Public Apology: In Which a Man Grapples With a Lifetime of Regret, One Incident at a Time by Bry Dave

Author:Bry, Dave [Bry, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781455509171
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

COLLEGE

(Or the six longest years of my life.)

Dear Todd Schwartz and Chris McGuire,

Sorry for spilling fruit punch all over the box of Calvin and Hobbes T-shirts you were hoping to sell.

It was the first semester of our freshman year of college, on the second floor of Marshall Dormitory, in the prison-cell-like, cinder-block room you two shared with a guy named Scott. I lived down the hall, in a similar room with my roommates Sean and Jeremy.

We’d only known each other for a month or so. We’d only known anybody we knew there for a month or so. And probably because we were all trying too hard to make people like us, you guys decided to invest some money in printing up a line of the familiar comic-strip-characters-acting-naughty T-shirts that were so popular on college campuses at the time. (Are they still so popular? I wonder.) You recruited another guy in our dorm, Jeff, a talented sketch artist, to draw a facsimile of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes drinking alcohol. It was a business venture. You weren’t trying to break any new ground.

What should the shirts say, though? What clever slogan to best represent our college and our wit? We all pitched in with ideas. I forget who came up with the winner, but I’m happy to think that it was not me.

“Connecticut College,” the shirts were to say on the front, with a picture of Calvin and Hobbes laughing with cans of beer in their hands. Under the picture were the words “When It’s Night Out…” Then on the back of the shirt, the pair would be depicted lying prone, with X marks in their eyes, under the punch line: “We BLACK Out!!!”

You brought the design to a silk screener at the Crystal Mall and put in an order for two hundred shirts for four hundred dollars. You planned to sell them for ten dollars each.

A couple weeks later, the shipment arrived in a cardboard box the size of a large television set. Many of us on our floor bought one the very first day. We were being friendly, supporting you in your endeavor. I wish I could say that’s as far as my support went, but I actually wore the shirt a few times—once when my parents and eleven-year-old sister had come to visit. My father was sick, and as I remember his tired, defeated tone when he voiced his disapproval—“Why would you want to wear a shirt like that?”—well, this apology isn’t just to you.

Credit to our fellow students’ taste, the T-shirts did not sell like hotcakes. You guys unloaded maybe twenty more in the following days, but after that, the mostly full box of product sat in your room next to Todd’s bunk.

Also living in our dorm that year were a group of sophomores we looked up to and hoped to befriend. From time to time they would mix up a punch made with Kool-Aid and grain alcohol in an orange Gatorade cooler and serve it, for some reason, out of a plastic decoy duck someone had brought to school.

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