028 - Strip Tees No. 4: "Atlanta Knights" and LA Days
The distorted joys of discovering grails in dead guy's drawers
Strip Tees is a recurring series in which I write
about t-shirts I like
After a lifetime in New York, a three-year stint in Los Angeles, and a return to the Big Snapple following an abortive attempt at moving to Austin last February, I’m back in the City of Angles.
That is NOT a typo; everybody’s got an angle here — and most of them are obtuse!
Despite the fact that the Mother Nature seems to be taking increasing umbrage at this city’s very existence, like Randy “Macho Man” Newman once sang, I love LA.
I love the sun that seems to shine brighter here, largely unobstructed by skyscrapers and unbridled by clouds in its unwavering daily routine of waking over the saintly mountains and hovering over the bustling basin before being called gently home over the blue horizon.
I love the light of the sun as it casts dramatic shadows at those magical hours and as it refracts through the haze of automobile exhaust and wildfire ash, producing the most sacred shades of yellow, orange, red, purple, and pink that practically make up for the requisite respiratory ailments accompanying them.
I love the shape of the sun… jk lol enough about the sun.
I love the food of every ethnic stripe and price point, accessible in every one of this city’s 572 neighborhoods and usually located, to my never-ending surprise, in a strip mall so hideously nondescript its architect must have suffered a childhood brain injury to the region governing self-respect.
I love the donut shops, the dog-friendliness, the do-it-yourself car washes, the delusions of grandeur that have kept the lights on in Hollywood for over 100 years, and the wackadoodles you meet on dating apps who tell you over dessert that Anthony Bourdain and Avicii didn’t take their own lives; they were assassinated by a global elitist pedophilia ring to prevent the release of a child sex trafficking documentary they were covertly producing together.
But above of all, I love the estate sales.
In the taxonomy of second-hand shopping, there is the yard sale, the tag sale, the garage sale, the rummage sale, the thrift, antique, pawn, and consignment shop, the swap meet, the flea market and their online equivalents (eBay, Facebook Marketplace)… but the estate sale takes the cake for me.
Part of the appeal is inherent in the word ‘estate’ and the visions of manicured lawns, topiary gardens, and manorial opulence it conjures. Granted, the reality of the destination rarely matches the imagination, but thanks to all the celebrities and the many parasites who got nice and rich off those celebrities, your odds of pulling up to a palace are better in LA than just about anywhere else this side of Abu Dhabi.
Regardless of a house’s size or condition, I find myself being struck by the same funny feeling of expectant excitation mixed with gleeful roguishness every time I stride up the walkway, as if I’m about to trespass an active archeological site. Few moments in life are as palpably pregnant with possibility as crossing the threshold of a dead stranger’s home — an anticipation often amplified after a prolonged wait spent helplessly cued along the font steps, passive-aggressively sizing up the early-bird egressors and their hard-earned spoils. Do they know what they have? Did I miss out on all the good stuff? Will I discover my diamond in the rough? Are the prices even reasonable?
Once inside, my eyes go wide as I scan my surroundings and get my bearings: a LeRoy Nieman in the foyer, an MCM coffee table in the parlor, a 48-star American flag draped over the sofa. Kitchen to the left; I’ll save that for the end. Home office to the right; too many filing cabinets ripe for the rifling. Bookshelves dead ahead; let me guess: Crichton? King? Koontz?
Every furnishing, accessory, and accoutrement, every tchotchke, curio, and bric-a-brac, every abandoned photo album of precious family memories and orphaned crate of Christmas ornaments, every silk tie, softball trophy, samurai sword, and Speak & Spell is for the taking. Each item assigned a value relative to its market worth It’s a truly singular experience that I can only describe as “open house meets grave robbery.”
For vintage clothing FREAKS like myself, the bedrooms are where the magic happens and where I tend to gravitate first. Some persnickety sale organizers will neatly arrange the clothes in piles on the bed or hang them on racks, individually pricing each piece to reflect market value. Booooooo. That’s no fun.
I much prefer the utter free-for-alls to be found in the dusty, downtrodden rooms untouched for decades, once belonging to children who long ago grew old enough to have houses and children of their own. These are the rooms with neglected cluttered closets dimly illuminated by a bare incandescent bulb on a pull chain and decrepit dressers whose disheveled drawers I hungrily tear through in search of… well, I know it when I see it.
And I saw it on Saturday in the midst of my first Southland “saling” expedition in over a year. Using the EstateSales.net app as our trusty guide, my buddy Tim and I wended our way through the Westside of LA, navigating the National Guard roadblocks to reach a lovely home in the Palisades (three blocks from the burn zone) whose hidden treasure potential seemed promising based on the listing’s photos.
But while parking I clocked a young hipsterish dude walking away from the house with an armful of goodies — the telltale “C” insignia of the Champion brand visible on a dangling sweatshirt sleeve cuff — otherwise known as THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO SEE HEADING INTO AN ESTATE SALE. I thought we were cooked before even getting out of the car; this schmuck had certainly picked the last bits of meat off the bones. Was there even any sense in entering at this point? For Tim’s sake, he being a novice in the trade, I resignedly trudged forth, hoping to at least settle for an interesting book or two… perhaps a self-published autobiography by some forgotten vaudevillian or a collection of poetry by the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.
I couldn’t tell you what that hipster dude was after, but it must not have been THE COOLEST SHIT EVER, because that’s precisely what I found in one of those decaying, disarrayed rooms tucked away towards the back on the second floor. I’ll never be able to explain how an exceedingly rare, double-sided “break through” t-shirt of a defunct, Atlanta-based minor league hockey team found its way into the bottom dresser drawer of this stagnant room in this $3 million home in the Pacific Palisades, and yet, there it was waiting just for me in all its perfectly distressed and faded glory.
I searched this entire house upside down and came across not a single other object related to the sport of hockey, the city of Atlanta, or the subject of knighthood. As such, I would have to rank this shirt as the most surprising find in my 24 years of foraging for vintage. Seriously, HOW THE HELL DID IT GET HERE???
Ours is not to reason why, yours is but to click and buy…
ABOUT THE TEAM: From 1992 to 1996, the Atlanta Knights played in the International Hockey League (itself defunct since 2001) as an affiliate of the Tampa Bay Lightning. They were actually pretty damn good, winning the Turner Cup (the IHL’s answer to Stanley) in their second season, and they were also notable for facilitating a pair of historically progressive pioneering moments: hiring pro hockey’s first Black head coach in John Paris, Jr. and suiting up the first female player in a regular season pro hockey game — Manon Rhéaume.
This shirt and many more fun vintage pieces are available at quizdaddys.com where all profits are continuing to be donated to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, assisting those struggling in the wake of the recent fires.