The shirt story

The rejection letters piled up by Enrico Johnson’s front door. He had long since bothered opening them, their contents were identical, even though he was frequently criticised for his own lack of originality.

‘At least these fuckers will stop arriving soon’, he thought to himself, as he was going through a period of chronic writer’s block and hadn’t written a story for several months. 

He took a  drive into town, hoping to come across some inspiration,  and although he was unsuccessful in that venture, he saw something that he believed could change his writing future.

There, in the window of the Famous Writers’ Shirts store, was the shirt worn by Ernest Hemmingway when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. It was quintessential Hemmingway, checked and rugged, a shirt that had seen the world, then sat in front of a typewriter, bourbon in hand, writing about it.

‘If I had that shirt on when I wrote, think of the ideas I’d have’, Enrico thought to himself, ‘think of the stories I’d start writing. Think what a writer it would make of me.’

He studied his own shirt in a new light. ‘No wonder I can’t write anything. You can’t have original ideas in a shirt like this.’

He looked at the price tag, but as he feared it was entirely out of his price range, $500, more than his entire life’s savings. Even if he won all the competitions he’d entered, even if all the publishers he’d sent stories to published them and sent him checks, he still wouldn’t come close to such a colossal sum.

He could try selling his car, of course, but it was an old car and he’d make only a few hundred dollars at best. And then how would he get home?

He studied the shirt for a long time before moving on, defeated. He couldn’t afford any of the merchandise in the Famous Writers’ Shirts store, he’d been in once before and the cheapest thing he’d seen was a vest once worn by Ian Fleming, and that cost over $100.

He’d only walked a few blocks before he came across a store he hadn’t seen before, ‘Hemmingwayesque Shirts’. He went inside, intrigued, and sure enough, amongst numerous other shirts all of a style one might associate with Hemmingway, was a rack of the rugged checked shirts. He found one in his size and tried it on. It was identical to the original in every way, except, well except it wasn’t Hemmingway’s and consequently contained not of the inspirational qualities of the original.

The price, though, was much more reasonable, just a couple of dollars. He bought one, even though he knew it would do nothing to solve his inspiration problem. ‘It’s a good shirt, all the same’, he told himself.

Then he had an idea. After phoning a friend, to arrange assistance, he hid the Hemmingwayesque shirt in his bag and returned to Famous Writers Shirts. He brazed in confidently, went straight up to the counter, and said, as he took out his credit card “I’d like to buy the shirt in the window. The Hemmingway.”

“Of course sir,” the assistant said, and signalled for a colleague to remove the shirt from the window.

“Would you like to try it on before you buy, sir?” the assistant asked.

“What, no, hardly matters.” Then he had a change of heart. “Oh, go on, I’d better see if it fits, it’ll be nice to wear it.”

In the changing room he swapped the original Hemmingway for the fake he had bought a few minutes earlier.

He returned to the counter and made ready to pay, but just as the assistant was about to take his card he received a call, as arranged, from his friend. “I’m sorry,” he said to the assistant, “I have to run, an emergency at work. Could you keep the shirt for me, I’ll be back in a few hours – name of Jenkins.”

And so he left the store with the original Hemmingway shirt in his bag. As soon as he got home he tried the shirt on, and sat in front of his typewriter, expecting the ideas to surge through him.

He sat at the typewriter all night, and the next day. Every so often he would take a long, hard sniff of the Hemmingway sweat still left in the fabric of the shirt.

Not a single idea occurred to him in all that time.

‘Bloody Hemmingway’, he thought to himself. ‘I should have got that Ian Fleming vest after all’.