This is Your Shirt

I collect t-shirts with logos on them. Not athletic team shirts. Not rock-band shirts. Just the everyday shirts that people print up for their business, their sports team, their fun run, their anniversary, their air force squadron whatever.

No art directors make the designs; no image specialist is around to whisper, "Hey, J.B., you don't really want to put THAT on a t-shirt, do you?" Just average folks doing what looks good to them. So I find some interesting things. Social documents, I call them. A window to your soul on eight ounces of combed cotton. Three for a buck at Goodwill Industries, such a deal.

The t-shirts divide into two groups: the ones I can figure out, and the ones I can only speculate on. The ones I can figure out -- their subject is obvious, or they're local, or they're something I can look up on the Internet.

Here's a fine example of a shirt I can figure out: Bustichi Construction, up in Scotts Valley. Click on the pic for more detail:


Now, I have actually dealt with Bustichi Construction; they did some work on the house, and they did it well. Dene Bustichi is a classic, boisterous Italian-Californian good old boy. And from the backside, he pretty much looks like the picture, or he did.

This is a classic tradesman's t-shirt, the kind I live for: the artwork by somebody's brother, the bathroom humor, the phallic humor ("our tools"), the bad puns ("We may be small, BUTT"), and most of all the idea that Bustichi and Company actually went around and did business dressed like this. You look at this shirt, you just know what life was like around the office.

This tee-shirt is quite old, probably from the company's start-up days. These days, funky Bustichi Construction is now BCI, a full-service contractor with a professional logo, a professional website and an impressive set of customers. Dene Bustichi is a well-respected two-term Scotts Valley city councilman and chairman of the county transit board. A responsible pillar of the community.

But I've got the shirt. Hee hee hee.

But now let's talk about the other group of t-shirts I collect: the ones I can't figure quite figure out, all the way. I mean, who is Nancy?


For reasons unknown to me, a lot of people print up t-shirts for their friends' fiftieth birthdays-- they give one to the birthday boy and maybe pass out a few more at the party. The shirts say things like "BRUCE HITS THE BIG FIVE-OH," or "Uncle Bob turns 50 in Acapulco!"

After the big day, nobody wears these shirts again, because they say "50" on them. And so the shirts end up at Goodwill, where nobody buys them unless they don't read English.

But Nancy's tee is the best fiftieth-birthday shirt I've ever seen, and that's why it came home with me:

I'll never know who Nancy is, really, but there it all is on the shirt: her life life in schematic form. The shirt is pretty new, so it's likely she was born in the mid to late '50s, grew up in a steel town in the rust belt and maybe got busted for smoking pot with the tough kids.

The rest I can only flesh out from my own head. But that's half the fun. For example:

Maybe Nancy was a tough kid herself, a proto-punk growing up in a hard-knocks steel town. Where all the boys were destined to go to work in the mills, and all the girls were supposed to stay home and make babies. But Nancy decided to go her own way.

So the popular Catholic girls at Industrial High spread rumors she was a "slut." Which means almost nothing but implies almost everything, and is a hard label to shake. And all the pimply-faced, smelly boys with big hands and noses went "hur,hur,hur," as she passed their lockers and secretly hoped she'd pop their cherries, too. Lotsa luck, creeps, it's just gossip.

But eventually she tottered out of high school on platform shoes and straight into the maw of the '70s. And hit the disco floor in Farrah Fawcett hair, a tube top, and glittery nail polish. Maybe she tended bar. There might have been some college in there, or not.

There was certainly a little coke -- maybe more than a little -- and eventually her Disco King in the form of a tall, dark, fast-talker with puka beads and and a porn-star mustache. And a bright future as manager of a discount vinyl-flooring outlet.

They moved in together, and the Catholic girls from the old neighborhood -- half of them already married and pregnant -- upped the gossip volume to Overload. Even though their brothers were aping John Travolta and trolling the disco floor for one-nighters. But, y'know, boys are different.

And so it was party party party for a while but Nancy got tired of taking a couple of general ed classes and hanging around the house all day. Disco King wasn't around so much -- he worked late nearly every day. She tried a little dealing -- I mean, why not sell what you like, and Disco King liked paying wholesale for his blow -- but called it off after the cops got a little too interested.

So she got herself a part-time job humping paper for a real estate agencies. Where her adolescent 'tude translated into just the right phone manner for barking at appraisers and title companies to keep that paper moving.

One long weekend, in a fit of coke-induced optimism, Nancy and Disco King drove to Atlantic City and married up. But not long after Nancy caught him in the hot tub with a barmaid, and he told her that marriage didn't mean the same thing to him as it did to other guys." And he invited her in for a threesome. Wearing gold chains down past his nipples. On the spot, Nancy had an epiphany of disgust.

So she packed her stuff and moved out that night, but not before keying a pithy comment about penis size across the hood of Disco King's Camaro Z28. She never took coke again. Well, hardly ever.

Nancy upper her hours at the real estate office to full time, took night classes, bought a few dress-for-success business suits -- the kind that showed boob -- and before you knew it, she was leasing commercial space in the new office towers going up in the inner 'burbs. Nice bonuses, a sweet Volvo 240. And networking parties three nights a week; and yes, sometimes she brought home more than business cards.

One of them stayed around -- Thor, a tall, blond, residential agent with a good track record in high-end home sales and a water-polo body he picked up playing for Lutheran University. It was lust at first sight, and compatible interest afterward. In the afterglow of sex, they talked cap rates and depreciation and gross rent multipliers until the sun rose. A merger was soon negotiated and finalized.

The Eighties hit the Rust Belt hard, and real estate along with it. Nancy and Thor looked for greener pastures, and Thor fastened on California. People told them the business was hell in Calfornia, too; but as Nancy said, you don't fear hell when you've seen Pittsburgh.

They settled in Santa Cruz, because the competition was small-time and they could smell all that Silicon Valley money just waiting to pour over the hill. And in a few years, it did. And they sold beachfront homes to execs from Apple and Silicon Graphics and Tandem, all gravid with stock-option bucks. After a while Thor stayed mostly on the sales end and Nancy took over the business end, running the office, leasing vacation property, managing apartment buildings. Twin Mercedes, a sweet executive manse in Carbonero Heights, and then the dotcom boom; life was good.

Well, except that Thor spent more and more time hanging with the sales staff while Nancy minded the store alone. And it wasn't easy. Nancy kept their ever-larger staff pumping paper and moving money, whipping cohort after cohort of slack-jawed 22 year-old-girls and boys into hard-nosed cubicle warriors. Until the competition hired them away and she had to start over with the latest crop of community college grads. Were they really getting dumber every year? And what the hell was this tattoo business all about?

She belonged to about three clubs and started partying with the other self-made businesswomen and corporate ladder-climbers. They had great times down at the Crow's Nest on Wednesday night and then was the time -- or two -- when she woke up Thursday morning in some Seabright beach boy's bed not knowing how she got there. And there was a photo --or two -- of her dirty-dancing half-naked with Weevil, a 30-something local surf god with 37 endorsement contracts. She honestly didn't remember a thing.

Sadly, it was time to swear off the margaritas. She cooked a fine dinner for Thor one night and kind of apologized. Thor accepted the apology and told her he was moving in with their third-best salesperson -- a 26-year-old blonde Reiki practitioner and CrossFit instructor, Abs you could bounce a quarter off, he gloated.

"Then I've got a going-away present for you" Nancy said. She reached for the stungun she'd bought for protection -- she managed property in Watsonville -- and tazed him in the nuts. For a long time.

After he collapsed on the floor, she kicked in the door of his locked office and went through his papers. She found travel receipts for Mr. and Mrs. Thor to Vegas and Cabo and Mazatlan going back three years. She didn't remember any of those trips, and not because she'd been drinking.

So she gathered the papers up neatly and went back into the other room to taze the groaning Thor another time or two for good measure. But the battery died, so she settled for pouring dessert -- zabaglione -- evenly up and down his prone body. She thought about trying to light it, but restrained herself.

When Thor regained full consciousness, he found one of the Mercedes gone and a lawyer's business card propped against his nose.

The divorce wasn't pretty, and neither was splitting the business, but they got through it and agreed not to spit at each other when they met again -- Thor had it written into the settlement. Thor got the residential real estate business and the house; Nancy got property management and commercial real estate and a couple of apartment buildings.

And a few visits from the FBI in the middle of it all, because one of her clueless 22-year-olds had opened an email attachment "from a friend" and infected the entire office network . It was now under the control of a Russian hacker ring that was using Nancy's computers to flood the Western Hemisphere with weight-loss spam. ("Lose 30 pounds the RIGHT way!) The young worker was "reee-leee sorry." Nancy put her on landscape maintenance.

And suddenly she was 50 years old and the "client meeting" someone put on her calendar turned out to be a surprise birthday party with the girls over at El Palomar. And then her best friend Babs put this t-shirt in front her and led everybody in a gawdawful version of "Happy Birthday."

And Nancy just stared at the tee, virgin daiquiri at her side. The big 5-0, then and God, hadn't it just been the other day that she was 22 and dancing the Latin Hustle under an giant laser-lit disco ball? She shook her head. She was here and this was now, and she was a tough old broad and that was that. She led the table in a toast to tough old broads everywhere and they pelted her with coasters. And a good time was had by all.

....and that's why I collect tee shirts. Yeah, I'm weird.