The Greatest T-Shirt Humanity Ever Devised

Staring down Election Day at the Warehouse in Masterton, NZ

I saw my hometown on a t-shirt at the Warehouse. This is the Walmart clone here, less gaudy and thinner on the shelves but still your standard backstop for life’s basic necessities. We were there to buy a trash can. There, in the boys’ clothing section, my childhood shouted hello: PHOENIX.

A whole row of ‘em, t-shirts and sweatshirts and shorts in a green no team of my dear desert metropolis would ever claim. Under the name was a shield with an interlocking S and D, basically a knock-off San Diego Padres logo: Kiwis, that’s a California baseball team. We Arizona kids did love to invade San Diego’s beaches every summer—we were the ones with sock tans, just staring at the waves—but the Warehouse wouldn’t know that. On either side of the shield, someone, somewhere on Earth, had chosen to type in the year 1947. In 1947 Phoenix debuted its first drive-through bank. Was there even air conditioning yet? The story I heard growing up was that folks used to sleep out on the porch in wet sheets. Now there’s 5 million people in the valley, a whole New Zealand in a single American county. Fly in at sunset and the backyard pools glint like dragon scales in the dying sun.

Why New Zealand wants a meaningless Phoenix t-shirt I cannot say. American soft power dies hard, I suppose. Places are held more loosely here, repped with less vigor. Outside match day I’ve rarely seen Hurricanes or Phoenix gear in the wild—yes, that’s our local soccer club’s name—much less a t-shirt that just says ‘Wellington.’ A neighbor down the street is currently flying the United Nations flag. By the highway in Featherston there’s a house that’s flown both the crisp green-white-green of Nigeria and a banner declaring ‘It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.’ A barbershop in Petone, meters from the beach where New Zealand’s first European settlers landed, flies a different nation’s flag every day of the year. Last time we were there it was Norway, snapping in a cold wind straight from the South Pole.

Maybe this is just the famously low-temp Kiwi vibe. Maybe it’s a small-country thing, this comfort with the notion that there are Other Countries Out There, and that any nation, unique as it may be, is first and foremost a copy of other nations in a worldwide system of same. As an American, though—we could never go there. Fly a UN flag in any American subdivision, you weirdo, and see what turns up in your mailbox. “The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised,” Kamala Harris just reminded us. Am I supposed to cheer this absurdity? She’s had my vote a month now, and I love that goddamn place more than I’ll ever be able to write down. But we’re just clinging now. We are white-knuckled and desperate and exhausted. The two sides of the endless American bar fight—Greatest Idea vs. Great Again—are biting and kicking as the true grail slips from our grasp. We each insist upon the genuine article, and we will not rest until the imposter is dead at our feet.

“We are not going back,” Harris says. It’s her best line, I think. I like the steel, the nod to freedoms bitterly won, the line in the sand. Half a world away I repeat these words through gritted teeth, watching the bees running riot through our rented yard. I feel proud and strong, and I feel afraid. We are not going back, but I cannot imagine what comes.

The past I can do. The Phoenix t-shirt flung me back to the desert ‘burbs of the late Reagan era. I rode my bike to a friend Randy’s house to play video games. We lived in the same ‘70s subdivision, with the streets all named for California beaches. Ours was misspelled, Manhatton for Manhattan. Randy lived on Pebble Beach. His house was the same model as ours, the same exact floor plan. I could find every door knob blindfolded but everything else was off—the wallpaper, the carpet, his redheaded mother at the kitchen counter in place of my own. We played Double Dribble in Randy’s room, same as mine, on an 8-bit Nintendo plugged into an old black-and-white TV. This was before video game licensing deals, so instead of real NBA teams we played as the L.A. Breakers and the Boston Frogs. We knew these were shadows of the trademarked Lakers and Celtics. But at halftime, when the cartoon surfboard and the cartoon frog came out to do their little dance, we lived for a moment in some alternate America, a country full of halftime shows and slam dunks but not quite our own. A great idea, even, effortlessly replicated by Japanese game giant Konami. Try and imagine a video game of fake NBA teams now. We’d laugh them off the screen. The Dodgers and Yankees are as ‘authentic’ and unreproducible as tectonic plates. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the NFL.

The frog has thoughts / via NintendoComplete

In his poem “Ode to the Republic,” Tony Hoagland—who once earned a degree in Phoenix’s little sister Tucson—imagined the day when America is no longer a superpower. How “humble and calm and curiously free” it would feel for us. America, he wishes, “May you sit on the porch with the other countries / in the late afternoon, / and talk about chickens and rain.”

Ain’t gonna happen, Tony. I bought that damn Phoenix t-shirt for my son in a mix of triumph, self-defense, and pure gringo spite. This one’s mine, Warehouse. That’s where your dad is from, I told my boy. He wore it proudly to school the next day, and to the beach the day after that, where it was promptly splattered with stinky tidal-flat mud. The minute we got home I stripped it off his back and dunked it in a tub with every laundry soap we own. I scrubbed each spot by hand. I let it soak a whole day. Damn if it didn’t come out clean as an angel’s robe, not a trace of NZ muck left. Just the fifth-biggest city in America, stripped of everything but the greatness of its name.

Next Wednesday afternoon, as the polls close in America, I will bring my son home from school and sit him down in front of the TV. We’ll have the news cranked up loud. Maybe we’ll have some American friends over. No one will feel calm or curiously free. The talking heads will shout as the magic maps come and go. I’ll lean in and point out Phoenix, down there on the lower left. I will tell him about the streets named for beaches. I will tell him about the swimming pools.

What so proudly we hail / via NintendoComplete

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