Wardrobe as memorabilia

Real men wear red," proudly pronounced a T-shirt of one Bedan singled out by a TV camera from that vast ocean of red at the Araneta Coliseum during last Friday’s NCCA championship game.

Hmm. The thing with red is that it can come in various hues: bright red, scarlet, brick red, wine red, ruby, crimson, cherry, cerise, carmine, rose, or close to maroon, among others. The last is what I guess may best describe the shade of muscle shirt or tanktop I wore that same Friday, for a live-on-TV viewing party at an SBC ’60 batchmate’s condo.

It was a HEAD sleeveless tee with the subhead Champion Athletic under the main text. I chose it for the occasion because it had the word "Champion" on the chest, and also because it was cotton-comfy and cool. The choice was made over the initial idea of putting on a regular tee in bright red that had Red Lion upfront, with Extra Strong below that, both within a circle ripped off from the Red Bull logo.

Others in our senior citizens’ group came in all shades of red, so that it was a good thing we didn’t find ourselves red in the face when the rival team’s spirited rally from 20 points down fell short by a measly point. We’ll take the win, we said, somehow relieved, and ready to paint the town red.

Now that maroon-ish HEAD tanktop joins the memorabilia shelves in my wardrobe closet. When I find the time I’ll archive it properly with a reminder tag: "Worn during championship night of 2006, NCCA Season 82, after a 28-year drought."

Having manfully prided myself all these years as one who’ll never be a fashion victim, I habitually settle for comfy wear – which is a tanktop, shorts and moccasins or loafers worn sockless – while padding about everywhere, except at Makati’s Tower Club when I meet for lunch with movers and shakers. Everywhere else: on the streets, in a supermarket, in school, sometimes even during board meetings of some distinguished org or other, especially during hot and humid seasons.

I can classify my usual (and unusual) togs into the following: 70 percent tanktops & tee-shirts, 20 percent polo shirts, five percent long-sleeved shirts for the occasional pa-formal or "smart casual" occasion, and five percent cold-weather stuff like sweaters and thick jackets, plus three suits for when I meet abroad with the likes of Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates or Michael Jordan.

Oh, for a future eyeball session with Bill I’ve reserved a turtleneck Chicago Bulls sweatshirt, and for Michael a tee with his face prominently up front.

My wardrobe shelves often get the benefit of spring-cleaning, when I pull out shirts and tees I haven’t worn for some time, and donate these to my mom-in-law’s driver, who’s my size, meaning paunchy XL. Or sometimes the two male teens who eat and sleep in our house, and get allowances besides, also raid my open closets (oxymoron!) for yet another addition to their own burgeoning casual wardrobes.

But there are shelves neither they nor I can ever raid for the hand-me-down tradition. These are the same shelves, holding about half-a-hundred "souvenir" tees, that our washing lady often stares at (I’ve caught her once or twice), wondering, as I assume, when she can ever lay her sudsy hands on the prized if unworn contents.

They constitute my glad-rags museum, er, wardrobe-as-memorabilia.

The oldest item is a crocheted chaleco in black and lime green that my beloved grandmother made especially for me, when I was but a pre-teen. That makes it contemporary and coeval with James Dean’s unfortunate early demise.

Then there are blast-from-the-past items of three decades old or more: the long-defunct Ermita mag issues, as tees, are prominent among these. Down the march of time have others been preserved, mostly with souvenir text or slogans on the chest, including Ninoy and Cory Yellow protest tees.

Early in the ’80s, too, I once wore, at a literary reading, a dark-blue tee with arrayed text on its front that had been designed by someone at the then President’s Center for Special Studies, where I had a brief sinecure as a literary double agent.

It was a nihilist’s dream design, with the four-letter word cascading from top to bottom, its transitive objects being all sorts of isms, ideologies and inklings, e.g., "Oligarchism, Absenteeism, Nepotism, Pro-Americanism, Capitalism, Communism, Time, Newsweek, Me-Too-Ism, Atheism, Imperialism, Sexism, War, Subversion, Secessionism...."

At that reading, of course I wore a jacket around it. Thing was, my jacket front kept falling open, until I noticed with my keen spy’s eye a bemused Adrian Cristobal in the front row, leading the curious grins, as my inadvertent striptease kept revealing partial direct objects of the F word.

When I wore it a second time while scouring around at Nepa-Q’s wet market, I noted that even the mataderos who liked to brandish their machetes were intently reading down my front and back. Since then I’ve consigned it to my non-fashion-victim’s museum.

Well, pulling it out recently for a possible photo-op for this article, I realized my mistake. It just wouldn’t do as an attendant visual. Worse, the second boy saw it and pulled an appropriation act. Ingatan mo yan, ha? Mas matanda pa sayo yan! That was all I could whimper in abject surrender.

Sometime in the late ’70s, when I was a dual citizen of Baguio and Sagada, I used to favor a faded blue denim jacket I kept pasting patches on, until the wearer looked gloriously armored for combat. Then there was a full-length overcoat, brown corduroy, and which I must have picked up at a Salvation Army shop in Iowa, which nearly won me a Best Costume award at a Swedish filmfest.

I wore it for a mountaintop scene (overlooking the Fedlisan rice terraces off Sagada) of overwhelming emotion, played with Bibi Andersson in Vilgot Sjomann’s film Jag Rodnar, the third in his celebrated trilogy that started with I Am Curious, Yellow.

Drat. I heard later that the jury pointed out the neo-realistic mud that had caked the overcoat’s hemline. And I had thought that would all be sublimated by my acting as I read an Eman Lacaba poem to a tearful Bibi. Well, lost my closest chance for a Nobel Peace Prize I could get.

There are other special sections in my wardrobe archives. One is for the collection of tees designed by batches of writing workshop fellows in Dumaguete, down the summers. Another is a collection of souvenir tees from literary festivals and conferences, e.g., Cambridge, Sydney, Rotterdam and Durban of late.

Somehow I’ve grouped a Cartagena tanktop with that fond assortment, recalling the year I would’ve taken a bullet for FVR, especially when he attended a NAM confab in Colombia, before we flew on, cigars in hand, to New York for the UN’s 50th birthday in 1995.

I got to wear those tees once, at least, before consigning them to my Memory Lane collection. But there are budding memorabilia that are still occasionally donned, as they’re yet of recent vintage, thus are only halfway up to the museum shelves. These include my Jordan-era Bulls favorites, as well as football tees I wheedle from friends in Europe every time World Cup comes around.

More than the usual sports jerseys (which stick to tropical epidermis) and light cotton tees, I’m partial to tanktops, not only so I can show off my bipolar biceps, but for practicing foul shots on the street where I live. By our gate I’ve put up a goal to demarcate the point in the curb where our property line ends and a neighbor’s begins. This goal keeps me in shape; my charity line average is much better than Shaq’s, I should warn any aspiring challenger to a pera-pera shootout.

Sleeveless shirts make it easier to pretend I’m John Stockton. Until recently, all my walking shorts were also Stockton-type, tight and very short, revealing a lot of thigh. But hip-hop influence, mostly from that guy who just made away with my F shirt, has allowed me to pick up baggy shorts that now reach close to the knees.

Tanktops and basketball shorts are also my usual gear when I take a brisk constitutional inside our village, or for pedestrian forays to Tiendesitas or the new SM Hypermart for Bicol Express to go or prepared sisig, respectively.

But at home, when toiling in the garden, being creative in the kitchen, or playing with my iBook for our bread and butter, even the tanktop and shorts are cast aside. And only black boxer briefs separate me from the notion that real men wear nothing.