Pomona College, early 1990s. The jumpsuit.
I found an orange jumpsuit at M&I Surplus in Pomona. Added the pumpkin-face details myself. Before the pumpkin phase, I wore it on rainy days at Pomona College — the fluorescent orange against a grey Southern California sky, walking across the quad looking like something that had escaped from either a civil engineering crew or a low-budget science fiction film.
Eventually I loaned it to John Scalzi for “Fred cosplay.” John and I overlapped at Pomona. He would later write Old Man’s War and become one of the more successful science fiction novelists of his generation. At the time he was a fellow student who understood the correct use of a borrowed orange jumpsuit: wear it as a version of someone else, commit fully, do not explain.
The jumpsuit has had more continuity of ownership than most of my possessions. It went to M&I Surplus from somewhere, to me, to Scalzi, and presumably continued from there.
M&I Surplus in Pomona was one of the great surplus stores of its era — the kind of place where you could find military gear, industrial equipment, and items that had no obvious function but were clearly important to someone once. The orange jumpsuit was the correct find for me at that moment in my life. I wore it exactly as much as it deserved to be worn.