Vintage Merch

In Objects of Desire we invite a writer to meditate on an everyday item that haunts them.

The jacket is a promotional item, something labels would put out in limited batches to send to radio stations along with a record. They’re hard to find—unless, of course, you know an old radio DJ. One who loved the jacket well, wore it even after it barely fit him, wore it even as his body shrank inside it. I am a fan of Springsteen, someone always seeking ephemera from his 1970s run, the era of albums that first invited me to fall in love with his music as a kid in Ohio, listening on headphones, dreaming of other landscapes.

The woman who sold the jacket to me in her townhome (I will call her Mary) ran her hands along its small and fading fractures. I found her because she posted about the jacket on an auction site that I sometimes peruse for vintage clothing. In her late seventies, she had hair awash in silver streaks and dark blue eyes that seemed to remain fixed on a single spot at a time—right now on the jacket. Not too many wears left in this. You sure you wanna take it? she asked me without looking up. I couldn’t tell if she was asking out of concern for me or a desire to keep it for herself, and so I mumbled and meandered, told her sure, but only if she wanted to part with it. Johnny—at least I’ll call him Johnny—was a DJ at an old radio station up in Cleveland. When I walked in, Mary nodded over at the stack of Johnny’s old records, told me I could go through those, too, if I wanted. And so I did, timidly taking a few old promo copies: New York Dolls, Patti Smith, a LaBelle record. Mary had just moved in, out of the house she and Johnny shared for more than twenty-five years. For the past five years, it had been only her. It’s harder to carry memories than sins, I imagine—though I suppose it depends on the memories and the sins.

When she asked what I thought a fair price was, I again mumbled and meandered. Mary had not posted a price; the listing just said, “All reasonable offers would be considered.” But what is or isn’t “reasonable” shifts in the process of bearing all manner of witness, and I found myself in a place beyond numbers. I said, frantic but tentative, “Five hundred dollars?”—not an amount I had on me and not an amount I was fully prepared to spend, but an amount that I thought would not be insulting, given what the jacket seemed to have meant to a person Mary loved once, who wore it for a while until he didn’t. Mary, finally looking up at me, laughed. Told me Johnny would get a kick out of someone wanting to spend that much on the old thing. She asked what I had in my pocket, and I pulled out two one-hundred-dollar bills. She peeled off the top one, shoved the jacket into my arms, and told me to take care of it.

And I do—most days. At a music festival once, I put it around the shoulders of someone I was hoping to kiss. A gesture of outdated romanticism that somehow worked. (I suppose the hits are the hits for a reason.) As we parted ways, her with the jacket still dangling off her, I shouted nervously, “Hey! Uhhh, wait! Sorry, that jacket. It just means a lot. It’s really old, you see, and it, well, it belonged to someone, once.” Another time I left it in a hotel room and almost missed a flight to retrieve it. I’ve had to handwash several stains off it.

I am drawn to the item of vintage clothing not only for the aesthetic satisfactions it brings—for my own personal fandom satisfactions—but also because I am extending the life of an item that someone else decided they were finished with. Or, sometimes, extending the life of something that someone lived a long life in and faded away in. The object is a bridge from one existence to another.

The jacket doesn’t have many wears left. Its small fissures have become large ones. Its fading has become even more pronounced. And yet, I am putting it through the rigors of my living, wearing it until it very literally falls to pieces, so that it can live beyond the person who first loved it, who first wore it, the person who boxed it up and left it for dead for a while. This act is a small, pointless tribute to a person I’ve never met and never known. I assume it will tip the moral scales in my favor, given all the bad karma I’ve pulled on in the form of shirts and jackets from men who maybe did someone wrong or maybe didn’t but probably did. I don’t know. I don’t ask questions. Sometimes it’s better to be an unknowing vessel. But sometimes you carry the history of someone else who lived a life in a beloved item before you were even born.