Old Clothes

           Whenever I've tried to buy new clothes, it's never worked out. I'd spend what seemed like an enormous sum and come away with something that always felt wrong on me, that I never wore.

          I have always known exactly what I like, without ever thinking about it.

          I needed Roosevelt-era stuff: big wool overcoats; split-toe Oxfords the color of flan caramel; narrow, shiny brown belts; kitten-soft tartan plaid scarves; heavy old wristwatches than lose 30 minutes a day; and, my God, fedoras.

          How my mother would laugh at my hats! I simply couldn't be myself without a fedora—Hemingway without a typewriter. I needed a gray felt crown.

          The language of my body began when I discovered thrift shops in the early 1980s in Kensington, underneath the Market-Frankford el. I still have the tweed coat I bought with Bob there. I took it to my mother's apartment in King of Prussia and she sewed the full-length tear in the back and restored to it buttons.

          That was the closest we ever got—when I was crashing and burning at 24. Job after job and never any money.

          But I looked fabulous.

          There's a picture from that time, taken in a photo booth in the basement of Suburban Station. It is a document of rare and disquieting beauty. Gauzy and ethereal, in silver and gray tones, it belonged already to an earlier time of Buicks and big bands. I had become myself, and all that remained was for me to learn to be kind to him—a lesson that took another decade, or more.

          My luggage was what they called cowhide. Most of the pieces had lost their suppleness, and the stitching was coming away in little heartbreaking centimeters all along the closure. Someone else's initials appeared below the handle.

          Never mind.

          I can still feel what it felt like then—I can conjure it easily. But that feeling is no longer a component of my living now. It was an excitement—erotic, certainly, but also artistic, literary, trenchantly urban—coupled with a loneliness so pervasive it manifested itself physically, behind my eyes, in my breathing. The loneliness became fear, and the fear became anxiety.

          My furniture, dishes, and pictures had to be old, too. In the eighties, you could find these things easily and cheaply, and, as the Argentines say, mejor que si. Only my paints and tablets were new, and I have those drawings today, the newsprint (ironically) yellow and brittle.

          My fashion sense has never changed, and I dress just the same today. And I grew out of the loneliness. 

          I still feel the adventure that September and October bring—but I miss Philadelphia.