September 2024 – ☆ STARSAILOR ☆

Listen: I have written many times about my black denim jacket, which, barring serious illness or a particularly cold day, I have worn essentially every day of my life for the last seven years:

I took this picture back in May 2023. Since then, my jacket had developed a handful of small holes along the arms or in the pockets or in the armpits, places where I kept my keys and chapstick and comb, and so on . . . any place that encountered daily friction. But of course in THE WORLD OF DENIM, a small hole is a sort of cavity or even tumor which will only grow in larger with time. You let something like that go long enough and you’ll end up with half a sleeve missing. For god’s sake!

Well: I just couldn’t have that, so when I was home last fall, I took my jacket to a seamstress who has a shop across the street from the hospital where I was born. This woman has been hemming my jeans for years, but nowadays she’s a big deal on account of how good she is. Since the pandemic, her storefront has doubled in size and she mostly does bridal / wedding stuff now, and someone told me recently she’s even running for mayor. I guess I believe this. But amazingly she still makes time to hear my desperate pleas to stave off ruin of my ratty black jacket.

I remember taking off my jacket and flattening it out on the counter. I pointed out all the areas where I needed it reinforced. She took out a little piece of white chalk and drew squares around the holes. She never said as much, but I could tell she was thinking “. . . can you really just not get a new one?” which I reckon is a fair thing for a law-abiding taxpayer to wonder at. She said she would do her best, and I surrendered the jacket over to her. Her turnaround time is one week, so it was a painful week. I didn’t even really feel like leaving the house. I felt naked without it!

Just as the LORD took seven days to create the heavens and the earth, so too did The Master Seamstress rebuild that which is most precious to me. I could hardly believe it when I came back around to pick up my jacket: she really had fixed it! In my head I figured I was going to look like fuckin Raggedy Andy from then on . . . and yet from a few feet away you can barely even tell there was any work done to it at all. Rather than just slap a patch on top of a hole and call it Christmas, she does some sort of zigzag stitching on the inside so it blends in with the surrounding surface fabric. Bless her heart, she went through and zigzagged every single stress point that had begun to fray or tear open. Newly restored, I once again, I crawled inside my aging black armor and went back to doing whatever it is I do with my life, which is more or less to travel around aimlessly and hang out with strangers and cute girls and strange cute girls while contributing almost nothing to Western civilization.

Believe it or not, such a thing does take a lot of out of you . . . and if you are a childish loser like me who wears the exact same uniform every single day of the year, that sort of lifestyle is going to chew up your clothes about as quickly as it chews you up as well. Which is to say that last year, after six months of being on the road nonstop and in a different city every three or four days, and sleeping on buses and trains and airplanes and couches and floors and sometimes spare beds or else next to a friend or goodly stranger in their own bed, and on and on, my denim jacket took a beating. I flew back to Berlin and was particularly gentle with my jacket for many months, knowing I didn’t trust anyone else to fix it, and biding my time until I could return here to The Master Seamstress.

AND SO IT WAS

. . . that I did return as was foretold by The Elders in The Long Ago, and on my back I bore the fabric of my brethren, being faded black denim that had only ever been washed beneath falling rain or snow. It was time once again to Frankenstein-stitch my old friend back together. Because if the tottering structure of my beloved jacket collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that I will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death, as the fella said. If it is my fate to go on in this way, to find myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway has been lost . . . then I must have it with me. My jacket, it protects me as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You know?

Before handing over my jacket over to be revived and made new again, it was with some sadness that I removed everything inside and out, including the little skull rider pin from PSYCHOMANIA (1973) on my lapel, which grocery store cashiers have been complimenting me for since the day I pinned it there:

Starting from the parking lot of the hospital where I first made contact with the people of planet earth, I dashed across two broad lanes of traffic to get to a shopping center across the street that has comfortingly not changed since 1994. Inside, the woman behind the counter remembered me and greeted me as “Mr. Ryan”. She pushed a button next to the register to summon the seamstress. As if appearing from the abyssal vapors of a dream, there she stood before me now: the future mayor of my hometown, and in her hand she held a bundle of dressmaker pins. I once again pointed out all the little areas that required her god-given talents and diligently she pinned them all. Here is an accomplished middle-aged woman and small business owner who designs wedding gowns that cost more than everything I’ve ever owned combined, and with a sort of reverence she beheld my old beat up denim jacket as though it were the Shroud of Turin.

“You must really love this jacket,” she said, and she surveyed its many one-of-a-kind points of wear that can only be got from living inside the thing year-round in places far and wide upon all God’s green earth. “I’ll just do a, you know—” and she made a zigzag motion with her index finger over a tumorous hole that had developed on the right elbow that I had been most worried about. I said yes, please zigzag the hell out of it, and she nodded and told the woman at the counter how many holes she would be repairing (10), and to charge me accordingly. Bless her, it’s a flat rate for every hole, no matter its size. (I realize that’s an uncomfortable sentence.) I whipped out my credit card and handed it over. I paid a $20 fee to expedite the work. There was no way I was going to go seven whole days without the thing again.

For the next two days I hid inside like Nosferatu, and only went out at night wearing my wine-red hoodie that I layer with my denim jacket when it’s chilly out, and which the seamstress had also once repaired. Still, it Felt Wrong . . . I missed the heaviness of my jacket on my body, and I had no place to put my Stuff. Laura once said that until she puts on her red lipstick, she’s not Laura Rokas. And in this way I am not Ryan Starsailor until I put on my jacket. I wear it even on 90 degree days and in all forms of inclement weather, and in every social setting no matter how formal. On long bus rides through Lousiana and Texas, during naps at work under my desk, and the many times I have slept on a stranger’s couch, I use it as a blanket.

WARNING: THIS IS EMBARRASSING (FOR ME):

A few months ago I did mushrooms alone in my apartment. I lay on the floor and listened to music and burned incense and all that, as you got to do. After an hour or so of this, I put on my boots and belt and jacket and descended the four floors to get to the warm glow of my nighttime neighborhood. It was still early enough, so I reckoned I would visit my sister and her dog on the ground floor before I left. I sat on her living room rug and we talked for a while. My body was vibrating and I felt real safe and comfortable with my jacket on. Perhaps inanely, at some point I spoke at length about my sentimentality for my jacket, and I had my poor sister try it on. She said what everyone says when I have them wear it: “It’s so heavy!”

When was the last time someone had worn it? I made both Stella and Nina from Chalk Talk put it on:

And before that, it was last summer when I lent it to an insane Russian girl in Charlottenburg, who kissed me so hard it was all teeth. We’d sat in a park on a chilly summer night, and she’d said she was cold and wanted my jacket, so I gave it to her. I was terrified she would want to keep it, and if that were the case there would be no getting it back. Later, after she’d bit my lip so hard it bruised, she did hand it over, and I slung it over me and took the bus back home to Schöneberg at four am. I never saw her again after that.

And before that . . . well, here it is: During that first pandemic summer when I was in Chicago, and when everyone was going insane for lack of intimacy. I was guilty of it as well, though hey, it’s only natural. I remember making out with this cute girl in a completely empty park, and once the sun had completely set I put my jacket around her shoulders as though it were 1955. Later I walked her to her car and she took it off and she kissed me and placed it in my hand. “Thank you for letting me borrow your jacket. It’s so heavy!” And then she vanished forever.

I headed back to Mable’s place in Bridgeport and I noticed my jacket was now permeated by the best smell in the whole world: it smelled like Girl. THOUGHT I: “Yeah dude . . . . .”

Exactly four years later, all that gone now, the shoestring government-funded itinerancy and the little romances in different cities, and so on, and living here in a world grown darker, I risked 15 minutes of sun exposure to dash across two broad lanes of traffic during afternoon rush hour. I entered the shop and a smiling woman behind the counter greeted me as “Mr. Ryan” and immediately went to retrieve my jacket, which was hung up and covered with a plastic sleeve on a rod about a half-mile long and packed to the gills with pants and shirts and skirts and wedding gowns. She pulled it out as though it were card from the middle of a deck. My bill was already squared away, so I was free to go. I said goodbye and was gone.

Outside, I examined the zigzagging patches in the fading orange sunlight:

I put on my jacket and was glad. Hooray for Hollywood. I walked across the street, to the coffeeshop in the middle of the parking lot where I’d had a dumb crush on the blue-haired girl who worked there when I was trapped in my hometown during the pandemic, and got an iced Americano. The blue-haired girl was nowhere to be found. She was probably long gone, and who could blame her.

Deciding I would wait until the sun set to go on a long walk with my jacket now returned to me, I cut back across traffic and back to the parking lot of the hospital where I TOOK MY FIRST BREATH and stood outside it drinking my bitter black coffee, and wondered at it. Had they swaddled me in denim the day they took me home on some winter day 36 years ago—such that I would develop an ancient subconscious affinity for the stuff?? Probably not. I walked home and, as usual, waited for that hour of daily darkness when most reasonable people are asleep and the world is quieter and more mysterious, and where I am invisible in the blackness of it.

One of my recurring nightmares, among the others I have written about before, is that my jacket is torn to shreds or else catches fire, OR SOME SUCH THING. In the dream I despair. I wake in fright. Maybe that sounds dumber than hell, though it’s true. Anyplace I have ever gone and anything I ever did that was worth doing for the second half of my adult life was done with that thing wrapped around me. God help me: I am sentimental about it. My jacket is the most important thing I own. I will keep repairing it until it is a rag, and then you may cremate me with it on, and bury my bones and ashes beneath a cairn at the foot of Mount Terror in Antarctica where a cold wind blows for all eternity, and maybe longer than that, as stipulated in my will.

AND SO IT WAS

WARNING: THIS IS EMBARRASSING (FOR ME):

HERE LIES RYAN STARSAILOR: “IT WAS SO HEAVY!”

HERE LIES
RYAN STARSAILOR:
“IT WAS SO HEAVY!”