In 2007, GQ editor Ross McCammon bought himself a really nice watch. It was a Mark XVI pilot’s watch by Swiss watchmaker IWC, and it cost him about $5,000, which he writes was a significant portion of his life savings at the time. He says that it was a “perfect object” because it isn’t gaudy, it is easy to use, and it is “straight-up beautiful.” But then, in 2012, the watch was stolen by one of four men employed by a moving company that McCammon and his wife hired when they relocated from downtown Manhattan to Brooklyn. The moving-company owner denied that his employees stole anything, and since the watch wasn’t insured, he couldn’t get any money for a replacement. Since he had a six-month-old son at the time, McCammon did not want to spend the money on a new one. But McCammon says he thinks about the watch all the time. He says that the watch is a brilliant feat of engineering and an understated piece of jewelry, but he mourns the loss of it so much because it was also the ideal heirloom: “valuable, useful, transferable, and (in a pinch) hidable.” McCammon says he often thinks about the scene in Pulp Fiction, where Captain Koons (Christopher Walken) tells a young boy about the odyssey of a gold wristwatch that the boy’s great-grandfather bought during World War I: “I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass—two years,” Koons says. “And now, little man, I give the watch to you.” McCammon calls the scene funny, weird and jarring, but most importantly, moving. He bought a watch he couldn’t afford to give it away, and that was stolen from him.
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