The Moose in the Closet: The Moose’s Closet: Hat Buyer’s Remorse

During November I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. All of the MITC stories appearing in November have been written in advance as has this generic little opening you’re reading right now. Instead of comic book plugging I’ll be linking comic sites, blogs, artists, publishers and writers I dig and I encourage you to go check them out, have some fun, try something new, whatever. Today’s link is:

Melody Nadia Shickley

Feel free to read my NaNoWriMo novel right here.

Story time…

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I have a love affair with hats. My closet is always well stocked with baseball hats, dressier caps, ski-hats, skull caps – hats are to me what shoes are to Robin. Every time I tell her she has too many shoes she reminds me that I own about twenty to thirty hats.

Due to this hat fetish I have bought many hats over the years that I ultimately (or instantly) regretted.

For instance, my big, novelty Cat in the Hat, um, hat that I bought at Lollapalooza 1993 (the same year I bought my retarded Flaming Lips’ shirt – what the hell was wrong with me that day?). The only people who should own a Cat in the Hat hat (and its Mad Hatter variant) are frat boys, hippies and white trash. I realized this after I bought it and decided I didn’t even want to wear it during the concert. So I stuffed as much of it as I can in my back-pocket, hoping someone would steal it – no-one did, obviously, because it was the ugliest hat ever made. I brought it home and never wore it again.

Unlike my ridiculous ski-hat. I don’t know where I bought this hat but if there was a store called “Waste Your Money While Looking Like an Idiot” I’m pretty sure that’s where I got it. This hat was literally about five feet long, felt and was purple/dark-purple striped. It looked like an elongated, floppy, multi-colored gnome hat. I would wear it in the winter and instead of letting it hang I would wrap it around my head like a scarf. It might sound efficient but I looked like a diseased version of that “Jaba no batha’” guy from Star Wars.

I also went to some pajama party in high school in which that hat became my “Sleeping Cap”. It’s like I was always making excuses for wearing that ridiculous hat.

Buying a bad hat is one thing. Buying a perfectly good hat and transforming it into a pleading to get my ass beat down is a completely different story. Take my perfectly normal looking Buffalo Sabers hat. Aside from being a Sabers hat there was nothing wrong with it.

The first thing I did to that hat was decorate it with a couple of humorous buttons. Do you remember in the 80s when everyone looked like a waiter at Friday’s? Buttons on their book bags, jackets, shirts – wherever they felt was a good place to fasten a piece of metal that says, “Be Nice to Me…I’ve Had a Bad Day” while sporting a picturing of a bloody knife. Anyway, I had buttons all over my Buffalo Sabers hat. Covered that damn thing.

Then I wrote my name in big fucking letters underneath the bill of the hat. “JAY” scrawled on it with a sharpie so that anyone standing up to 300 feet away would know that my name is “Jay”.

But, in case they couldn’t see it, I’d flip the bill up so you only saw the underside of the hat.

And occasionally wear it backwards or sideways.

I swear to God it was like the combination of every bad trend ever created all rolled into one and placed on top of my head. The hat must have weighed about twenty pounds from the buttons alone – the ink from the sharpie easily jacked that weight up to twenty-two pounds.

But even that hat has nothing on what commonly became known as my “Transexual Hat”.

I was at the J. Crew down at the South Street Seaport, doing a little winter shopping with my then home-girl Mary. I couldn’t afford J. Crew clothes back then so I was sort of there for moral support more than anything. I saw this hat on sale for like five bucks and said to my materialistic self, “Fuck man, I can have a J. Crew hat. That would be dope.” So I bought the hat.

At first glance it wasn’t that bad – not the greatest hat ever but it was passable. It was a black woolen ski-hat with gray designs on it and had a big gray pom-pom thing on top. The pom-pom as an adult male was pushing it but the masculinity of the black and gray seemed to counter it well – it was a manly hat.

I buy it, walk out of J. Crew with it, and Mary eventually looks at it and says, “Why are there hearts all over your hat?”

I take the hat off and look. The “gray designs” – they were hearts. There were other designs, though. There was a horse, for instance. A snow-flake. I honest-to-God don’t know how I missed this but the pom-pom combined with hearts, horses and snowflakes automatically trumped any masculinity that the LA Raider color-scheme tried to induce. We decided that the hat might have been born a man, but it went to great lengths and painful stitching to do away with its masculinity. It was a transsexual hat.

I held onto it over the years. I find that if a girl is ever over my place and didn’t come prepared for the cold letting her borrow the hat was always bonus points provided they didn’t ask for the story behind it. You’ll be surprised how many women would just accept the fact that you leave a woman’s hat lying around the apartment. None of them will believe you bought it for five bucks in the men’s department, though.

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The Moose’s Closet: Hat Buyer’s Remorse

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

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