Michael Pitt, What Are You Wearing?

In this feature, we dissect the outfits of Michael Pitt like an overly enthusiastic sixth-grader would a frog dripping with designer formaldehyde.

When I was a child, I had an invisible friend named Michael Pitt. He lived in a pillow fort I made for him in the back of my closet, and for clothing he wore old things from the rag bucket my mother kept underneath the kitchen sink. His favorite shirt was an olive green button-down that smelled like Pine Sol and had flecks of spaghetti sauce on the sleeves. He only wore it on special occasions, like when we’d make tea for the squirrels or fingerpaint our dreams onto tree bark or try to find faces in the clouds. Or when we’d take baths together.

One day my mother threw the green shirt away. Michael Pitt and I had planned to spend the afternoon teaching the mice who lived underneath the garage to sing old Shaker songs in a round, and he wanted to wear the green shirt over a pair of shoe polish-stained corduroys. But when I went to fetch the shirt from the bucket it was gone, and in its place was a pair of plaid Christmas-colored boxers.

Things weren’t the same for me and Michael Pitt after the shirt went away. To make him feel better I fashioned him a cape from an old holey beach towel, but it didn’t match the socks he’d turned into a cap to keep his ears warm when we’d go out searching for glow-in-the-dark berries late at night. I told him we’d get him a new shirt soon, the dark blue button-down my father wore to dinner at my grandparents’ house, but I had the sinking feeling our friendship wouldn’t last all the way until the shirt was worn out enough to end up in the rag bucket.

The last time I saw Michael Pitt he was wearing a paint-stained bandana as pants and he looked kind of strung out. He smiled at me kind of sadly and walked off toward the woods, where the foxes and the bluejays were humming the Celtic folk song we’d taught them last summer.

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