Before I tell you that I purchased the fine leather wallet in a mall somewhere near Boston, and prior to informing you about the nasty-assed velcro-and-nylon wallet that the fine leather one replaced, I must portray the ultimate and hard-edge reality that I am a sort of man who carries a wallet everyday of existence, no matter the outfit or the type of activity a certain day might render. This seven days a week, the back pocket of any pair of pants, the wallet resting against my ass in jeans, in khakis, in shorts, in loose shorts in shorts unfortunately too tight; it is a pair of fancy slacks for a suit worn at weddings or graduations or dinner at the best restaurant in the city, the wallet on my cheek for that lunch we had when my girl graduated from law school and her mother flew out from St. Louis and her aunt all the way from Europe: there was the asparagus soup and the best silver and china and my nice sport coat and my girl’s dress and her glowing visage of success, and there was a leather wallet, bulging with whatever, pressed both into my ass and into the cushion of the chair on which my ass rested. And all chairs forever. Since, I don’t know, eighth grade I’ve worn a wallet, like my father and my grandfather, on the right side of my ass, in any pair of pants. Once or twice, admittedly, I set the wallet in the sporty pocket of a suit coat’s inner slip, like a gentleman. Never do I leave home without it. And it’s never a case of carrying my identification with me – my papers, sir; I suppose merely the place where I keep my money. The vestibule, the carrier, for my money, this nice leather thing.
And I thought I was a man among men when I decided to replace the tattered velcro nylon thing that I’d received for a Christmas present when I was in the tenth grade. It was falling apart. Soiled and stained. The velcro strip, in fact, had loosened its ties to the wallet fabric and was hanging in a quite literal fashion by a thread. Yes, I’d always felt that the day upon which I ventured forth, with full specificity and determination, to buy a leather wallet marked the first day of my becoming a man. It is not the day, or time of night, when I lost my virginity, not attending the university, not successfully completing a hitchhiking journey from Boston to Los Angeles and back again, it was not my first real job, nothing and nothing of any of the above. No, the day I became a man was when I owned a leather wallet, a fine gentleman’s wallet, a pretty penny, too. For seven years I’d owned this leather wallet and for seven years I have officially been a man. No touching this man. Not with a pole of any length.
When the wallet is not resting in a pocket and pressing against the flesh of my ass, daily, it sleeps on the shelf above the coats and far above the shoe rack, next to a coffee mug that holds loose change and a set of keys. The brown leather wallet always there, against this mug, waiting to find its rightful place against the daily warmth of my backside once more. And the reason it’s important to reiterate and engage with both daily and ass is that it is necessary to understand that no matter where I went the wallet went. I think this is a sickness. The wallet with me unlike any other thing: not like any shred of clothing, not like a favorite backpack or briefcase, not like my girl, not like a thought even; not like oxygen and only like the blood that swims through the corridors of vein and artery. The wallet, in fact, is as an external version, or supplement, of my heart. And there is never nor has there ever been a deviation from this habitual costume. I have never forgotten to place that wallet against my round rump. Never had it stolen. Never misplaced it. The fine brown leather wallet, formed to the shape and position of its standard and ubiquitous resting place, perpetual, permanent. Pulled out at the ATM briefly to extract plastic card and to insert the cash monies. Occasionally set a friend’s new business card inside. A library card. I’ve only one credit card. My medical insurance card. My driver’s license, of course, in its flip-about clear plastic window, separate from other pockets, special. Scraps of paper with notes to myself, addresses, phone numbers: you know a wallet. You either have one yourself or you have a spouse who wears one. And so, sexily, in warped unique fashion, I reveal now that I am not writing an essay about my brown leather wallet.
No, I am writing about the shameful contents of my wallet. We remove here instantly any discussion of the driver’s license and the debit card and the cash that occasionally rests in the billfold. No, remove those items for which a wallet exists at all, and let us jump immediately to the manifold crap. For this crap holds my interest, increases my embarrassment, and gives life to this essay of shame.
This pouch, this sack, this bag, this container, this hull, this pod, this skin; this pocketbook, this billfold, holds and sets to daily attendance and containment a set of senseless and useless daily waste and shit. Yesterday, after seven years, I finally cleaned out my wallet. Every man should clean out his wallet once a year, at least. It is a duty. It is necessary. As necessary as paying taxes and going over accounts, as functionally important as mowing the lawn and cleaning out the gutters. As necessary as remembering your partner or spouse’s birthday. An anniversary thing it should be.
And it wouldn’t be so bad if the items I removed from my ass yesterday were, say, stored away in some shoebox in my closet. In a box still unpacked and under the house from when we first moved here. In the jumbled, tangled file cabinet, in a box underneath my desk in the cluttered office; at work, perhaps, drop-jammed in a neglected folder. No, the crap removed from my ass yesterday would not have elicited comment had it come from the special and neglected utility drawer – where loose items like screws and items unknown find themselves tossed – in the corner of the kitchen. Then I would understand.
No, it is because the items removed came from the fine brown leather holder of things that rests daily against the curve of my butt, daily, everyday, forever, without deviation. I carry these items around as a way of life. As an integral part of my life. As important to me as my beating heart, as any habit, good or bad, as a kiss to the love of my life, as a letter to my mother, as philosophically inextricably entwined as any way of life can possibly be. They were, sundry, unwholesome, forgotten, and wadding, thickening: business cards jammed in a wallet from friends who left said company or companies five years ago; phone numbers and addresses on slips of paper, most notably my brother’s information from a house he hasn’t even seen in five years; a library card from the public library in Amherst, MA. I live in Oakland, California. Three notes to myself about essay ideas that I’d written when I was in my twenties. A bankcard from an expired account with an expiration date anyway that claimed double zeroes for 2000. More business cards from friends who have changed jobs three times since. A Blockbuster Video card from 1997 and we haven’t been lately because they no longer exist. A coffee-stamp card (by ten get one free) from a coffeehouse in Amherst. Two coffee-stamp cards. AAA card that expired in ’00. Three gas station receipts from two years ago, when I was on a road trip and thought “Hey, maybe I should save these receipts!” Folded, faded, sad. My aunt’s phone number and address on a large slip of blue paper quarter-folded. And my aunt’s phone number and address written in my address book. Two Volkswagen business cards from a dealer in Montreal – in French – from when my Vanagon broke down in rural Quebec. Thought that I might like to call them sometime, you know, when it was time to buy a new car. While waiting for them to finish restoring my van they’d shown me all the models on the floor. A business card from the mechanic in Deerfield, Massachusetts who was my main man for dealing with the endless mishaps any Vanagon will share with its owner.
When I’d cleared the wallet of paper and plastic, the pile between thumb and index finger was six inches squeezably thick. Tossed the load into the wastebasket. “Good bye,” I said, and stared down at the pile commingled with regular office trash. My fixation, my problem, was the fact that these nonsense items lived every single day of the year for many years, no matter – “Honey, can you grab my wallet?” – the circumstances, against the warm, rounded curve of my ass. As a part of life as oxygen. They might as well have been my eyes. I carried them around the world, I cared for them, I made sure that I never misplaced this vital element of daily gear: they received more care than other things in my life. And for this fact I am laced ignominious.
“Ew,” my girl said when I showed her the wallet and she squeezed it in her fingers, and the leather, formed to a thick rounded mass, a wallet stuffed and straining, now flopped and rippled as she pressed, “Like the folds and flaps of skin when an obese person loses a lot of weight.” Stretch marks, a sad-looking thin little fine brown leather wallet, leaning now on its shelf above the coats and shoes, the wallet a measure of when we finally become.