We was headed north, where people needed socks year-round, and I was trail boss of the sorriest bunch of sock wranglers I’d ever laid eyes on.
“Hey you,” I yelled at the one everyone knew as “you.”
“What?”
“Still asleep? There’s a Tommy Hilfiger about to wander off into the sagebrush over yonder.”
You looked up and gazed off into sun, still low in the sky because we hit the trail early in the sock-driving business.
“Oh, right. I’m on it.”
“Glad you could make the time for it,” I said drily, as dry as the alkaline to slightly acidic dirt we was riding over.
“Hey boss!” It was Clell Furnell, an eager young wrangler who was a bit of a brown nose.
“Yeah, what?”
“I got two Gold Toes that don’t quite match.”
“What’s the difference?”
“One’s broad stripe, one’s thin.”
I squinted at him to let him think I was thinking about it before making a snap decision based on years of hard work putting stray socks together into pairs. “Tie ‘em together tight so they don’t get loose again and call it a day.”
“Okay.”
He was off like a shot, all piss and vinegar. He’d probably match up ten pair more before we circled around the campfire tonight and swapped tall tales of days gone by, when business tycoons wore over-the-calf stretch hosiery, not like the young yuppie punks of today; every pair of socks they own has some kind of “whimsical” design–little dollar signs or Pac-Man or smiley faces–like there’s something funny about taking innocent investors’ money and putting it into bitcoin-blockchain crypto-exchanges that suck it in like a black hole and never let it out.
No, I’ve fought the good fight all my working days, trying to convince folks that socks don’t just “disappear” into the ether, like they was desaparecidos that paramilitary goons in South America cause to simply vanish, leaving no trace. You got to work your herd of socks to keep ‘em together, checking your dryer after every load, making sure one doesn’t end up in a pillowcase or fitted sheet. And for that you need an experienced crew of sock wranglers, not the night shift attendant at your local laundromat.
“How they hangin’ boss?”
It was J.T. “Smiley” Embree, the snarky assistant trail boss who has his eye on my job.
“Fine,” I said. “Since when do you care?”
“Since never,” he said, giving me the shit-eating grin that earned him his nickname. We then engaged in a little sock wrangler one-ups-manship; he rolled a cigarette with one hand, expertly pouring tobacco from a sack into a rolling paper, licking the paper, curling it into tightly-rolled tube, and replacing all his smoking accessories in various pockets, all without taking his other hand off the saddle pommel. I countered by carving a meerschaum pipe with an ornate figure on the bowl, adding a wooden mouthpiece, as well as an attractive velvet-lined case.
“Pretty neat trick,” Embree said.
“You don’t get to be as old as I am without larnin’ somethin’ along the way.” I let him know by dropping a few g’s that I’d had enough of his darned foolishness.
“You ever wonder—what’s the point of all?” Embree asked, cocking his head to one side, waxing philosophical all of a sudden.
“Mine is not to reason why,” I said, quoting a line about a doomed military action. “Mine is but to try to make some sense out of a crazy collection of foot garments that has seen too many stragglers left behind in gym bags, locker rooms, underneath beds—girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s.”
“But them rich owners,” Embree said. “They could just go out and buy another pair. It’s all so pointless.”
I whirled my head around like the turret of a tank and lined him up in my sight: “We get paid to care, that’s why. If there’s something about your paycheck you don’t like, why don’t you go work the lost-and-found bin at your local youth rodeo or hockey rink?”
That shut him up, and a good thing too, because the next words we heard was the cry that strikes alarm in every sock wrangler’s heart.
“Sock rustlers!” Clell Furnell called out.
“Where?” I called back.
“Over there, making off with two prize Ralph Laurens.”
“With the little polo player logo that makes people think there’s something luxurious about a cheesy article of clothing mass-produced by quasi-slave labor in a Third World sweatshop?” I asked at length, leaving myself winded.
“The same.”
“Let’s get ‘em!”
We were off like birdshot out of a twelve-gauge, and before you could say “GQ’s Annual Review of Best Men’s Dress Socks” we were on the rustler like a duck on a June bug, to mix my homespun metaphors.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” I asked as I hog-tied an assistant buyer for a national department store chain.
“I was only trying to stay ahead of what the fashionable young man will be wearing next fall,” she said.
“Stick to the classics, don’t be fooled by trends,” I said grimly as I put the finishing touches on a double sheep’s head knot around her wrists.
“What does that mean?”
“Black, maybe blue, never brown. No patterns other than argyle.”
“That doesn’t sound very exciting,” she said.
“You want excitement, you should transfer to the boxer shorts department.”