Nothing But Nothing Says Iconoclasm Like a Hawaiian Shirt
It was all of a piece–the lighter with a naked lady on it he got at some bar in Subic Bay, Philippines (the PI, he used to call the Philippines, when he spoke of it at all, which was rarely, since he rarely spoke at all), the unfiltered Chesterfield cigarette permanently smoldering in the corner of his mouth, the half-full can of Pearl beer (I never could figure how his beer was always, philosophically perhaps, half-full), and the Hawaiian shirt. Untucked, the top two buttons open, a not-quite-white shirt of the type that would come to be known as a wife-beater underneath.
But Uncle Leonard didn’t have a wife to beat. Or even a girlfriend. Only a TV repair shop he ran out of my grandmother’s garage.
Still, that goddamned shirt. I like to think that it was that shirt that made him look at the world and find it wanting, the world outside that shirt never able to compare to the world within it. Maybe he only had the one, or maybe he had ten dozen (my mother, a hardshell Baptist, never allowed me to visit him in the storm cellar out back of my grandmother’s that served him as home, and it didn’t occur to me until much later that I probably could have disobeyed her in this or any number of other things), but he was never without that shirt.
I imagined he slept in it.
And maybe I was wrong. Maybe the clothes didn’t make the man. Maybe it was the two tours he served in Vietnam, killing and trying not to die in the jungle. Maybe it was that his fiancee left with a group of hippies for the West Coast midway through his first tour in ‘Nam (bringing about, probably, the second tour in ‘Nam, which maybe was what put the blink on him), never to be seen again. Maybe it was the fact that he used his GI Bill to go to TV repair school like his mother, my grandmother, told him to, instead of going out to California to try and find his fiancee and maybe become a stuntman.
Whatever the case, it didn’t work for me. I went with some friends to Mexico, bought myself one of those woven Mexican pullovers, the ones with the hood and the pocket on the belly. I tried to wear it every day, but it was summer, and it was itchy, and I was never able to get the smell of vomit–compliments of my introduction to mescal–out of it.
All that need be said about the decline of Western Civilization is here summed up.
Maybe if Uncle Leonard hadn’t immolated himself and all he owned out there in the storm cellar, I could have asked him how he did it, how he made himself one with his clothing, became synonymous with it, became more than the sum of his parts.
But those Hawaiian shirts. They’re made of polyester. And that goes up pretty quick.
