The 1996 Western New Mexico Men’s Recreational Rugby Tournament, Sponsored by the Coyote Moon Cafe
photo by prashant kolachala
The 1996 Western New Mexico Men’s Recreational Rugby Tournament, Sponsored by the Coyote Moon Cafe
by graduate student jake head
When I wear it, my mind forces me to bridge the gap between the seemingly unrelated front and back. I imagine a young man, a man who used to be my age, sitting in a well-worn western cafe; a cafe that always has cherry pie and a fresh pot of coffee. A cafe I’ve only been to via TV show plots and beatnik books. The man wears a cotton headband restraining long, feathered hair. He is lean and mean, sweaty from the match, drunk on both joy and lager. He and the rest of the rec team drink gallons of booze and eat piles of lean beef in celebration of their small-town victory. Yellow fabric camouflages mustard, beer, and sweat stains. I imagine their rugby league is sponsored by the cafe, the owner being heavily invested in his community’s minuscule triumphs; the community being heavily invested in the cafe’s continuous supply of saturated fat and lite beer.
The man wearing the shirt (my shirt) is a high school football star turned recreational rugby leaguer. Maybe he plays in the summer on break from New Mexico University. Or this is what he does to blow off steam after a long shift at God knows where. Maybe he doesn’t play at all, he just works in the cafe, and for some reason, they advertise the tournament on the back of the shirt. Perhaps there was no original owner at all, and this austere t-shirt is just a factory defect. A factory defect that advertises for the Coyote Moon Cafe on one side, and a men’s recreational rugby league tournament on the other, and the character I’ve made up to match an austere and bright yellow article of clothing is actually just the product of some guy in a screen printing shop mixing up two files. I have invented a thousand other narratives to explain the origin of my favorite t-shirt and this is just the one that makes the most sense. All I know for sure is that somehow, in the past 25 years, this shirt has managed to travel from New Mexico to Georgia and from someone else’s shoulders to my own.
I prefer the romantic approach. To me, the fabric is soft because it is worn. It has felt the sweat of a nostalgic championship and the dirt of well-worn turf. It has traveled the continent in a van. It has made its home in desert storms and sweaty Southern cities. I feel powerful in it because someone else felt powerful in it before me, and I stumbled upon it in Value Village because some force decided that I was overdue for a mundane object to romanticize.