FRESH FLY THREADS
My quest for the ultimate T-shirt!
I took some Daily Sketch suggestions a few weeks ago and one of them was Bartman. It instantly took me back in time.
When I was a kid, I couldn't wait for lunch on Mondays. I know, weird, right? An elementary kid excited for school on Monday? Well, I was. It had nothing to do with school though. It was all about Sunday night. Sunday night TV to be exact. My friends and I would do our best impressions of the previous night’s shows. In Living Color was the highlight as we performed what we thought was a perfect version of Homie The Clown, or Fire Marshal Bill. After that, it was all about The Simpsons. I was so obsessed with The Simpsons. I tried so hard to pull off the Bart jokes. I drew each character over and over. I had sketchbooks full of Bart Tyson, Bart Hogan, The Ultimate Bart Warrior, Chuck B and Flavor Bart (yes, I just drew celebrities as Bart). I had the stuffies, the fast food toys (I think they were from Burger King, but could be wrong) and eventually that album! I was in full tilt on The Simpsons.
One thing I didn't have was the ULTIMATE piece of merch. A T-SHIRT!
One day I was buying some candy and pop at Randall’s Liquor (Classy, right?). I lived in a very small town in Illinois and the liquor store had a little of everything. Booze, snacks, movie rentals, and one rack of t-shirts. It was usually just stock car racing shirts, featuring the local Saturday night stars of the mud track that was Fairybury American Legion Speedway. But on this day, this FUCKING AMAZING day, there was a new addition! Right there in front of me was the holy grail. A Bartman t-shirt!
It was $25. In the 80’s that might as well have been a cool million. I had to have this amazing piece of fashion. This work of art! This…something else equally hyperbolic. It was time to check my finances. And by that, realize that I had nothing saved up for things like this.
I had a paper route, but I can’t express to you how little I was paid to do that. I’m pretty sure it was deemed criminal to pay children that little to do what I did everyday at 4:30am. Most of that money went to Mad Magazines, cassettes, and movie/Nintendo game rentals. I realized I needed some side hustles.
First up, I decided to offer up my services for one of my least favorite things…mowing. As I kid, I was like FUCK MOWING. As a 43 year old man, I’m like FUCK MOWING. You can see that my hatred for lawn care runs deep and goes hard. But hey, any money counted. If I could mow a certain number of lawns, skip some candy and pops, and maybe NOT rent Beetlejuice for a tenth time, I might be able to save up the $25 and bring Bartman home!
I slung papers and mowed, slung papers and trimmed those sidewalks, worked hard and saved loot. Somewhere in there I decided to start renting out my cassette tapes like Small Town Video and Randall’s rented out movies. Because I had the paper route, I had a bigger collection of music than most and I took advantage of that. $1 a tape and you got it for a week (cue Jay’s I’M A HUSTLER).
Finally, I had my $25, rolled up into Randall’s like I’m flush with more cash than any other human on the planet had ever been and bought that Bartman T-shirt! It obviously was still there because it cost $25 in the late 80’s. You better believe I tested the limits of that garment quality by wearing it as much as humanly possible. Lucky for me, my stepmom was a crazy person about doing laundry and would be washing our clothes before we could even take them off. So, I made that shirt put in the work!
I hope you enjoyed the Sketch and the walk down memory lane!
-Skottie Young
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This was such a great read, as a kid I did the same shit just to try and get X-men merch and Fleer Ultra cards. Learned from an early age how to hustle from collecting aluminum cans to also mowing lawns.
This was such an awesome read! Being a 90's kid my scene was more the cartoons and Pokémon cards! Glad the story had a happy ending with you saving up for the shirt!