Walking Risky

I was walking down the street and a guy was about to pass me and I was feeling good wearing a jacket I salvaged from a pile of my grandfather’s clothes that my mom was planning on getting rid of. I was feeling good walking with my new jacket from my old grandfather, which maybe my mom was going to throw out or was going to give to Savers—the jacket. The jacket is canvas green standard issue from the US Navy and bulky and too big for me with probably real fur around the collar and some lines of wear in white squiggles down the sleeves and some anonymous brown splotches on one of the shoulders. “U.S.N.” is emblazoned on the left breast. Like I’m honoring my grandfather by wearing it. He served in the Korean War. Not as long as he would have liked to—the Navy. He was in the boiler room and never fought anyone. He tells me he never even got drunk in the Navy, where because he’s Polish his nickname was “Ski.” He once told me that he has this recurring dream where he’s walking through an abandoned city and going through empty factories and mills and some women’s faces turn to him but don’t say anything. He worked all his life first on the farm then at the silverware factory then at the municipal light plant then at the camera factory then at the funeral home. “Calling hours,” in his Bristol County accent like calling ow-uz, was something I heard a lot growing up. “Removal” was when he would go to the house and collect the body. He’s buried friends and gotten paid for it. He met my grandmother who’s dead when they were freshmen in high school and she walked into the classroom and he was at his desk and he saw her and he noticed the way she carried herself and he thought, “She’s mine.” Which he pronounces like, she’s mayan. That’s what he told me when I asked what it felt to see the woman you’re going to marry but you’re both so young. And I wonder whether when you’re young you want to own another person and when you’re older you want to be owned by a person because as life goes on it becomes more and more unbearable to live it without someone to hold you. And I notice how when I ask how he feels about something he doesn’t name the feeling but describes what the feeling makes him want to do. On the way home from his first date with my grandmother, after prom, they blew a tire. There’s also this stolen valor thing like what right have I to wear this jacket whose metal zipper is sturdy and which has no rips in it and someone asked me if I got it at a vintage store. It’s weird to see these other pieces of evidence that maybe my grandfather was actually cool. I saw his disco and animal-patterned silk shirts in the pile. And some hats in a box that I can’t describe because I don’t know anything about hats. He and my grandmother used to go out dancing at this place called Roseland. It was the Copacabana of the South Coast, which is different from the South Shore. I was wearing this jacket and feeling good and this guy passed me and we looked at each other. He was dressed in layers and was tall and skinny and I felt proud to be about to walk by him because on top of honoring my grandfather’s military service I was also on my way to a beautiful woman’s apartment. I didn’t think much of my outfit because she invited me over spontaneously but still I felt good with what I was wearing and thought about how I still can’t find pants that look like everyone else’s pants. I seem to always buy pants that would be slightly off-beat in the suburbs but are completely bourgeois in the city. Pants that fit too well. Pants that I wear a regular brown leather belt around and it’s pretty tight on my waist but not so tight that I feel like I have to poop. And my grandfather wears corduroys like me sometimes. I was wearing corduroys and my grandfather’s jacket with a “U.S.N.” emblazoned on the left breast of the green canvas and the “N.” was a little faded and I figured whoever passed me and saw the three letters would never think that I was or had ever been in the Navy. Because I guess when I wear the jacket I actually try to wear other things that make it look even less likely that I could be or could have been in the Navy, like sneakers and my hair long-ish and messy and curly, and maybe the way I walk though confident isn’t exactly like the way a guy in the Navy would walk because sometimes I walk risky. And my grandfather pulls up his pants high in the old style. I have a friend who’s my age who recommends this. Pants pulled up over your stomach. It’s comforting and comfortable. To feel older than you are. My jacket is unzipped and the left side of it is flapping in the wind, which I hate. I actually have to capture and reign it in so it doesn’t hit the girl who passes me shortly before this guy is about to walk by me who looks younger than he probably is. And I speculate on what neighborhood he lives in and what his ethnicity is. I’m obsessed with guessing strangers’ ethnicities. But I keep my guesses to myself. This guy’s skin is brown and his hair is longer than mine and curlier and curls better. And he bounces a little when he walks. I don’t bounce. I almost sort of bound. And the zipper on my grandfather’s jacket is a little hard to hitch together but not hard to zip up; once you get the zipper connected then it becomes easy to zip it up. And it’s a matter of preference if you want to button the buttons on the outer layer above the zipper or not because you can do none and leave the jacket open or zip it up and leave it unbuttoned or button it up without zipping it or zip it up and button it. I’m glad I found my grandfather’s jacket in that pile in the garage among all the other junk and treasures that my mom pulled out of my him’s house before we put him in the old folks home, where he plays cards and watches Fox News and talks on the phone for hours with his autistic New Jersey friend who knows so much about military history and mechanical stuff that you could probably blindfold him and give him a bunch of screws nuts and washers and he could put them into all the right places on the hull of a cruiser. My mom tells me it’s my grandfather’s favorite jacket. But the real reason I’m glad I found the jacket is because I was in the market for a light jacket like this. Because I lost this exquisite black button-up light almost suede jacket I bought in Trieste and brought back to the States. It was cold and windy in Trieste and I wore that jacket and lay down on a pier in the chilly sun with my legs dangling over the water while a cruise ship carrying a Polish couple I smoked with and ate sausage with the day before roared out from the quaint bay. And the guy who sold me that jacket at this thrift store couldn’t care less about where I was from. I wore that jacket around Italy instead of the down coat my mom got me in Krakow because it was too cold and I didn’t bring a warm enough coat and she spent too much money on it and it’s orange which is my favorite color. It was embarrassing to walk around Trieste with an orange down coat because the Northern Italians dress well. I ate fish and drank wine and made eyes with an Italian woman also eating alone and after on the road along the water asked this guy what bus to take back to my Airbnb and it happened to be the same bus he was waiting for so we got on together and he told me he was from some Northern African country and how much he hated the Northern Italians and invited me to a university party but I didn’t go because I was too old so instead I stood on my balcony and gazed out toward Slovenia while the bora winds slammed my doors. And I lost that jacket at a bar when I was on a triple first date—three couples. That night was not worth it. We got up to leave the bar and I walked over to the table behind us where we were sitting earlier and where I remembered putting my jacket and there were some kids in their early twenties there and one of them this guy had a copy of East of Eden or Grapes of Wrath on his lap and I said what is this a Steinbeck book club. And one of his friends said no he’s just reading it and I said why and she said don’t ask. She was serious. We left the bar with the girls and took a car back toward home and talked about our favorite fruits while we chewed gum and listened to the girls sing an old camp song they made up and they tried to get us to sing along but there was no way I was going to do that so I forced myself to smile and my friend who sat next to me and I looked at each other and realized we never should have agreed to this. I called the bar in the morning and they hadn’t found it. A triple first date is the worst idea in the world. I was wearing this jacket and feeling so good and thought about when my grandfather will die. And whether my mom will be relieved. Whether she’ll feel a lightness and whether I’ll regret anything, regret not asking him anything. Or telling him anything. But he doesn’t really ask. But I’m proud of him. He’s a great man. And when I wear his jacket I feel like a good man. I feel worthy of the beautiful girl whose apartment I’m walking to while the wind blows my hair and the sun shines on the other side of the street and my head buzzes because I was just hanging out with some good friends who make me feel alive. And I feel alive and I feel warm but not too warm and I walk and I look around and this guy walks past me and I look at his face and he looks at mine and as he dips his head and scratches the side of his mouth and his curls fall over his eyebrows and he bounces and I bound and I think about who he is and where he lives I look at his mouth and I see his teeth and I think I see him smirk. And fear grips my chest and I feel like a clown. Everyone is laughing at me and I’ll never buy the right pants and I’ll never live in the right place and and I’ll never know if I’ve met the right person and I’ll always get left behind by the friends in the golf cart in eighth grade who raced up the muddy hill and I shirtless chased after them and felt like I was in Temple Run and eventually caught up to them and sat on the back of the cart but it wasn’t a funny joke. I look at the guy for a second and don’t smirk back but feel a flame in my chest and murderous embarrassment. My face seems to freeze. I lose all capability of facial expression but imagine my face going through like a montage of facial expressions, millions of them like flashing images of faces from famous paintings on a screen and I have to choose which one to put on. I don’t stand as straight as before. I’m almost at her apartment. And in my mind I’m back home where I grew up and I’m just trying on my grandfather’s coat for a day but I’ll have to give it back. And I’ll give it back and he’ll hang it in the closet and we’ll all sit down for dinner and eat French fries with duck sauce from the Orient Restaurant. And he’s always been the last one to finish his food. And he always asks whether he’s the last one still eating, once again. At Easter this year, he didn’t eat all of his ham. And he only took a few bites of his banana cream pie ice cream. He always hugs me but also always insists on shaking my hand. We have almost the exact same body. At Easter when he was going back to the old folks home he told me to watch my back when I get back to the city. I always pat him on the back when I usher him out the door. This time when he was getting in my mom’s car for her to drive him back he got wobbly and stumbled and laughed and opened the passenger-side door and getting in said, “Don’t get old, Ben,” and I said, “You, too.”