling.

Once home, I tried the shirt on with some jeans, and rather liked the effect. It suited me. I liked the inner lining, and the way it was made. I walked downstairs and stood in front of the Mont in the den. “How’s it look?” I asked.

He glanced up from his computer and flinched away. “Good god!” he yelled. “Don’t do that to me!”

“Oh, come on,” I chided. “It’s not that bad. Is it?”

He smiled in a conciliatory manner and said, with the utmost of sincerity, “No, it will be fine. Once you have a sweater over it.”

Butt-wipe.

Saturday night, feeling feisty, I announced, “I am wearing the shirt.”

“You’re not really,” said the Mont.

“Yes. I am.”

“Airplanes will mistake you for a landing strip.”

“I’m wearing it!”

I must have sounded determined, because he shrugged in that sort of it’s your funeral way and let me go change. I put on the shirt and looked at myself in the mirror. It fit well. It didn’t billow around the waist, the way so many slim-fitting shirts tend to. I still liked it. It was in that kind of proud and feisty mood that a couple of minutes later we pulled up in front of Clark and Jeffrey’s house down the street, to pick them up before we went to the bar. “Good evening, Clark and Jeffrey, people to whom I am speaking this evening,” I said.

There was a moment of silence as they both settled in. Then Clark said, “Oh, are you not talking to the Mont because he said something about you wearing his mother’s blouse?”

The whole, long evening was like that. My so-called friends had the bar’s owner come over and ask me if I’d like him to find a tablecloth to match my shirt, and enlisted the karaoke mistress to call me to the microphone using my drag-name-if-I-had-a-drag-name. (If you must know, it’s Pansy Pots. Because once we were driving by a garden center that had a sign advertising Pansy Pots 3 for $5, and I said, “You know, that would make a great drag name.”) By the end of the night, even my friend ‘Drew’s partner, Stee, was in on the joke. When the Mont went up to the mic and ended up soloing “Something Stupid,” on which we normally duet, I complained loud and long that ordinarily he asked me to sing with him.

“Maybe it’s the shirt,” said Stee, sounding apologetic.

I don’t care. I like the shirt. It was six dollars. Maybe there was a reason it was discounted so steeply. I’m wearing it, dammit. I'M WEARING IT ALL THE TIME.