Good Vibrations Magazine

They’re out there, shirt cockers.

I don’t know if it’s a Burning Man phenomenon. Perhaps it has gone global. But for one week a year Black Rock Desert is most assuredly the shirt cocking capital of the world.

What is shirt cocking? Ah, you lucky uninitiated, to know not the likes of shirt cocking. To have never seen the wrinkled, dangling horror of it all.

Let us take a second; we’ll let you enjoy this last moment of peace. For once you are told, or worse, have seen it, the image will be with you till the day you die.

I have been told of deathbed scenes where the person’s life flashed before their eyes, childhood, loss of virginity to a camp councilor named Jerome, love, loss, the white cliffs of Dover, and then – the final conscious image of well lived life, a 75-year-old man on the Playa shirt cocking.

And then you die.

Alright, shirt cocking:

Imagine a man wearing a t-shirt. The color doesn’t matter though I’ve noticed they tend to be white. It’s quite warm out and to protect himself from the sun this man is wearing a hat. Sometimes a baseball cap but more often a wide-brimmed straw number

This man is also wearing socks and shoes. The socks are pushed down. There will be none of this 1970’s ABA Basketball style with white tube socks pulled over-the-calf with three colored bands around the top. He may be a shirt cocker but one fashion faux pas does not necessarily deserve another.

Do we have the picture? A man with a wide-brimmed straw hat, a white t-shirt and pushed down socks and shoes. Notice anything missing?

That’s right: pants. Shirt cockers don’t wear pants.

Nada. Zilcho. T-shirt, no pants. Just flapping in the wind. It is, perhaps, the worst fashion statement ever, excepting of course grown women in stirrups.

And for some inexplicable reason shirt cocking is very, very popular with the older male set. It is also popular with the under two-years-of-age set. We can forgive them. But at 50-years-old you should know better.

You see them all over the Playa, saggy, lived-in bottoms waddling and jiggling with every step of their New Balance sneakers, the hem of the t-shirt ending just at the lower back. They carry umbrellas a lot, which is odd because you can’t cover your cock with an umbrella.

Apparently there was a camp this year armed with a pants-cannon. When a shirt cocker walked by they would load and fire pants at him from 100 yards away.

Whenever I see them I’m sure to point them out. It’s a Playa game of sorts: Where’s the Shirt Cocker. I’ll point we’ll ride over in a wide arc to get the view from the front. You can’t really appreciate the sheer absurdity until you get the view from the front.

The t-shirt cuts off the torso. The socks and shoes truncate the legs. You are left with half shins, knees (so ridiculous), and a pair of thighs all as a set to frame – a cock and balls.

Shirt cocking highlights the utter absurdity of a cock and balls. The sad, useless droop of the whole thing swinging willy nilly with the roll of your walk.

Actually, it’s the balls wrapped in their wrinkled bag that do the swinging. The cock tends to bob up and down more, landing on the sack of balls and then rebounding back out into the air.

Swinging and bobbing, bobbing and swinging, it’s the cock and ball dance. And nothing gives you a better view than shirt cocking.

I think what makes it most ridiculous is that it is like a backwards striptease. Can you imagine someone coming out on stage and taking their pants off first? Then their underwear? Standing there in their shirt?

A striptease creates context through unveiling. The stripper exposes the least important or least erotic parts first. We get the message. Things that are still covered are more prized, more erotic. And then there is the aesthetic of the shape. The exposed curves of the top of the body give a framework from which to see the bottom of the body.

From the point of view of evolutionary biology we expose our genitals last because they are the most important for reproduction.

Either way shirt cocking inverts the erotic paradigm. You don’t start with the cock.
Maybe if it’s just peeking out of an unzipped fly in a Mapplethorpe photograph. But I don’t think Mapplethorpe ever photographed a shirt cocker. Shirt cocking comes from an erotic and aesthetic Hades.

And so I must share a story.

No one knows how the shirt cocking war began. But one day I found myself threatening my friend Carrie with shirt cocking.

“You will see me with a t-shirt and no pants on,” I’d say in a menacing tone. She’d shake her head and grimace and place her hand before her eyes as if to block even the thought of the image.

Months this went on. I’d walk up to her and start to undo my pants and she’d shoot her hand up. It got so all I had to do was cock my head a certain way and her eyes would close, her head were turn and her hand would go up, a triple defense.

My cock and balls aren’t that remarkable, well formed, a bit on the red side.

Dominic and Reynaldo saw them all the time on the Playa, usually with the tip fitted inside a plastic bottle so I could pee. Dominic says I have barnyard balls. I still don’t quite know what that means. But seeing them shouldn’t have been that big a deal.

Of course, I wasn’t threatening to just show them to Carrie. I was threatening to shirt cock her.

I had more than one conversation with Carrie with my T-shirt on, pants down and her eyes closed. That may seem strange, but those are the circles I run in.

Victory came one night at a camp out. It was about 3 in the morning. I was bouncing around on G. Carrie was holding court on a porch, smoking a cigarette, probably scoring some gossip.

I knew the time was right. I moved off to the side and pulled off my pants. Then I stepped out of the darkness and said in as benign a voice as I could muster, “Hey Carrie.”

She turned to see me standing there, a bloody shirt cocker. “No, no, no,” she cried. Everyone else was just sitting there staring at this man who, for some unknown reason, had taken off his pants.

I had won. I promised never to do it again. To lock me in Carrie got me a t-shirt. It says, “With a shirt like this who needs pants.”

The answer is everyone. If you’re wearing a shirt you need pants.

And Carrie, that includes me with my slightly red barnyard balls.