I knew one guy back in college who had his wallet on a chain. Vern, the low-rent Elvis marque who shot pool in the Valli basement with a Marlboro 100 perpetually depending from his lips. The chain gave him a touch of biker swagger. The chain said he had a Trojan tucked away. The chain said his driver’s license might be commercial. The chain said he might well snap that pool cue over his knee and swing the butt if it came to that.
One was wisely wary of a man with his wallet on a chain. Which brings us to a Twitter poll, of course.
I’m surprised he was surprised. Sensible men had “front,” of course. Diehard traditionalists had “back.” Men accustomed to the larcenous potential of urban interactions had front. Guys of an older age, with enormous baggy jeans hanging over nonexistent fundaments, had back. Front men regarded the wallet as an object intended to be reduced to the barest utility. Back men saw their wallet as a sort of portable hard drive, stuffed with everything they might possibly need.
I am a front man. My wallet is wafer-thin, with three cards, a work ID, and my driver’s license. In the thin slots are other forms of ID, one postage stamp, and a crisp $50, ironed flat. I take it out multiple times a day to go up and down the work elevator and beep myself into the office. I can slide it out and slide it back with minimal effort, because it does not have the dimensions of a paperback novel by one of those 60s authors who wrote 500 page novels about intrigue and romance in the car industry. I actually have three in the same style, color-coded to wardrobe, and can swap out the contents with the practiced ease of a soldier reassembling a field-striped rifle in the dark.
My father was a back-pocket man. My father somehow carried the same wallet for 30 years, and never lost it. All of his pants would inevitably bear the imprint of the wallet’s shape in the back right keister pocket . Sometimes when he took it out it looked as if it had been fused into a solid object by time and enormous pressure, like a geological formation. I remember once we looked through it.
His original Social Security card, which had been abraded over the years and reduced to the thickness of Dollar-Store toilet paper. I don’t know why he kept this close, but his generation (and mine, to some extent) regarded that card as precious and irreplaceable, something you’d have to produce in 40 years if you wanted your benefits.
A faded picture of Mom from 1946, after he returned from war, with the two of them smiling and hugging by the enormous filthy coal furnace by the Fargo train station. They both look very happy that he wasn’t killed on a miserable island on the other side of the planet.
Discharge documents, in case some burly MP braced him at the IHOP 62 years after he got out of the Navy and wanted him to prove he wasn’t AWOL.
Portraits of me and my sister in horrible high school clothes and ludicrous hair, and grainy shots of grandkids in the larval stages, all of whom were now driving and voting.
His pilot’s license. Expired, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t take the stick if he had to.
Fourteen charge cards for trucker gas-station plazas between Fargo and East St. Louis, Missouri, where he would drive and pick up product at 2 AM in the morning at the age of 82, indifferent to the fact that he was 82 at 2 AM in East St. Louis.
A driver’s license with a mugshot of his impassive face, looking like someone who’d been caught after 40 years on the run but was content with his choices
And more. One of the reasons the Dad Brick was so thick was the wallet itself. You could imagine it advertised in the back of VFW magazine as a “Whole-Cow Wallet.” It had been worn shiny by decades riding up and down in his back pocket. The edges, once sharp, had bent to his posterior contours. It was the sum of his life in many ways, a book of his duties and accomplishments. I don’t think he ever pulled out the pictures and gave them a glance, but he knew they were there. Every day he settled into the cab of his truck and felt the presence of The Wallet, and was reassured.
That’s my life, and it’s still all there.
Beautiful piece- made me miss my dad (back pocket), stepdad (BP), and James' dad too who was such a fixture on The Bleat over the years.
My first husband had a wallet with a chain. Made it very difficult when I tried to steal it.