Monday, January 16, 2012
Or: Money, It’s Gotta Be the Shirt
In late summer of 1996, a year before I would move to Los Angeles, my best friend, Andre, and I attended a wedding there together. During our visit, one of our destinations was Spike’s Joint on Melrose, the West Coast retail outlet for Spike Lee’s then-burgeoning production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. We were fans — particularly of School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X — and we came seeking swag. This was in the days before e-commerce as we know it today, so it was a rare opportunity to shop for official 40 Acres gear like that we’d seen Spike modeling in interviews and at public appearances.
Truth be told, what I really wanted was an X cap, but despite the sincerity of my intentions — I had in fact read The Autobiography of Malcolm X a few years earlier and was moved to a deeper understanding of and a profound admiration for the slain civil rights leader — I didn’t want to be seen as the white guy from the Midwest attempting to appropriate an aspect of the black experience to which I bore no rightful claim. So at gut-check time, I chickened out and settled instead for a perfectly respectable navy blue cap displaying the 40 Acres logo in red and a 40 Acres logo T-shirt whose back reads “Make Black Film By Any Means Necessary.”1
Over time, I stopped wearing my T-shirt as often, and to my chagrin my head has grown two or three hat sizes over the years, effectively rendering my cap unwearable. But Andre had gotten years of wear out of the gray fleece pullover with embroidered logo that he bought that day. So much so that the fleece lining had all but worn away over hundreds of washings. Naturally it was one of the most comfortable articles of clothing he owned.
And then it vanished.
The pullover had been packed among a few boxes of clothes and other personal belongings that had not arrived with the rest of their household when Andre, Michele and their daughters moved to Seattle. Of all the belongings lost among those errant boxes, I imagine that the pullover was one of the first things Andre missed, so often, so reflexively did he pull it from his closet when dressing for recreation and relaxation.
They’re in Seattle about five years now, and over time they had replaced anything necessary, anything that could be replaced. (One would hope there hadn’t been anything truly irreplaceable, items of great personal significance, sentimental value or family history, among the lost.) Life goes on.
Then one day the boxes turned up.
I can’t remember all the particular details of their reappearance, but they had been relatively accessible and close at hand all that time. Perhaps not properly or accurately labeled. Perhaps hidden just out of view.
In any event, Andre now has his gray fleece pullover back, and like a toddler reunited with his blankie, he will rejoice in the fact and the feel and the reassuring comfort of it after all this time apart. Never mind that three or four years spent crushed inside a box has left a permanent, shadowy crease down the front of the pullover, just off center, that no amount of laundering or ironing can repair. That’s not enough to prevent Andre from wearing that pullover until the rest of the fleece is worn from its lining like the plush of a much-loved teddy bear.
As any respectable wife would be, Michele is mortified by Andre’s insistence upon wearing the pullover. To her mind, it was lost once; he knows what it’s like to live without it; it shouldn’t be so hard to let go of it one more time, gently unto that good night. She’d prefer that it were donated, discarded, or perhaps immolated.
Which brings us up to the present.
Andre invited me to be his guest Monday at Microsoft’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And that is how we both happened to be wearing our now 15-year-old 40 Acres gear when we met the day’s keynote speaker: Spike Lee.
I had no expectation that we might actually meet Spike, even in passing, but after Andre said he was wearing his 40 Acres pullover, I decided, just for the hell of it, that I’d wear my 40 Acres T-shirt under the quarter-zip pullover I was wearing to the occasion.
It was a nice event, attended by a few hundred people who braved the snow, and featuring presentations by Microsoft officers about various diversity initiatives and charitable programs in which the company engages, in part to recognize and honor the legacy of Dr. King in the daily life of the company. Then Spike took the stage, and after he reveled in the Giants’ victory over the Packers Sunday, he spoke eloquently and passionately about what Dr. King’s life and legacy means to him. Then he challenged us all to not just treat the occasion as a day off from work but to go home and read Dr. King’s speeches or his letters from the Birmingham jail and to think about how we can put Dr. King’s example into practice every day of the year.
Had that been the end of it, it still would have been a great day spent with my best friend, making the most of the opportunity to celebrate the life of Dr. King, whose dream has, to a great, if not yet complete, extent, come to fruition in our lifetime.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
It is my particular gift, cast over me as though by a fairy godmother’s spell, to attend an event as a friend’s plus-one and end up taking home swag like I’m George Clooney’s Golden Globes date. (Case in point: I once attended a MINI Cooper function with my friend Todd and ended up winning a set of new wheels and tires, valued at upward of three grand, to a car that I didn’t own. No, really.)
And so it was that I found myself holding a specially marked raffle ticket that made me one of 50 attendees invited to meet Spike after the event and receive an autographed copy of an impressive coffee-table book about the making of Do the Right Thing. And so it was that Andre, who had so graciously invited me to be his plus-one for the occasion, became my plus-one.
When we finally reached the front of the receiving line, we said hello, and Andre explained quickly that Michele wanted him to get rid of the shirt. He asked if Spike would mind endorsing his pullover, as it were, which Spike did, inscribing it around the logo, “Nice shirt. Spike Lee.”
I stepped up next, and as Spike signed my book, I said, “We really didn’t think we’d get to meet you today, but we’re really glad now that we wore our 40 Acres gear,” and I held up the front of my shirt enough for him to see the logo on my own T-shirt underneath. At which point he rose again, with his pen held aloft.
“Oh, no,” I cut him off. “You don’t have to sign it.” I had only wanted him to know we were big fans from way back; I imagined that signing my T-shirt would be a much more unwieldy operation than Andre’s had been.
“Are you kidding?” Spike said. “I gotta sign it. That’s vintage!”
Spike motioned to my collar, so I unzipped the top of my pullover, and he Spike Lee’d me right along the neckline. We shook hands and I thanked him for the honor of having met with him. Andre and I exited feeling self-consciously giddy about how our day had transpired.
So now I have a vintage 40 Acres T-shirt that can never be washed again, as I can’t account for the permanence of the marker Spike was using. But perhaps best of all, Andre has a lovingly well-worn gray pullover that Michele can never throw out.
1 It’s almost quaint now to remember a time when Spike virtually propelled himself by force of will, marketing savvy and remarkable talent to the forefront of his generation, that rare African-American filmmaker who was getting his films produced, distributed, and seen by mainstream audiences. So much has the cinematic landscape changed during his quarter century of prominence that now we can’t get rid of Tyler Perry no matter how hard we try. That, brothers and sisters, is progress.
