You see, though they have their books and classes fully paid for, they are totally broke. Living ten to a room in a squat, the twelve-member group makes art, plays in death metal and punk bands with names like Rectal Remorse and Cementary, eats in bulk, and looks like shit.
They are also the most sought-after designers in the city. “I think one of the reasons famous Latinos like Benicio are into our hats is because they feel the same way. They feel lost at home and lost here. I would rather die than go back to Colombia, but I hate L.A. I love the garbage but I hate it here.”
With sales climbing fast, Arturo may be making some nice garbage of his own—or not. “I don’t care about the money,” he says of his company’s newfound popularity. “Even the $500 ones don’t make us any money. The process kills the profits. That’s the beauty of it.” Go Die is very strict about how their product is made. These anarchists have invented a whole litany of rules that can never be broken. First, the original design must be found on the floor of the hat shop they rent the machine from. These loose-thread designs will say anything from “Los Angg” to “What ar-” and the collective must decide which hats they are going to try to reproduce. Once they have a hat to go from, they must try to make ten hats that match it exactly. “It’s very difficult to make the machine fuck up like that,” adds Arturo. “You have to yank it back and forth and sometimes unplug and pull it out. We throw dozens out before we’re satisfied. We made ten of the original Go Dies and we must have thrown out thousands of misfires. They have to be perfect.”
For now Arturo and his twelve friends seem to be perfectly satisfied with their lives of dissatisfaction. They have ignored ambition and fame and focused their passion into seemingly irrelevant minutiae like perfectly reproducing embroidery mistakes. If the collective ever finds true happiness, they will lose their talent and will cease to exist. In other words, the only option for these kids is misery or death. Hence the name.
