Dear Todd And Chris

Dear Todd and Chris,

Sorry for spilling grain 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 grim, 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 copyright-infringing, familiar-comic-strip-characters-acting-naughty T-shirts that were so popular on college campuses at the time. (Are they still so popular? Probably.) 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 represent our college and its personality? Something our fellow students would see and not be able to live without. Something to make people say, “Yes! Yes! I need that!” We all pitched in with ideas. I forget who came up with the one you chose, but I prefer 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 200 shirts for $400. You planned to sell them for $10 each.

A couple weeks later, the shipment arrived in a cardboard box the size of a large television set. Many of us in the dorm bought one the very first day. We were being friendly, supporting you in your endeavor. I wish I could say the purchase was as far as my support went, but I actually wore the shirt a few times. Once on a day when my parents and eleven-year-old sister had come to visit. My father was sick with cancer at the time, and remembering the tired, defeated sound of his voice when he asked me why I would ever wear something like that in public, well, this apology isn’t just to you.

Credit the student body’s collective 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. They did this in the hallway this night, and we joined them, and I drank too much. (Which, really, when drinking grain-alcohol punch out of a plastic duck, is the point, right?) One of the sophomore guys, Carter, drank too much, too. And at some point, unluckily for you, the party migrated from the hallway into your room. And probably because we were having trouble standing, Carter and I found ourselves sitting on the big cardboard box, cackling like the type of idiots who would wear t-shirts that say, “When it’s night out, we black out.” Then we started pouring full cups of the punch over each other’s heads. The alcohol stung my eyes. I don’t remember a lot more. Because, you know, it was night out…

The next day, it was discovered that the punch had dripped through the box and soaked through the t-shirts, dying some solid, leaving even the least affected with a few small splotches of pink. All pretty much unsellable.

You guys were unhappy. But, largely because of Carter’s elder status, your loss was chalked up to collateral party damage. The shirts were your responsibility, you should have moved them, or spread a tarp over them or something, before allowing such obviously inebriated fun-loving innocents into your room. You’d made most of your money back already, anyway. We’d mostly cost you potential profits.

In hindsight, the ruination of those godawful t-shirts was a good thing for everybody. A good thing for the world. The less chance another father would have to see his son wearing one, the better. But still, businesswise, I probably owe you some money.