When trash was wild.
When it was wild I put wild on my nation's flag and it snapped in the air like a snake's tongue, it said similar things. It was useful as is all trash--useful in disguising the character of pure nature. Or maybe it is pure nature.
My folks bought me a souvenir Rolling Stones tour t-shirt at Three Rivers Stadium on the bright gilded afternoon of September 6th, 1989. I was in ninth grade. I am no longer in ninth grade and the shirt bears this out.
Every girlfriend I've had since then has asked in that bumble voice one takes to beg for forgiveness that I please get rid of it. I gained weight, I lost weight. I rolled in pigshit and met a girl at a party whom I likened to Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde. She was flattered and we spent a mildly rapturous summer together; we split just before I was to take her home to visit my folks and attend an old pal's wedding. She, despite all intimacies, never lasted long enough in our time to object to the t-shirt. That was the summer of 1999.
My parents, both alive and well, living on a forest summit in Bedford County in a real pastoral burst I never knew existed til I saw it about four years ago with my own eyes--they bypassed the ask phase of the riddance process. Being both adherent Republicans and basically secular conservatives they have no patience with bureaucracies.
I am a liberal, a romantic and a snake's tongue. I have only the bureaucracies, the likes of one trafficing between jobs and rubbing one's hands together to either emulate the building of a fire or the pittance of warmth one derives thinking of building a fire. I never had a funny dream that was happy; I never had a sad dream that was not full of love. It is that specific hand warmth of me, an oily and desperate shift in temperatures and at the risk of letting on too much the armpits of the t-shirt are the color of coarse seed German mustard. I know, what kind of romanticism sweats mustard? Or its color? Blame me, not the way of living, not the romanticism.
The last time a disposal attempt occurred was when I was still in school, circa 1995, when my parents lived in the second of my two childhood homes--the one at 804 Nesbit Drive, in Carlisle PA, about two hundred yards from Carlisle High School. About five hundred from the passing of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I was home in the spring and had not yet totalled my (third) car, I know because I drove myself back from Indiana. It was bright. All the afternoons in this anecdote are bright, not necessarily because they were, but because I want to consolidate certain joyful elements so as to create an air of generality to the hope, that with each hope you recognize it each time. What is seen is probably known, and what is not--to the faithful and proficient, is only guessed at.
Yes, spring, they call it Amnesty Day, the day you can haul any damned thing you're sick of having around out to the curb and no matter how jagged, biohazardous, no matter how mangy, no matter how much it moans the trashmen are required to pick it up and take it the fuck away:
In front of 804 a brown and tan couch sat, to which some of my earliest memories correspond. Before I felt the burden of narrative I would draw my finger along the plush chestnut vine and leaf design on the arm of the couch and, I assume--as I do not remember anything but the photographic material of the memory, rest in aimlessness. This is the time before either the classroom, the girl or the burden.
Glad bags were stuffed with old dress clothes--the everyday clothes disintegrated--see above, and were thrown away piecemeal--sat in rows along the sidewalk on either side of the couch, and atop the cushions. As every year there was a broken box fan from a hard summer. The Rolling Stones shirt was not bagged.
In fact it lay atop the centermost bag in a fashion indicating either sacrifice or surrender--it was white when purchased and for a few ensuing years, in fact, it remained so.
The shirt said, rather my folks through it:
We are not throwing this away. We are throwing it here for you to see, and you, by finally leaving it here are throwing it away as you need, finally, for the jaundice sweat stains moth holes and other holes (God knows what you do in it--we don't ask and we don't want to know) and for the shape of it when you stand back in it, when you wear it, and when they're seen out with you, leave it there where you threw it away before you came home.
In my estimation it has retained its ticket value of $25.00. It is the distillation of my whiskeyed young life, the part that did not end on Amnesty Day, Spring, 1994.
THE AUCTION begins now and will run through to midnight, December 2009--a few thousand hours past its 20th birthday, fewer thousand past my own 34th. Bidding begins at $25.00 and bids can be emailed to me privately at BryanMickle@hotmail.com Each subsequent bid will be posted in a comment box and will be anonymous. The auction winner will be announced on January 1st, 2010 at 12:01 AM. The winner will receive the shirt as is--for additional photos of the item or any additional paraphernelia deemed pertinent (within reason) by the winner. In addition for authentification the item will include a copy of this notice printed on a decent stock and signed by the auctioning party, me--please allow for addional editing of said document for clarity in the meantime. All shipping and insurnce costs will be paid by To Stink, To Cheat, To Torture.
Good luck readers.
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