24 May 2018, evening.

I walked south from my hotel on W57 Street in Manhattan. I was wearing a Jason Laurits-designed t-shirt from his Paste gallery. It carried a print of the outline of a t-shirt emblazoned with the ubiquitous I Heart NY logo. A t-shirt, with a print of a t-shirt.

My destination was Chelsea Market, where I’d bought the t-shirt the year before. My route took me through Times Square. I tried desperately to make out the drones of Max Neuhaus’s sub-sidewalk installation beneath the louder drone of tourism and commerce, but failed. I’d visited Neuhaus’ ‘Times Square’ early one morning with my friend Reed the previous year. Coincidentally, I was walking downtown to watch Reed & Caroline, Reed’s duo with Caroline Schutz, perform at Pianos on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side.

At Chelsea Market, I ate a vegan burger from Creamline and, with time to kill, wandered into the Posman book store. I bought a copy of ‘Howl’ by Allen Ginsberg and Jonathan Lethem’s survey of Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music.

“Neat shirt,” said the cashier. “Where did you buy that from?”

“At a shop on the ground floor,” I replied. I think I may have made a downward pointing gesture as if trying to make her see the Paste gallery that was literally below where she was standing.

“Neat,” she said again. “That’s so meta.”

I had no idea what she meant.

I mulled this over while walking to a sports bar a couple of doors down from Pianos, where I met V for a couple of pints of Stella before the gig. The lady behind the bar pouring our drinks was wearing the same grey Muppets t-shirt that I’d bought from Walt Disney World on a family vacation maybe a couple of years before. I contemplated saying, “Nice shirt,” but decided that maybe that would be perceived as flirtatious.

V and I went down the street to Pianos. I offered him a drink, noting that the bar served Stella.

“The Stella’s not good here,” he said. “It tastes sort of soapy.”

We had a pint each anyway.

After the gig, V and I helped Reed pack his equipment into an Uber. While Reed went back inside to grab his cello, I asked V if he ever got recognised at gigs like this.

“Nah,” he said.

Moments later, someone tapped him on the shoulder with a pile of records to sign with a Sharpie. Perhaps fearing that another fan would collar him for autographs, we walked back down to the sports bar, leaving Reed to wonder where his assistants had disappeared to. We had another drink at exactly the same spot where we’d stood before Reed & Caroline’s set. The lady with the Muppets t-shirt was still serving behind the bar. I don’t think she had even noticed we’d left.

V’s Uber arrived and I headed back uptown on the Subway, still a little confused by what the cashier in the bookstore had meant by her assertion that my t-shirt was “meta”.

At the hotel bar, I took a stool and ordered an Old Fashioned, and then a second, and then a third. The third one tasted weird – not soapy, just weird – and I asked the server to check it. It turned out that she had made it with iced tea instead of whiskey. I ordered a fourth one, even though I really shouldn’t have. I sank that just as a massive crowd came in, and went to my room.

After opening the door, my room promptly span violently and I vomited into the toilet. For some reason, in that moment while I was bent over the toilet, my dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis forced itself into the forefront of my thoughts. He had been diagnosed in the January of that year but I realised, there and then, that I hadn’t accepted it, or even begun to process it, or remotely acknowledged what it meant. The journey to come to terms with it all began in that hotel bathroom, in New York, there and then.

Whenever I see either that Jason Laurits or grey Muppets t-shirt in my wardrobe, I’m reminded of that night.

Both t-shirts mentioned in this piece form part of ‘All The T-Shirts I Wore In Lockdown’, a Mortality Tables collaboration with the superpolar Taïps label and anonymous sound artist Xqui.

Available on limited edition cassette single from superpolar.bandcamp.com, with digital editions from mortalitytables.bandcamp.com and xqui.bandcamp.com

All proceeds from sales of this release will go to CALM – the Campaign Against Living Miserably – and Kölner Tafel.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Documentary Evidence