Boy Wonders

by Cathal Kelly

  Our mothers had two rules of fashion: our clothes were cheap and non-flammable. There was a lot more fire in the seventies.

  I was especially unaware of how I projected myself into the world. It wasn’t that I didn’t think about it. It was that I didn’t realize you could.

  The only item I can recall with any specificity from my childhood was a dishdasha that an aunt and uncle had brought back from Lebanon. They’d gone there on what had seemed an impossibly cheap overseas holiday. When the front door to the hotel was blown off in a bombing, they began to understand why.

  The dishdasha was, depending on your perspective, a charming example of exotic finery or a dress for men. I was only allowed to wear it in the house, which shows you on which side my mother fell. She was open-minded, but the aperture only widened so far.

  What I do remember is the first item of clothing I wanted. In the best tradition of going hard on the way in, at age twelve I fixed myself on Michael Jackson’s jacket.

  Everyone liked Thriller. Because if you didn’t, life would not have been bearable. That album and every song off it were in constant rotation for the better part of two years. Thriller was more the soundtrack of our lives than the hymns at church or the national anthem we sang every morning.

  My ur-image of Jackson—the one I wanted to steal for myself—was taken from his “Beat It” video. In it, he wears the most ridiculous garment ever conceived.

  There have been down moments in fashion through history. The kilt, for instance. That makes no sense. It’s a bolt of cloth you wrap around yourself. It’s fabric that has not yet been turned into clothes. It’s like pushing yourself around on a wooden wheel because you don’t have time to wait for it to be attached to a wagon. That’s the kilt. But people wear it.

  French aristocrats used to style their hair around birdcages, with birds in them. That’s not just imbecilic. It’s unhygienic. But the best way to visibly separate yourself from the plebs is to wear something they have neither the time, money nor inclination to put on themselves. You can’t go down the coal mine with a live crow knotted into your ponytail, for instance.

  The “Beat It” jacket was in that same tradition—fire-engine red, chainmail at the shoulders, covered in non-functional zippers. I did not yet understand the distinction between clothing and costume. This was the latter.

  Jackson’s “Thriller” jacket—the one with the stylized M that made him look like a particularly progressive member of the space program—is more iconic. People are still trying to copy that coat. But the “Beat It” jacket is purer Jackson because it is more definably kitsch.

  A Versailles courtier would have thought it just a bit too much, but I wanted it.

  Certain ridiculous items of clothing creep into the mainstream for a moment—say, drop-crotch pants or platform boots. This wasn’t one of those. Everyone knew the “Beat It” jacket, but no one wore it. No one.

  I would blaze that trail. I spotted one in a shop window at the Eaton Centre, where I spent most Saturday afternoons wandering around aimlessly with friends. I don’t remember what it cost, but it wasn’t cheap. It took me months to save up the money from my paper route. I could have held on to that stash for a couple of years and bought Apple stock. If I had, I’d be writing these words from inside the cockpit of my private helicopter as it sat down on the south lawn of my Tuscan villa. The smaller one.

  But, as usual, I wasn’t thinking too far ahead.

  I didn’t tell anyone about my plan. It was the first time I’d “shopped” without my mother. I didn’t understand the codes of commerce. That you have to find someone to show you whatever it is you want, and do the dance of considering buying it. I just walked into the store and tried to pull the coat off the rack. When someone intercepted me, I tried handing him the money.

  The most notable part of the transaction was that the guy who sold me the jacket spent the better part of ten minutes trying to talk me out of the purchase.

  “Are you sure about this?” he said. He was young, but clearly sophisticated. He must have been. He was wearing leather pants.

  In retrospect, I should have bought those instead. It would have been the only time in my life I could fit into a pair.

  I told him I was sure.

  “Why?”

  “I really like Michael Jackson.”

  “Yes, but…,” he said, regarding me sadly. It should have bothered me more that he didn’t finish the thought.

  I was so excited that I wore it home on the subway. For the first time in my life, strangers noticed me. People asked about it or yelled out “JACKSON!” as I walked by. I did not enjoy that feeling. They weren’t making fun, as such—I was too small to be freely mocked. But it did not feel as if I was being admired.

  When I showed it to my mother, she got a look on her face. She knew. But it wasn’t in her nature to offer an opinion in a matter of taste. She had a Catholic farm girl’s take on haberdashery—it was meant to cover your nakedness and protect you from the elements. As long as it accomplished those two goals, how it looked didn’t matter.

  I wore the jacket to school on Monday. I’m not sure what I expected would happen. I might have hoped for a few admiring comments. But I didn’t want it to be a big deal.

  It was a big deal.

  Kids gathered around in a circle to touch it. The girls wanted to wear it (another bad sign). Someone asked how much it had cost and when I told them, people laughed. There was a lot of laughing. Not the good kind.

  I went home in it and on the way a bunch of older kids I didn’t know pointed in a threatening way. One of them asked to try it on and I knew this was the prelude to a robbery. I picked up the pace and speed-walked to my house.

  I put the Michael Jackson jacket in my closet and never wore it outside the house again. Occasionally, I’d pull it down and dance around in my bedroom in it, but that was as far as I was willing to go.

  On one of her visits from Ireland, my kooky aunt Sheila found out about it. I guess she and my mother were laughing about the story. She asked me to bring it into the kitchen. Sheila would have been in her early forties at the time. Usually swathed head-to-toe in sensible brown wool, she was not a fashion risk-taker that I could recall.

  But she liked that jacket.

  She put it on, spun round a couple of times. When I would have expected her to hand it back, she sat down at the kitchen table in it and recommenced a conversation with my mother. I was being dismissed.

  A few hours later, she was still in it.

  My mother came to me: “Can Sheila have the jacket?”

  What I should have said was, “No” or, better yet, “How much is she willing to give me for it?”

  Instead, I opened the door: “Why?”

  “You never wear it. And she likes it. Why not give it to her?”

  So, stupidly, I did.

  I never did find out what she did with it, or, more to the point, what she did in it.

  Did she wear it around Dublin, hoping to stumble into a back-alley dance competition? Did she wear it to work at the Ministry of Agriculture, where she was some sort of bureaucrat? Did she go out with friends and everyone would sit around pretending that Sheila didn’t look like a visitor from the near future or, possibly, a German? Did she know how ridiculous she looked?

  Or did she have so much confidence that she didn’t care what people thought? Was she a better, stronger person than I was? I suspect she was. I like to think she wore that Michael Jackson jacket all over the place, and did not give a simple fuck about what anybody said.

  Though it was an expensive, unmitigated disaster, the “Beat It” jacket got me thinking about clothes. I guilted my mother into taking me to Simpsons so that I could buy myself an outfit—grey pleated denim chinos, a grey patterned dress shirt (it would have been okay if I’d stopped there, but…) and a blue denim vest.

  I looked like a gentleman cowboy with airs or the world’s most effete shitkicker.

  But a girl in my class, Kel
ley, looked over at me as I sat down on a Monday morning and said, “You look nice,” and it was all worth it. Nobody else said anything or needed to. One kind mention was perfect.

  This was the sort of noticing I was interested in—subtle and glancing.

  By reputation, the best-dressed man in Western history was Beau Brummell, an early-nineteenth-century bon vivant who didn’t do much aside from going out-of-doors looking classy. He’s credited with establishing the modern uniform of the professional class—a sober suit and tie.

  Brummell had many thoughts on what constituted proper sartorial comportment (in quotations that are so perfect, they were either made up or workshopped at many, many parties for the purpose).

  “If John Bull [the average man] turns to look at you on the street, you are not well dressed, but either too stiff, too tight or too fashionable.”

  And:

  “To be truly elegant, one should not be noticed.”

  I wonder what Brummell would have thought of the “Beat It” jacket. I imagine he might have summoned a mob to beat the wearer—an obvious witch—to death.

  Brummell is also given credit for establishing the coat as the core element in a man’s wardrobe. As long as you had a well-cut coat of fine material, the rest of your outfit was inconsequential. The coat told people what you were about.

  I can chart my life through coats.

  After the “Beat It” jacket, the next one that mattered was a trench coat. It was the first thing I’d ever owned that you could say was well tailored. I had seen it on Neil Tennant, the lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys, in the video for their first hit, “West End Girls.” There is nothing to that video. It’s mostly Tennant marching at the double-quick around London, trailed by the band’s keyboardist. There is no choreography or story. What made the video iconic was Tennant’s double-breasted full-length black trench coat. Per eighties style, the coat was too big on him, but other than that it’s a timeless garment because everyone who puts one on immediately looks cooler.

  I was fascinated by the way the coat swept around Tennant’s ankles as he moved. Pop stars are often photographed in front of large fans. As the breeze catches their hair and clothing, it creates the illusion of movement and action. Tennant’s trench coat captured that feeling. He looked like he was going somewhere.

  The coat fit in with my changing presentation—all black, buckles, layers, pants pinned below the knee, weird Robert Smith hair. Though I had no friends who dressed that way, I was going full goth.

  After a short while, it struck me that the look had something too effeminate about it. Too swirling and elaborate.

  Also, the coat did you no favours in the Canadian climate—far too hot in the summer, not nearly warm enough in the winter. It is difficult to look steely when you are sweating like a pig that’s been wrapped in black draping. The problem with a trench coat is that it’s designed to be worn in a trench or the British Isles, where it’s sopping wet all of the time. I have three or four of them now and I get to wear them about six weeks of the year. Eventually, I will hit a critical mass of trench coats and it will make good financial sense to move to London and starve there.

  The next jacket iteration was my favourite—a bog-standard black leather biker jacket, the sort worn by real rock gods. I’d come back around to my first musical crush, Joan Jett.

  Of the many things that you do not realize when you are young, the most frustrating is that this is your one chance at a great many things. Nobody reminds you of that. And when they do, you can’t hear them.

  You will never again be free of the obligation to work. You won’t be able to sleep until noon (see under: work). You won’t spend entire weekends at someone else’s house doing nothing but watching TV. Your friendships will never again be so intense. There are dozens of things I would like to go back in time to tell my younger self. Not of the “Do this differently” variety (though there are those), but more along the lines of “Soak this up. This is happening now, and soon won’t ever again.”

  The black leather biker jacket is one of those things. That’s a lifetime one-off that you get a pass on from ages fifteen to twenty-one.

  What do you think to yourself when you see a forty-year-old guy in a black leather biker jacket taking a toddler to buy ice cream, dressed up like Joey Ramone with male pattern baldness?

  “He looks nice” or “I’ll bet he’s a good man to have backing you in a fight” or “I would like to spend a day making love to that rugged adventurer”?

  No, you think only one thing: “How sad.” And then you think another: “Is there no one who loves this man enough to tell him how sad he looks? He’s got a kid. Where’s his wife in this? She shares some of the blame. Or maybe they’re divorced and this was part of her revenge. How wicked.”

  There is no going back to the leather biker jacket, not for men. Twenty-one is a hard stop.

  A small exception can be made for working musical artists (defined as those who have cut studio albums in the last five years and can sell out a three-hundred-seat venue) until the age of thirty. But that’s it. Even the Ramones started to look stupid after fifty.

  Women get a biker jacket pass until whatever age, since they can wear one in an ironic, gender-bending, Le Smoking sort of way.

  Men, there is no irony possible. Everyone knows what you’re up to—you’re reliving the glory days. That you feel so desperate a need to relive them suggests they weren’t all that glorious. Which is another level of tragedy.

  Certain jackets are meant for certain very specific times. If I missed out on dozens of the things that you can only do with dignity as a child—going to Disneyland, riding a skateboard, crying in public—at least I got that one right.

  After the leather jacket, there was an Oakland Raiders parka.

  I did not like the Raiders in any special way. At the time I only had room in my heart for Notre Dame football, but the Raiders jacket had a perfectly severe aesthetic. It was simple and black, with the team name stencilled across the back in block silver lettering. Also—a bonus—it was warm.

  It was another jacket with a musical connection, having been popularized by Public Enemy. That group’s military presentation (they had their own ersatz armed wing—Security of the First World) appealed to me. I was in the midst of reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and having a working-class-white-kid reaction to its message of radical self-exploration. I was trying to be more myself by copying other people. I didn’t detect the irony. (Though I have to say that, all these years later, Malcolm X would rank in my best-dressed hall of fame.)

  People at school liked that jacket. Too much, as it turned out. Word quickly got back to me in the broken-telephone style of high school that someone was looking to steal it. Who exactly? They couldn’t say. Or the name changed. The threat was obscure. I got paranoid.

  I couldn’t leave the jacket in my locker, so for the better part of a year, I wore it everywhere. I couldn’t lay it across the back of a chair in the lunchroom and go outside for a cigarette. It had to come with me.

  As a result, that jacket and I became inextricably linked. It was a big school and many of the kids there didn’t know me. I became “the guy with the Oakland Raiders jacket.” I stopped wearing anything else. I wore that thing in spring and summer. My body adapted, modulating my internal environmental controls. I grew comfortable in it, like new skin, and I couldn’t move on to whatever jacket was meant to come next. It wasn’t something I wore anymore. It was me.

  Then I went to a house party, had several drinks, forgot my rules, left it lying on a bed and it was stolen. I was bereft, but I could soon see the wisdom in it. I wasn’t ever going to let that thing go. It had to be taken away for my own good. In the end, I wonder if it was one of my friends doing me a favour.

  I thought I might switch back to the biker jacket, but the one I owned no longer fit right. I wanted the same thing again, only a bit bigger. Exactly the same thing.

  At this point—aged seventeen—I no l
onger spoke to my father.

  Very occasionally, he’d try to come to see me at school and be rebuffed at the office. He’d leave me long, ornate letters written in red ink. I didn’t bother reading past the first few lines. I don’t know what point he was trying to make, but I didn’t care to hear it. Whatever it was, I was sure I’d heard it before.

  At Christmas each year, he’d phone the house to ask my brother and me what gifts we wanted. Those calls were awful—the way my mother would spasm upon hearing that unexpected, unwanted voice from the past. The way she’d hand me the phone and say “It’s Niall,” never “It’s your father.”

  These conversations didn’t touch me. The only thing I felt for him anymore was a dull resentment. I thought of the annual gift-giving as evening the score.

  He’d never get you the thing you asked for. Instead, he’d get something he thought you’d like. Since he didn’t know us anymore, it was always wrong. But that last year, I wanted something very specific—a new leather biker jacket. I’d found the perfect one in a shop on Yonge Street. I told him what it was called, where to get it and how much it cost.

  His sister brought the presents by our house. I didn’t bother leaving mine under the tree and opened it straight off. Of course, it wasn’t what I’d asked for. It was a black leather jacket, but a puffy, cinch-waisted one that looked as if it had been stitched together from torn pieces. In its guido-ish way, it was as farcical as the “Beat It” jacket. It was something my father would have worn. I didn’t even try it on.

  I waited until after Christmas to call him.

  I was working in a movie theatre downtown. There was a windowless office in the back. After the doors were locked and everyone else had gone home, I went in there and dialled his number. Once it began to ring, I turned off the lights and sat there in total darkness.

  The conversation started out cordially. I thanked him. He asked if I liked it. I tried the “yes, but…” route. I wondered if he still had the receipt and could I get that from him. He tried to convince me that this was a better jacket than the one I wanted. I should just try it for a while. I’d like it.