The Pile of Last Resort

I noticed today that I have a lot of underwear.

It’s not, I hasten to add, because I’m an underwear fetishist. Far from it. The sight of a man in underwear might make me shift in my seat a little, in order to allow room for my boner to grow, but it’s the man I’ll be looking at. Not his shorts. I don’t collect underwear with funny or cute label names, or quasi-chemical mixtures of letters and numbers printed on their elastic waistbands. I don’t feel particularly more sexy when wearing an expensive pair of shorts over a pair I’ve gotten in a plastic-wrapped three-pack from a discount store.

No, my motivation for having a large drawer stuffed full of over fifty pairs of shorts is that I’m fundamentally lazy. Good as I am at changing out towels and sheets on the household’s beds every week, I really hate to do my own personal wash. I’ll launder every damned towel in the house—and sometimes it seems there’s more of those than of my underwear—and wash and iron every tablecloth and dishrag, too, by gum, before I’ll turn to the pile of cotton underthings moldering in the laundry basket in my closet.

I’m not as bad as my college freshman roommate, who managed to get through an entire semester of not washing his shorts by using an elaborate system of wearing each pair for several days and then turning it inside out and repeating the process, until finally they were all so disgusting that he would judge which was still freshest by going through his laundry bag and giving them the ‘sniff test.’ Those things were practically able to stand up on their own, by the time he took them home for his mom to wash over Christmas break.

But sometimes I feel like I’m on that edge.

I realized something today as I sorted out my fresh, clean shorts. Though I’d never consciously thought about it before, I sort my underwear into three distinct piles that I keep separate in my big bedroom chest.

There’s the Good Stuff pile. This is the largest of the three categories by far—the pile into which I fold my everyday decent foundation garments. None of them are stretched out, none of them are ill-fitting. If I were to be in an automobile accident and rushed the hospital, neither I nor my parents would be embarrassed to be cut out of them in the emergency room. Nor would I be ashamed of them if I walked into a trick’s house and dropped my jeans. I’ve got my Gap and Banana Republic stuff in here, as well as those comfortable little square-cut trunks I get from H&M, and a lot of other pairs I’ve accumulated over the past couple of years.

And then, I made the realization today, I have my Sex Shorts. These are the ones I deliberately set aside to wear on the days I think I’m going to get laid. None of my Sex Shorts are fancy, as my dad my say. But they’re nice. And I know that another man might enjoy removing them for me. Also in this category are the shorts that men have bought for me over the years, either to enjoy on my own, or to wear specifically for them.

And then—oh, I hesitate to mention them—there’s the Pile Of Last Resort. Gentlemen, am I incorrect in assuming we all have one of these? Into it go the underthings that I simply would rather not wear, and yet cannot bear to to throw away. There’s a parsimonious side to my Scottish heritage that won’t let me throw away these pairs of boxer briefs with which there is nothing physically wrong. Sure, some of them are butt-ugly. Yes, there are a couple of pairs of shorts that I might’ve gotten on Father’s day that have absolutely no support whatsoever and have a tendency to let my nuts plummet out, like some kind of free-fall amusement park ride, without the slightest notice. And yes, there are a couple of pairs of white shorts with mysterious black marks on them that never really have washed out. (Not skid marks. You guys are dirty-minded. Black marker marks.)

It’s there that you’ll find the baggy, shapeless pantaloons that the blind and even the fashion-averse would scorn to wear. The grampa panties. The Fruit of the Looms that must’ve been woven from sour grapes. It is the pile to which underwear crawls when it is ready to die.

I know I should toss them all out. I hate looking at them when I open the drawer. But then I think they might come in handy, sometime. Like, when I’m being lazy and not washing, which happens at least once a month.

Oh, Pile Of Last Resort. Your are my secret shame.