Fresh Off the Boat (32 page)

“Son, think about it. Who shops here? Have you ever seen a Republican with some Izod shit on in here?”

“No, but mad people still like Hillary!”

“Yeah, people like Hillary, but they aren’t your customers! Black, Asian, Spanish people shop here and your white customers skate. Every single one of the motherfuckers is voting Obama! Think about it. You’re preaching to the choir.”

In March of 2007, I got a call from the biggest supporter Hoodman would ever have: Nima Nabavi. At the time, Nima was the godfather of online streetwear. Before all the other Internet retailers, Nima was doing it right. He went to grad school at NYU and he started Digital Gravel to sell street art, streetwear, music, and basically anything related to hip-hop or street culture in general. He was the only other person I met in streetwear who understood its power beyond a five-year blip on the fashion radar and wanted to use it to promote the things he believed in. He never took ads on his site, he supported artists even if it didn’t make money, and he was blatantly political in the email blasts he sent out to sell product. To this day, a lot of the integrity we have at Baohaus comes from watching the way Nima carried himself and his business.

Nima also carried Obey, Shepherd Fairey’s brand, but even Shepherd wouldn’t make Obama tees until late into Obama’s campaign. I had been doing it since January ’07 because I wasn’t some pussy that was scared about what people would think of my opinions. I knew Obama was the right dude for the job and I did everything I could to get behind it. That’s
the way it should be. Nima bought up every single Obama T-shirt in my apartment after our phone call. The day he put them up, everything sold out in three hours.

Within three months, we had nineteen stores carrying our shirts and I donated 10 percent of each shirt to the campaign. Not 10 percent of profits, straight up 10 percent off the top. No bullshit after proceeds or 1 percent business. I wasn’t making that much money anyway, so the point was to get this motherfucker elected and we did. There were people like me in every neighborhood doing the damn thing for Obeezy. Five dollars here, a hundred dollars there, don’t smoke that this week and donate the dub kid! It was happening everywhere. We all had a part in it and when Obama got elected, I told myself, Today, you’re an American motherfucker.

I
n 2009, I graduated from law school in the midst of a recession that killed streetwear. Kids with disposable income for the latest kicks were thinning out. Before the recession, I assumed I wouldn’t have to take the job as an associate at a law firm, but when the streetwear bubble burst, I had no other option. Ning, Steve, and I continued designing Hoodman, but most of our retailers started closing up shop and there was nowhere to sell our goods. Nima and Digital Gravel remained our biggest supporter, but even he was having trouble once Karmaloop.com co-opted the movement.

For the first time in my life, I played it smart: I took the job as a lawyer, walked through the doors of a giant midtown office building, and took the seat in my office next to Major Abshed. Major Abshed became my best friend at the firm. He was an international associate from Saudi Arabia who’d gone to Cornell before taking the job as a first-year associate. When he started he was gracious, accommodating, but also fearful. He didn’t know how Americans at work would receive him. We’d both been snake-bit before. You go to law school and figure you’re being exposed to the crème de la crème of American society, people with money, education,
and experience. Yet, somehow, some way they never learn how to treat people.

Working in a law firm was not for me. Major Abshed and I would get high and go to Yemen Cafe in Brooklyn after work. Right off Atlantic near Court Street, it’s the best Middle Eastern food in New York. They’re known for one dish: yaneez. You sit down, they bring you an iceberg lettuce salad in a wooden bowl like you’re eating red sauce Italian, but it comes with a spicy relish instead of dressing. Light, spicy, fragrant, and acidic, it was the best iceberg salad I’ve ever had. Simple, humble, satisfying. They follow that up with a bowl of clear soup made of lamb bones. The opposite of the salad, the soup is deep, complex, balanced, and mysterious. You can’t quite identify the spices because none of them is too pronounced. If you asked me what the spices were, I honestly couldn’t tell you. The spices are just there to quell the gamy flavor of lamb so that you can drink the stock and take in the flavor of its marrow. Once you finish your soup, they bring you a plate of roasted lamb.

One day you get neck, another it’s shoulder, some days it’s chops or shank. The restaurant will give its regulars the shoulder, but I would always ask for neck. I liked to get between the bones and pick the meat out. It is hands down the best dish of lamb I’ve ever had. Every day, they roast the lamb with Arabic seven-spice, perhaps some lemon zest and extra paprika. The lamb is covered in foil and comes out dripping with juices. Tender, succulent, but not flabby. The lamb has just enough structure while still giving easily to the tap of your fork. Everything comes with Afghani bread, rice, and
salta
, which is a stew made of carrots, onions, okra, and potato that you throw over the rice. To finish, you get cardamom tea. When you’re ready, you get up, leave twenty-two dollars, and walk out knowing that you’ve just spent the best twenty-two dollars in New York City at that moment.

While other associates competed on billable work trying to climb the ladder, I got high and took Major Abshed around the city. When I promoted parties, a sideline that grew out of my streetwear hustle, I’d bring Major Abshed. I’d give him new music; he’d take me to Middle Eastern restaurants. And, of course, we watched basketball. The NBA really is an
international game. I’ve never met someone from abroad that gave a shit about the NFL, or could even decipher it, but they all love the NBA. As an undergrad at Boston University, Major Abshed became a Celtics fan. In 2008, the C’s were on top of the world so he never missed a game. It kind of drove me crazy listening to him go on and on about Pierce, KG, and Jesus Shuttlesworth, but I let him have his shine. Major Abshed smoked so much weed watching basketball that I started to buy ounces and split it with him.

THE ONLY INSPIRATION
in my life at that time was Hoodman. I tried to resuscitate the business but it was no use. I should have known it was going to happen. As a kid, I’d seen hip-hop lose its voice and edge when Puffy came through with the shiny suits and Master P started pushing plastic jewel cases. When Eminem came along it was a wrap.
^*
There is a point where everything that meant something to us goes to die at two-for-one Ladies Night.

The same thing happened with streetwear. It became too accessible and the customer base changed. Instead of being a culture created and sold to heads who actually lived in New York, Los Angeles, or the Bay, it became something people consumed on the Internet. Instead of buying the shirts for what they stood for—transgressive, satirical, do-it-yourself democratic street culture—people co-opted it as the style du jour. They rocked it ’cause it was hot, colorful, and played on Friday night. That was it. The people that copped Hoodman switched from hypebeasts and downtown kids to Jersey bros who went to Libation or Spitzers. I was suddenly dying for the hypebeasts to come back. Originally, I hated the hypebeasts because they never understood the “whys.” Why is this design dope? What does this message mean? Where does this allusion or lyric come from? Most of them didn’t know, they just read blogs or saw others
wearing certain styles and copied them. They’d always go for the shiniest pieces and the most hyped sneakers, never really paying attention to the more subtle and nuanced designs. Everyone can appreciate Chris Paul or Deron Williams, but what about the Andre Millers
^†
of the world? When I first started following streetwear I was a sucker for the flossy joints, too, but over time I understood it and really appreciated it on a level beyond seeing it as just “style.” Streetwear was the product of a greater downtown New York culture and consciousness that pervaded our lives. Downtown New York is a movement and, for a time, streetwear was its uniform.

Despite the fact that hypebeasts worshipped the culture because it gave them an identity, at least they followed the narrative. Like jam band groupies or roadies, having hypebeasts was better than not having supporters at all. I remember hanging out at Union seeing the same kids coming in, unfolding shirts, picking the shittiest, most expensive pieces off the rack while all of us kept from laughing. But at the end of the day, you need the hypebeasts because they drive the culture forward and allow you to keep creating. You just can’t bet your culture on their consumption because their loyalty is fleeting.

It wasn’t that my brand changed; the critical mass for the culture dispersed. Part of that was because of the way distribution changed with the introduction of Internet retailers into the scene. The retailers—most notably Karmaloop—put the physical stores out of business and the culture lost its gatekeepers, the ones who kept standards high and poseurs out. At every boutique, even if it was owned by some old head, he’d have a kid that helped him with buying that’d tell him “yeah this” or “naw that.” Karmaloop, on the other hand, would carry only the big-name, played out, stigmatic brands that set the original style for the culture, but not the smaller brands that were actually moving it forward. For every John Cusack
America’s Sweethearts
blockbuster, you need a
Grosse Pointe Blank
or
Better Off Dead
.

Karmaloop had more buying power than any physical store. They’d purchase your entire stock for the season, locking you into exclusivity, and
then undercut all the physical retailers. Nima, on the other hand, would buy your shirts like they were weed. Gimme forty-eight shirts, here’s the money, enjoy. No strings attached, no sendbacks, just paper. Shortsighted kids didn’t understand that we voted with our dollars. Instead of supporting the brick-and-mortar stores that started the culture, they would try things on at stores and then cop online. Once the brick-and-mortar stores dried up, Karmaloop squeezed designers by cutting deals and making unsold merchandise returnable. This arrangement buried brands because they’d spend mad bread just to produce the order and then took an L when things didn’t sell. Designers were idiots: they became creditors for this piece-of-shit company that ate the entire culture whole.

Watching what happened to our culture, I told myself I’d never let it happen to me. It’s too important. Sometimes you need to borrow some of the master’s tools to survive. I remembered a quote from
Catcher in the Rye
: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” I mean, two things I’m not and that’s perfect or humble. Somewhere between Nima and Salinger, there I was, a kid that wanted to stunt for a cause.

With Hoodman on the slide, I started selling weed again. Although I made good money at the law firm, I knew it wouldn’t last and tried to stack as much paper as I could. I got the work from some people in Crown Heights that had a grow house in Queens. To lower my personal costs, I moved from Chinatown–Little Italy to Fort Greene and lived in one of the row houses on South Oxford and Atlantic. The houses were nice, but a thousand dollars a month less than what I was paying in the city. After work, I’d hang out with the people in the park and play ball on weekends.

There was this ill spot called Cake Man Raven. Everyone knew him for red velvet cake and people from outside the neighborhood lined up to cop a slice, but I stayed on the pineapple or coconut jawn. Through the cake shop, I met the other people in the neighborhood that hustled out of a town house on South Oxford and Fulton owned by these twins. The twins were twenty-year-old kids who grew up in Fort Greene with their mom in a three-story brownstone that became a million-dollar property when the
neighborhood gentrified, but they treated it like a trap house. I told them to clean it up, stop hustling, and sell the joint if they needed bread, but they didn’t listen. The house was full of roaches, empty Henny bottles, and blunt trash everywhere. These kids didn’t even have a garbage can so blunt guts just got thrown on the ground like peanut shells at Five Guys.

To this day, Fort Greene is my favorite neighborhood in any of the five boroughs. I met a lot of creatives like Damian Bulluck, who was early at Fader; Kelvin Coffey, who edited XXL; and Jay Lew, who was one of the illest photographers in New York. Dustin Ross lived down the block and started Studio Booth. Right on top of an African clothing store called Moshood was my boy Jesse Hofrichter, who’d gone to Cardozo and worked at a big firm but produced music and rapped in his spare time. All of us in Fort Greene were just doing our thing, maintaining any way we could. But Fort Greene wasn’t Williamsburg. The creatives weren’t twenty-year-olds from Nebraska who came because they grew up shopping at Urban Outfitters and wanted to live on the Bedford stop. Fort Greene was and is a real neighborhood. The neighborhood still had a strong black community and I thought that any time there’s a Seventh-day Adventist Church in the neighborhood, you can only gentrify it so much. Loved that church. But I was wrong. Even our barbershop, Changing Faces, got phased out; cot damn shame you can’t even get a decent cut on Fulton St. anymore.