Just the other day, the weirdest thing happened. I was over my friend Antonio’s house for his birthday party. It was a small shindig—just to celebrate his birthday. I won’t divulge his age, but let’s say that he’s a few years shy of 40. Yes…I did bust his balls a little bit. Antonio’s a good guy, so I went easy on him. He’d also invited his brother, Javier. His brother-in-law, Mark was also there. Somehow, we started talking about what I’d like to call man-wallets. I’m not a Seinfeld fan, but I guess there was some episode where George had one of these monstrosities. When I’m talking about a man-wallet, I’m talking about one of those bulging, hulking things that can barely contain a lifetime worth of pictures, old business cards and God knows what else. Oh yes, we started comparing.

 

I stopped trying to play this game a long time ago. A few years ago, I started having back problems. I didn’t know what was wrong until it hit me that my slowly growing man-wallet was throwing my back out of whack. In my day job, I work in an office and so man-wallet+8 hours in an office chair=equaled some annoying back pain. I ended up finding a thin wallet at J. Crew. After a number of faithful years of service, I’m now getting close to retiring it.

 

So back to Antonio’s wallet exhibition at his birthday party. He pulls out his wallet and it was incredible. Not in a good way. No, no…I’m talking in a ridiculously surreal, incredible way. It was so unreal that it was real. Antonio had so much crap stuffed into his wallet that the sides of his wallet couldn’t even rest on top of each other. The only way to keep everything from coming out of it was with a rubber band. I’m not making it up. He used a rubber band to keep his wallet closed! Now, mind you—I’m not usually the type to pull my wallet out and compare. I mean who pulls out their wallet?! The answer is us. We encountered some perfect storm of testosterone, a few beers and just one of those moments that comes along rarely.

 

Speaking of rubber bands, Javier then pulls out a wad of cash from his pocket. This was after he showed off his wallet, as well. The priceless thing about the wad of cash is that it was secured with a rubber band that was tied around it. All that I could think was, “This is the working man’s money clip!” Now, for the record, I’m not a huge fan of money clips and I don’t know many people that use them. I don’t get the idea of them. Yeah, they’re simple. However, I like the compartments that a wallet has. I’m sorry. I like a wallet. Now, Javier’s contribution was showing us his registration for his car. He had the thing laminated! Now, I’m dead serious when I say this. He’s a genius. You’re supposed to keep it in your wallet and you have to figure that, after years of being exposed to heat and sweat, that it would get nasty. To laminate it, to protect it is genius.

 

To top the fact that Javier had the wad of cash with the rubber band tied around it, his wife had to bust on him. This made it worse for the guy. She said, “Doesn’t your dad do that? Oh wait….now, I see where you get it from.” The guy couldn’t say anything. He didn’t. All that he did was shake his head in resignation. He was thinking the same that I do lately, “Oh, my God. I’m turning into my dad.” It’s a sad moment when you realize that no matter how hard you try, you have your parents’ charming habits. Javier was becoming his dad.

 

So as I get to the end of this story, I have to ask the guys out there: do you have a man-wallet? If so, what does this say about you? I figure that after a certain point, you need to realize that enough is enough. Go through those business cards and either put them into one of those card folders or just throw them away. Odds are that if you haven’t used those business cards yet, then you probably won’t. Like Javier, I’ll shake my head in resignation. We, guys, are a strange lot. We’re nostalgic and keep crap around forever. Our women will agree with me. Maybe it’s this nostalgia that makes us add to our immensely bulging and immensely ridiculous man-wallets.

 

Author: Nicolas Ayala