For a long time it was all about the hat. The Perfect Hat. I wore a lot of hats in high school, mostly because I didn’t know what to do with my hair, but I had a friend who was on an endless quest for the perfect hat, and the concept interested me. As far as I know, he never found it, but I eventually found one I thought was perfect and I dropped a hundred dollars on it. My friend did not agree that it was the perfect hat, but it was a classic, wide-brimmed wool fedora that looked like it fell out of a noir film and I went for it, for better or for worse.

But, for me, it was really about the leather jacket. I asked my dad at my high school graduation what he was going to get me for a “grad gift” and he just sort of snorted, What do you want? and I said I’d like a leather jacket. He laughed and said something about them being too damn expensive, but -I had him- I said, well, didn’t you have a leather jacket in high school? and he thought I was joking, but I, wisely, waited for the answer, which, of course, was yes. He grew up in the fifties, after all. They all had leather jackets.

I think I ended up paying for the jacket myself, somehow, but it was no matter -I really wanted one. I was going to keep it forever, and wear it around the world. I pictured myself riding a motorcycle across the desert, climbing the pyramids, and sitting in cafes surrounded by luminous strangers in colorful dress and speaking foreign languages, I in my jacket. It was going to be my Adventure Jacket. And, of course, it was going to be just like the one Indiana Jones had, or some acceptable facsimile, and it would register the stories of my lifetime, and I’d be wearing it when I finally uncapped the fabled box of treasures, and the mysteries of the universe came flowing out.

I finally found a jacket that felt right, in a dopey leather goods store in a local mall. It was a couple hundred dollars, was the right color and weight, had all the necessary pockets in all the proper places, and it had a silky interior lining with some kind of cartographic map design on it. I immediately envisioned myself lost in Kashmir or Tajikistan or somewhere in India and I was taking off the jacket, turning it inside-out, and spreading it out on the saddle on the back of an elephant and I was trying to find my way back to the border, or the bar, or wherever they served beer in English.

Most importantly, the jacket was warm without being hot. This meant that I could wear it with the zipper down and feel comfortable nearly everywhere. I thought I looked good! I would put on a dress shirt and tie and go to church in it, and sometimes I would even throw it on when I walked out of the ocean, no shirt at all. I was an idiot, but I had The Jacket, and I was sure I would have it the rest of my life.

I wore it across the country a few times, both directions. I wore it to the South Pacific and to Mexico and to Europe. I wore it to friends’ weddings and funerals, and I wore it around the house. And for a time I wore it with the wide-brimmed fedora, which I thought

looked super-cool. I was in St. Louis, Missouri, standing beneath the famous Arch wearing the fedora and the jacket when an older man approached me. He looked like some lonely old businessman, killing time at a tourist spot between flights. I had noticed him eyeing me earlier, in the visitor center. He walked up, said hello, stood there uneasily for a few moments, and then said, tellingly, “I like your outfit.” I quickly excused myself and drove to Chicago. Somewhere on the highway it dawned on me: don’t wear the fedora with the leather jacket.

Anyway, it was a good jacket, but I wore it in a lot more coffee shops than countries, and I spilled a lotta latte on it over the years. I tore it, one night, climbing over a fence, and it ripped just below the armpit in a soft spot in the leather. As the hole grew over the years, I had it safety-pinned together, and it seemed to hold. But soon, the collar started to fray, and the backside got stiff and cracked from all those times I wore it in the rain. And then the lining got dingy, and the maps became unreadable and scented with all my sweaty badness, and those maps on the lining would lead you to nowhere but the conclusion that the guy wearing this nasty old coat had nothing going for him.

At its low point, the brown leather Adventure Jacket was thrown-up on by its owner, and it hardly deserved the undignified event. That was me, leaning up against a dumpster behind some bar in Hermosa Beach, my leather jacket shielding me from my vomit. Sure, I cleaned myself up after that, but the jacket never regained the luster that my other, more illustrious exploits had burnished it with, and it was eventually closeted and retired on some uneventful day.

I kept it, and still have it, though I haven’t worn it in ten years. It’s hardly wearable, but it does lend some sort of timeworn, book-jacket feel to the wearer, and it has a lot of memories. I keep it around for the sentimental value, though I can’t seem to expunge from my memory that time that I barfed on it. Since then, there’s been other, more utility-oriented jackets. It took me years, but I finally learned that it was never the costume that knew or told the story, as much as we’d like to think these things are filled with meaning. They are only so if I am there, explaining it. And when I am gone, it will be little more than an old, smelly jacket, and all who gaze at it will not gaze in wonder, but will only wonder why I had held on to an old, beat-up, smelly jacket.

Indiana Jones, I later surmised, must have had a whole bunch of jackets. And they must have been made of Burmese dragon skin, or some damn thing, since he was dragging under trucks in them with nary a blemish, whereas I ripped mine hopping over a little fence. I suppose he could have gotten by with the single favorite hat, since he was a cautious fellow. Anyway, Indiana Jones made the fedora/leather jacket thing work, but he made it work in a time when straight men wore fedoras.