In college, my friend Mark always made a point of being cooler than me. He was always the one with the quicker comeback, always the one scoring the ladies and, as I learned because college is an experimental time, always the one with the bigger wiener.
And that weren’t bad enough, after he graduated from college, in what I thought was his coolness coupe de grace, Mark moved to Bosnia to be a war correspondent. I’m pretty sure he did it to spite me.
Mind you, I could have hopped the next plane to… Iraq and trumped him, but as I was packing my bags, my wife Sandie, the “practical” one in our family, quickly pointed out that living in war zones tends to bring a slight chance of death, so I needed another plan. Sandie worked up an Excel spreadsheet. We needed somewhere exotic, exciting and preferably with little or no ethnic cleansing.
We settled on Australia.
Strangely, there’s less call for war correspondents down under then you’d imagine, so I instead landed equally prestigious work covering Melbourne’s booming microbrew scene. Mark could cover his little atrocities for Newsweek or whatever. I was writing about beer. In Australia.
Genocide? Beer!
But meanwhile, Mark had long returned home and his time abroad had become the stuff of legend to the blank-eyed, cud-chewing herd that made up our circle of friends. So now, after five, hard years… or maybe six, I can’t remember. My time spent in Oz is kind of a blur. Either way, it was time for me to come home and let my legend begin.
But the day we came home, there was no parade. No ticker tape. No one wanted to hear about Mountain Goat Beer’s Surefoot Stout or Geelong Brewery Piss Lager. No one. And you know why? Because all eyes were on Mark. Again, he had trumped me. Mark had married himself a lesbian.
And not just any lesbian, a hot, rich lesbian who, for their first anniversary, rented him a high-class hooker who, I’m told, looked just like Daryl Hannah in Splash, but you know, in the parts where she had legs, not fins. And the three of them had sex.
I’m pretty sure he did that to spite me too.
It’s not that I want Sandie to rent us a 1984 Daryl Hannah. Or a 1976 Suzanne Somers or a 1997 Lucy Lui. I’m not into that, but --
Okay that’s not true. I’d very much like Sandie to rent me a 1976 Suzanne Somers, but the logistics would be staggering. I mean, the health screening process alone… I wouldn’t want to get a dirty 1976 Suzanne Somers because –
That’s not true either. I’d love a dirty 1976 Suzanne Somers but it isn’t going to happen because I’m just not cool enough to cope with a situation like that – and Mark is. That’s the rub. All my life, when it comes to being cool, I’ve always been one lesbian wife and a high-priced hooker ménage-a-trois behind guys like Mark.
But I wasn’t going to give up. I had something to prove, so I waited, like a panther in the zoo, ready to strike when the time was right.
Mark, conversely, had nothing to prove. He was a former war correspondent with a huge wiener and a hot, rich, lesbian wife. Normally, a guy in his situation might start hunting and killing human prey in a desperate attempt to find something, anything, to connect him to humanity, but Mark also had a bad shoulder, so instead he settled for bidding on bizarre shit on eBay. As in, he would search the auction listings for things like boxes of dirt or jars filled with Brad Pitt’s farts and bid on them. Then he would email all his friends about it.
Along with listings for rural Texas towns and cashews shaped like penises, Mark cluttered my inbox with dozens of listings for soiled socks. The item descriptions were always moving, innuendo-laden tales of well-endowed boys or chesty young girls who had fallen into hard times and were now forced to auction off their used hosiery just to survive. And they’d be making $50-60 a pop!
That’s when it hit me -- there is only one guy cooler than the guy who bids on bizarre shit on eBay – and that’s the guy who sells bizarre shit on eBay. Soon, that would be me.
Having no unwanted farm towns at my disposal, I wore some Costco tube socks for about a week straight and when they'd reached a whole new level of stink, I borrowed Mark's digital camera, took a few shots, let them crawl into a Ziploc bag by themselves, sealed the bag and…
Congratulations! Your item has been successfully listed on eBay.
Mark was going down.
I wish I had recorded the description, because it was by far my finest hour as a writer, the stirring tale of a young, fit surfer eager to buy a new wetsuit, so he was selling his old, stinky socks to raise funds. The only fragment I still have is:
"These socks smell great.... and I wear them jogging (a lot).”
No one bid for four days, but I kept that under wraps. What Mark didn’t know only made me cooler. Then, I got an email. It came from... I'll change his eBay handle to protect the innocent. It came from WEIRDOSOCKLICKER32:
Hi,
Kewl socks, I am lkg for very smelly un-washed socks - Do you offer that option?
Thx a lot
WEIRDOSOCKLICKER32
He spelled cool K-E-W-L and that bothered me, but my battle was not with Weirdosocklicker32. It was with Mark, so I responded:
If you want very smelly, un-washed socks, that's what I'll provide.
Instantly, he wrote back:
Really kewl, Thx !
Count me In !!
WEIRDOSOCKLICKER32
Then he bid. The next day, someone else bid. My socks were up to $5.00. I forwarded Mark the entire chain of emails. Take that, Weiner Boy.
Within minutes of sticking it to Mark, WEIRDOSOCKLICKER32 who didn't like the competition, wrote me again:
Thanks a lot ! Okay, yeah, that’s not his name. I changed it, but the point is, he signed the email with his real name to humanize his creepy attempts to circumvent eBay. I wasn't all that moved, so I responded:
Thanks but no thanks. I think I'm just going to let the bidding do it's thing. Good luck!
- D
That night, bidding leaped to $20. It was truly a golden moment but as I was writing Mark to gloat, tragedy struck. An email from eBay:
Dear Denis Faye,
We appreciate that you chose eBay to list the following item:
1674313375336222453234343 Used men's sweat socks
However, your listing contained material that is inappropriate for eBay's general categories.
"These socks smell great. [...]and I wear them jogging (a lot)."
This type of information is considered extraneous and would therefore not be permitted in an auction listing posted in our general categories.
Therefore, we have ended this listing.
I immediately appealed the ruling. They wrote back with a 50-page-legalese email that can basically be summed up as follows:
Dear Denis Faye, Later, I learned that the trick to selling stuff like this is to include the words, "washed to eBay standards" and they'll let you off the hook. So for example, you can post:
I wore these socks four years straight, to keep my feet warm at my job, where I spend the whole day stomping, without shoes, on the decomposing carcasses of rats and seagulls. Now I'm selling them to you, unwashed. Please hurry up & bid before they kill again.
These socks washed to eBay standards.
That would be fine, and you'd probably make a tidy bundle.
Now were I just selling dirty socks for my own financial benefit, I would have walked away from the auction and returned to selling Sandie’s old Jane Fonda workout videos but this wasn’t about money. It was about honor. It was about dignity. It was about my smaller penis – my slightly smaller penis. I couldn’t let that bastard Mark win again. But eBay could no longer be trusted, so I’d have to go at it alone, cowboy style. I wrote Burt back:
Hello Burt Reynolds -
As you may have noticed, eBay decided to cancel this auction. If you'd still like to buy the socks, I'll sell them to you for $20, plus $2.50 shipping. If you are interested, please provide me with an address and Paypal me the money and I'll send them off today.
Sorry about the inconvenience. Notice that I used my real name. I didn't want to, but because I was now operating outside the secure umbrella of eBay, we were communicating directly via email. It's not like he knew my home address or anything. I figured the worst he could do was send me some nasty internet porn, even though in the back of my mind, I knew that Burt Reynolds probably owned internet porn that would burn holes in my retinas.
He wrote back:
Yes I’ll take them ... See, now a money order would require that I give him my home address -- and that was a no-can-do. It was time to cut the cord:
Sorry, Burt, I only work through Paypal. If that doesn't work for you, I understand.
He responded:
Too bad - thx anyway ! This was all Mark’s fault – somehow. The bastard had won again. And then, because this is how my life works, I got another email from Burt:
I don't know if you can help but I decided to ask… Despite not having my home address, Burt Reynolds had now managed to plunge me into his filthy little world – and I wanted to hate him for it.
Then came my This American Life epiphany. Burt Reynolds was just being true to Burt Reynolds. He was keeping it real – I was the one trying to be something I’m not.
I’ll never be as “cool” as Mark. I’m not the Fonz and I never will be. I’m the Richie. And sometimes, when I’ve had too much to drink, I’m the Ralph. Either way, I’ll never play boner ping-pong with a fancy hooker and a lesbian wife and that’s okay. I need to focus on keeping it real. It’s just kind of sad that it took a faceless sexual deviant who beats off into dirty sock and does – something - with used condoms to teach me that.
I burned the socks, changed my email address and scrubbed myself in a scalding shower until my pores bleed, but before I did all that, I replied to Burt Reynolds, because I owed it to him:
Burt -
Can I buy now ?
How much would ask for ?
-Burt Reynolds
Fuck you.
Love, The eBay Team
Denis
Ok for $ 20 + 2.50 shipping
I can only send you a Money Order - Is it ok ?
Let me know Thanks a lot
Burt Reynolds
Burt
would you sell used condoms ? (serious question) Thx Burt
No, that's not really my thing – but thanks for asking.
- Denis