On Tuesday, a student in my creative writing class at a southern California junior college that shall remain unnamed -- the student, as well, will remain unnamed, although I will say that his first name is the same as mine but with one extra letter in it -- asked me if I was sponsored by Lacoste. "Or," he said, then a bit more sheepishly, perhaps afraid that he'd offended me and would suffer consequently at grading time, "is it just kind of a preference."

The reason he asked, I suppose, is that although for the first time this semester I had not come to class wearing a polo-style shirt with the telltale green alligator embroidered over where my heart would be -- if I had one -- it was raining outside, and so over my peach-colored Yves San Laurent button-up I was wearing a white Lacoste rain jacket -- and yes, with the alligator embroidered over where the heart should be.

Later this semester, when it's colder outside and the winds heading out of the East toward the ocean bite harder, perhaps he'll see me in my black Lacoste ski jacket, and perhaps I'll be wearing my pink Lacoste sweater underneath that ski jacket, although it's equally possible that I might be wearing my cream-colored Dior sweater, or even my yellow Burberry sweater. I always, these days, seem to prefer the Lacoste, but you can't wear the same sweater every day during the winter, and I've only turned up one Lacoste sweater of acceptable color, size, and quality at the area Goodwills.

But we don't need to tell anybody about that part of things, not anymore than we would need, or want, to tell anybody if I'd in fact paid the full and fully obscene price of acquiring all of my high end brand name items new. Brand name clothes, like any other commodity, write their own mythology by effacing their origins, appearing tracelessly, almost genetically, as pure signifiers: economic comfort, good taste, intelligence, international experience. But, of course, every signifier has its origins: words, for instance, come from the throat by way of the tongue: what Roland Barthes calls, eroticizing the evolution, the grain of the voice.

My secret, of course, is that I learned at some point that no matter how much you pay, eventually every commodity turns into a piece of garbage -- cars, shoes, photographs, electronics: they are all like Aristotle's pure potential (not the same at all as thought itself) before they are purchased, and the moment they have been purchased they immediately begin their process of decay which will arrive, eventually, at the landfill, the bottom of the food chain -- and that's where I come in: stopping two or three times a week at the Goodwill near work, or near my unrefinished loft, or nonconverted liveworkspace, in mid-city Los Angeles, to flip through the racks of polo shirts and button-up shirts and jackets and sweaters and, even, sportcoats.

I also know that after a commodity has become garbage and then rescued, or, more appropriately, salvaged (a salvation, indeed), it is no longer a commodity, and, therefore, no longer in a process of decay: now eternally itself. My loft, which is itself, arguably, a piece of salvaged garbage is filled with other pieces of salvaged garbage. Forget the clothes! My desk is a green steel school desk either bought or stolen years ago from the University of Arizona, and the reason for the ambiguity is that although I paid for it, I suspect that the man who accepted my twenty dollar bill was not qualified to sell it; the wood and Formica tables on either side of my bed were salvaged from my parents' house and my grandmother's house respectively; some kind of strange Swedish army water purification device acts as my coffee table; my old, wooden stereo receiver was salvaged from my aunt's common law husband, who has long since moved on to the kind of electronics one can find at Best Buy.

But I also know that the difference between secondhand and vintage, as it were, is in how you punctuate it: a brand new, space-age white, slippery sleek, heavily-commodified Apple iMac computer on the desk, for instance, or the iPod docked on top of the old stereo receiver. The expensive accessories create the appearance that the inexpensive "vintage" is by choice -- which it is not -- rather than out of necessity, which, of course, it is.

*

It's not bad, really, this whole sponsorship idea. After all, despite the fact that I spend the majority of my time alone in my bedroom at my desk, twice a week I appear as a young, stylish creative writing professor on the campus of a southern California junior college, and believe me, these kids are looking to me. Of course they're looking to me. They're in junior college and so to some extent they know that for whatever reasons -- economics, psychology, disinterest, simple inability -- they've been put on the losers' track, and so they're looking for a way out, for something different, and when I show up passing out copies of Artaud's "All Writing is Pigshit..." and teaching them plotting techniques by way of stories about Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm, they figure out pretty quickly that I am something different. And I am: Although I've worked there for almost four years, I actually don't know the first thing about Orange County. I don't even know my way around Orange County. I drive forty-five miles on the I-10, the 110, and the 405, exit at Harbor Boulevard, drive about a mile to campus, park near my classroom, teach my classes, then get back in my car and run the process in reverse. I'm saying that because these people are looking to me as the something different that they're looking for, to be or to become, they are, to some extent, consciously or unconsciously, modeling themselves after me.

I'm a star. When I step into the classroom I resonate like Paris Hilton: It's not that I know the truth; I am the truth.

Lacoste should sponsor me -- I'd boost their sales in Orange County, I'm sure of it -- but I suppose if I showed them this document they'd realized that I'm already doing the work for them -- having showed up to class every day this semester with their telltale logo emblazoned above the location of the hypothetical heart which may or may not exist -- which is to say, there's no reason for them to waste their money paying me, either in cash or clothes, to do it for them. What I need is competition: if Polo, for instance, were to send me twenty new shirts, then Lacoste, to protect their interests, would have to respond in kind. The gift I am giving them now is not a gift but a trap. Quid pro quo.

But I wouldn't be caught dead in Polo.

*

The whole point of all this garbage salvaging and name brand whoring, I suppose, is that I'm befuddling the system, I'm throwing a monkey wrench into the machinery of class and commodity: I'm stealing the signifiers that are proper to another, wealthier class of people, without actually being one of them, and yet there's also a specificity to how and what I steal, one that changes depending on where I am, at a given moment, orienting myself in what Gilles Deleuze might call the "system of social coordinates." It's a strange process of signifying who I am by acting as though I am signifying who I am not, but not quite. Since I've picked up on the preppier fashions -- albeit in a secondhand-vintage-garbage-picked kind of way -- I've cut my hair into one of those euro-style faux-hawks. In a way, I guess perhaps it all comes down to a process of disrespecting the signifiers of the social or economic class to which you do not belong, the club a membership to which has been denied you, or the party to which you have not been invited. What else could Q-Tip have been thinking when he told the world: Tommy Hilfiger is my nigger? You don't want me so I'm going to love you to get back at you, that kind of thing.

So are you -- or, I should say, am I -- trying to be what you are or not or are you simply trying to dismantle its meaning, rendering its exclusion of you irrelevant?

*

In the fourth grade, I brought a football to school for recess, and my classmate Chucky offered to write my name on it for me. Chucky was an interesting sort. Three bullies dominated that class -- Endasia, Hakim, and Chucky -- but whereas Endasia was ugly and brutal and Hakim was beautiful and brutal, Chucky, who was much larger than either of them and therefore the hypothetical enforcer of the group, was only occasionally and unwillingly brutal. He didn't really want to be brutal, but he wanted to be part of the axis of power in the class, and who can blame him? Power is an in and an out, and once an in and out have been established everybody wants to be in, because the only other place to be is out (and in that class in particular being out constituted a safety risk). Chucky couldn't forsake his position of power, but he had his moments, particularly when Endasia and Hakim weren't looking or weren't around, of softness and sincerity, and his offer to write my name on my football for me -- perhaps, indirectly, a desire to protect me from having it stolen by Endasia and Hakim -- was a manifestation of one of those moments. In a movie of bad guys and good guys in which the three bullies maintained the side of evil, Chucky would have been the bad guy who doubted, the one who wavered, who was with evil but not himself evil, and eventually he would have been the key to the whole movie, the eventual victory of the good.

In the real world, though, things are not so black and white -- although, come to think of it, Chucky was black and I was white, so go figure...

My name is Eli. It's three letters long and written, I think, exactly as it sounds, and I think I've always been plagued by an inability not to understand that there are a lot of people who are a lot dumber than I am, but, more specifically, to comprehend exactly what this means, or exactly what possibilities this proliferation of dumbness entails. I couldn't believe that Chucky was really asking me this question; not only that, I didn't believe that Chucky was really asking me this question because I didn't believe that it was a question at all: I believed that he was mocking me, that the question was itself not a question but rather a mockery in the form of a question, assuming the form, as it were, of a question, and that the only way for me to evade the mockery -- although not completely because the gesture itself, of mocking, is itself in part performative: by presuming that he can mock me, or indicating that he thinks of me as someone to mock, or who he can mock, he already mocks me -- was to return it, or to meet it on its own terms: to mock it back, as it were. And so I did.

What I'm saying is that I just could not believe that he was really asking me how to spell Eli, and the reason I couldn't believe it is that what could possibly be easier to spell, or what more obvious. It spells itself. First you hear the letter E, precisely as you would pronounce it if you were reciting or singing the alphabet, and then -- these two sounds mediated by the voiced dental L sound -- the letter I, once again precisely as you would pronounce it if reciting or singing or chanting the alphabet. Eli. So I thought he was kidding. I thought he was trying to play me for a fool, and I was not going to be played for the fool, and so I played him back, but in playing him back I wasn't really trying to play him for the fool. The gesture -- of playing him for the fool -- was simply meant to neutralize his effort to play me for the fool, to render it impotent, but also to indicate a certain playing along. After all, he was one of the bullies. You didn't want to run contrary him, even as you refused to allow him to play you for the fool. All of which is to say that when he asked me how to spell my name I rolled my eyes and told him: "E, L, X, I."

I thought he would get it.

*

And as far as Q-Tip and Tommy Hilfiger go, I suppose that what I'm trying to suggest is that part of what is in operation in Q-Tip's pronouncement that Tommy Hilfiger is his nigger is a sort of "kill him with kindness" type of thing. But it's more than simply converting your enemy into something other than your enemy by refusing to treat him as enemy; it's a way of trapping the person who dehumanizes you and dismisses you, of cornering them so that they can't dehumanize you and dismiss you without doing the same to themselves. Which is to say: Tommy Hilfiger never wanted anything to do with poor, urban black people. It's a performative word, speaking of performatives: it is the very fraternity it indicates, or something like that. So Q-Tip's pronouncement, or announcement, that Tommy Hilfiger was his nigger, was not, as one might think at first glance, and invitation. It wasn't Q-Tip saying, "hey, Tommy Hilfiger, why don't you and I be friends." Q-Tip's pronouncement or announcement that Tommy Hilfiger was his nigger made Tommy Hilfiger his nigger, made it true, and the inability of anybody who isn't in that fraternity to even utter the word that designates the fraternity makes it the most intimate sacred kind of fraternity, and suddenly, whether he wanted it or not, Tommy Hilfiger himself, of the upturned collars and pleated slacks, was in it, was one of them -- and I have to emphasize: whether he wanted to be or not, he was -- and once he was one of them, it was no longer possible for him to dismiss them, or, perhaps more importantly, to dehumanize them.

The greatest of all the nice guy philosophers, American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, understands this quite well when he writes, in the introduction to his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, that creating the kind of utopia he envisions as the end of a teleological liberal-democratic history, will entail "coming to see other human beings as 'one of us' rather than as 'them.'" According to Rorty, it is crucial that we see other human beings as one of us because when we do, when we realize that their bodies are our bodies, in a certain sense, then their suffering becomes our suffering, or if it doesn't become our suffering then it becomes at least something we can understand, or perhaps comprehend, by way of our own experience of suffering; and when we can understand that their suffering is suffering like our suffering, then we will no longer desire to stand for it, and we will desire to work to abate it the same way that we desire to work to abate our own suffering, and the same way that we desire to work to abate the suffering of those who we do see as one of us: our own family, sometimes, or the other members of our group insofar as we identify ourselves as members of some particular group or other.

I often think of when my sister broke up with her boyfriend. She was staying with me in Los Angeles, having just left him in London with the intent of returning after dealing with certain matters stateside, but also with a sort of lingering sense of the impending doom of the relationship. The day he called her to break up with her -- she seemed to have known it was coming, and yet the shock of it nearly crushed her when, finally, it really came, like the arrival of a messianic future -- I could feel the waves of pain that were inside of her inside of me, they belonged to me, I was suffering with her, and when I held her and she cried I was not doing it because I was strong and she was weak -- I was not allowing her to lean one me, as it were -- but rather we were two pains, or, rather, a single pain in two bodies, and the coming together of our two bodies, my holding of her while she wept, was quixotic in the sense that if it was meant that the non-suffering of one body were to cancel out the suffering of the other, what actually happened, because her suffering belonged to my body, as well, was a repetition, in the one body of the other.

And yet it helped. It always helps. When I have suffered, I, too, have sought comfort, for lack of a better word, in the arms of others, those who I have trusted or loved or who knows what, and it has helped. It always helps because the simple fact of not being alone helps, and this is something, I suppose, of what great American nice guy Richard Rorty is getting at with his constant neo-pragmatic calls for solidarity: that perhaps the salvation of the world can be found in the fact that my arms were of comfort to my sister in her suffering not because they were a place of non-suffering, an escape from that suffering, but rather because they were another, equal place of suffering, of the same suffering, suffered equally, as though it were my own.

When Q-Tip declared that Tommy Hilfiger was his nigger, the whole point was that in that moment Tommy Hilfiger lost the right, or the ability, to not be Q-Tip's nigger; in that moment, Tommy was one of them, of the people who are allowed to refer to each other as "my nigger," and so he could no longer dismiss them, dehumanize them, overlook their existence. I would like to think that we are all doing the same thing when we appropriate some of the signifiers of the social and economic classes that will not admit us into their ranks; or -- and I suppose this, too, would be acceptable -- that we are destroying the integrity of their inside, that we are crashing their party loud and drunk and obnoxious. Perhaps I like that idea better, and it's just as possible that Q-Tip was up to something more along those lines. The irony of it all, of course, is that perhaps Q-Tip was not Tommy Hillfiger's nigger when he made his famous fraternal declaration, but by the time that declaration mattered -- by the time it had resonance -- Q-Tip was successful and wealthy, and he really was Tommy Hilfiger's nigger.

Which is also to say that for the complexity of the gesture of my Lacoste wearing to achieve the kind of broad resonance it would need to actually act, people would have to be, on a large scale, paying attention to me, recording my gestures and disseminating, and if that ever happens I will, like Q-Tip, already have made it into the party I am actually trying to crash, the part whose inside I am trying not simply to penetrate, from the outside, but, rather, to render meaningless by bringing the outside into it.

The complexities of sponsorship.

Tune in during Week 34 to find out where their antics land Endasia, Hakim, and Chucky this time!

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