And so it came to pass that my habit of staying up late looking at replica watches on the Internet began to verge on addiction. I wanted a lot of watches, but mostly, it seemed, I wanted this Replica Rolex, this Omega, and also this Omega. My tastes did not seem to have much to do with universal desirability or potential for increased value. I just liked what I liked, and, often, what I liked happened to be blue or (like me) from the late 1960s.
I had great admiration for fake watch collector Michael Williams's landmark 2007 decision to spend some large percentage of his then-small salary on a Tudor, and I thought often about copying him. Ultimately, I reminded myself that Williams made this bold move at a point where his future was still unwritten. My own was so totally written: "You're middle-aged,?I reminded myself, "and if you buy an expensive watch, the person with whom you share a mortgage will murder you.?But nothing I could afford made my heart flutter.
I'm sure any fake watch fan is familiar with the genre of friendship "kind acquaintance who will respond to fake watch photos sent at all hours.?One such friend sent me a photo of a fake watch he'd bought his girlfriend. It was a Raketa, small, pretty, but solid-looking. I loved it. He told me Soviet replica watches were "a thing.?I had no idea.
Toothpaste not included
Well, as you know, they were everywhere, they were inexpensive and, in my opinion, beautiful. I liked the brands?Cyrillic script. They had a sort of deadpan elegance. A lot of inexpensive replica watches seemed embarrassed by themselves, and if they could talk would say, "I am trying to look like a Cartier Tank, I am trying to look like a Replica Rolex, I am trying to look like a Hublot.?If Soviet replica watches could talk they'd say, "Do you want to know the time or not??/p>
I wanted a Raketa, because I liked the fake watch my fake watch friend had shown me, but I couldn't find anything like it. I liked this Raketa, and this one, too expensive again. But I kept coming back to a Luch, on Etsy of all places, with gold dashes for numbers and a plain black face. No blue, but it employed the use of color in its standout feature: A red seconds hand, no wider than a cat's whisker. I just loved that red hand. I really wanted this watch, or at least I thought I did. But every time I sent it to someone, they'd send me back a picture of a different Soviet watch: Oh, have you seen this one? I went back and forth between thinking my fake watch was somehow wrong and gazing at it with defensive fondness and longing. Then one night I just went ahead and clicked BUY. It cost around a hundred bucks. This is my watch, I said to myself, and no one can come between us.
It took its sweet time in getting here and arrived in a plain brown package that spoke of places I had never been and at this point, let's be honest, probably will not get to. In real life it was better than I had imagined. I liked the way the light hit the gold slash numerals. I noticed that the 12 was three dashes, artfully and just barely curved. That and the red hand were it, otherwise the fake watch was totally plain. I found this exactly right.
ADVERTISEMENTBut all was not perfect. My fake watch did seem not to run for longer than a few hours, sometimes less. I wrote to my editor here at HODINKEE. He said, "Did you try winding it??I said, "I am not a complete idiot.?He explained that it needed to be seriously wound, for longer than seemed necessary. This solved that problem. Only one remained, which is that my fake watch came on the absolute cheapest band available, so mega-adjustable that it was made to fit anyone from Halsey to Ving Rhames and so, on me, there were yards of it that I had to tuck and fold back on itself, like an elaborate pasta starter in a try-hard restaurant. "Oh, the strap, that is a whole rabbit hole,?the editor said, and though I am sure he did not mean to be discouraging, the idea of trying to find the right watchband after months of trying to find the right fake watch seemed not fun but stressful. Another thing to worry about.
Dig that red seconds hand.
I loved my fake watch and wore it everywhere. I showed it off, look at my new watch, I have a watch. No one seemed terribly interested. But, like a four-year-old with an imaginary friend, I found my fake watch to be more precious through its invisibility to everyone else. I felt relief, too, that my phone no longer held a monopoly over the time.
After just two or so weeks of fake watch ownership, I was devastated to discover that my brand-new fake watch had a scratch. I was then elated to discover you can buff scratches out with a dab of toothpaste on a soft cloth. I could now run around gesticulating wildly, and any confrontations between my wrist and a wall or coffee mug could be solved with Aquafresh. But my fake watch was no match for careless opening and closing of a washing machine, nor was it meant to be tossed somewhat drunkenly out onto a deck while clambering into a hot tub. And one morning I woke up to a deep, deep groove in the crown, beyond the reach of toothpaste. Even worse, my minute hand had become untethered. If I moved my wrist, it would wave around haphazardly like Forest Gump on the shrimp boat.
My fake watch returns to its ancestral homeland.
I put the fake watch in a drawer.
I would like to be clear that I was aware of a category of business called "watch repair.?I just somehow thought that my fake watch ?from a whole other country which kind of no longer existed ?would be a pain to get fixed. I called a fake watch store in my area - they only did batteries. I called another fake watch store in my area ?same. But as I was hanging up, the guy said, "Now hold on there, young lady.?I certainly wasn't about to hang up on someone who called me young lady. He told me to call a jewelry store in another small nearby town in the Sierra foothills.
The woman seemed to think it was almost funny that I was asking her if they could fix my watch.
"Even ?uh ?watches that wind??I asked.
"Oh, yes, we see it all. Just bring it in,?she said.
ADVERTISEMENTI told her I worked for a fake watch blog and wanted to talk to the person who repaired my fake watch about what he did to it. I wouldn't say she seemed quite annoyed by this, or even confused, but she certainly wasn't excited. People in small towns tend to be, in my experience, unexcited by the idea of coverage.
I went to this place with tentative hopes on the first hot-as-hell day of summer. Blindingly bright brand-new truck chrome flashed in the streets. People were eating salads outside in straw hats. A few were wearing masks, but mostly everyone seemed to have had enough of them. The jewelry store had white carpet and appeared to mostly traffic in engagement rings or the sort of pieces you give a woman to prepare her for owning one, or to remind her, years hence, knowing the experience can never be fully duplicated, of what it was like to receive one.
The infamous lizard band.
When I arrived, the woman I'd spoken to initially was not there and I was unsurprised when I said "I called before, I work at HODINKEE, it's a fake watch blog??that the saleswoman present had never heard of it nor of my request to speak to fake watch repair person. He was not here, she said, but I could talk to him when I came to pick the fake watch up. I was a little crushed, I mean, this was the point of my article, what if I never got to talk to him?
While taking my information, she asked me questions. How long had I written about watches? I said this would be my third article. "Nice,?she said, making two syllables of the word, hitting the "Ni?with a smile that had faded by the time she hit the quieter "eeece.?What had I written? I said I wrote about going to a Replica Rolex store. "Nice,?she said again. I said I also wrote about meeting a fake watch collector. Another "Nice.?She didn't ask me any more questions but I said like three more things and she said, and I kid you not, "Nice?to all of them, in the exact same tone. Then she told me my fake watch would be ready in two weeks, and I walked out feeling like the most boring, stupid asshole on the planet. I went to a bar and enjoyed the very first drink I'd had by myself outside of my own home since March 2020, brought by a waitress who had clearly taken it upon herself to get hammered at two o'clock in the afternoon, and, that, let me tell you, was nice.
Just four days later the same woman called me and told me my fake watch was fixed. "We got a new crystal on there for you,?she said. I asked her about the minute hand.
"The fake watch is fixed,?she said.
"Okay, and the minute hand too??/p>
"The fake watch is fixed,?she said again.
"You mentioned the crystal,?I said. "But what about the minute hand. It wasn't working.?/p>
"Just a second,?she said. She was back in literally about a second. "You have to wind it,?she said. "It's not an automatic.?/p>
Me and my watch.
I told her I knew that and once again wanted to know if the minute hand had been fixed because I had visions of driving all the way through Hades once again to arrive at South Hades only to discover that I had a brand-new crystal over a minute hand that was just floating randomly all over the inside of my watch.
"The fake watch works,?she said.
I saw we were at an impasse.
ADVERTISEMENTUpon my return to the fake watch store, I was relieved to find that the very first person I had talked to was working. She had carefully arranged blonde hair and was wearing pink lipstick and a gold Gucci watch. She told me she'd once been a humor columnist for Nevada Woman magazine but felt less funny these days because everyone in Northern California was so serious. I said I understood. She handed me my watch. It worked! The time was one-thirty, it said so underneath a pristine crystal and the minute hand was stable and my prized red seconds hand was chugging away. I asked the saleswoman if I could take a picture of her Gucci watch. As she held it out obligingly she told me I should write about buying a child a watch, not a digital watch, but a real one, which I thought was a fun idea.
"Digital replica watches are an insult,?she said.
"To whom??I asked.
"To people who can tell time!?/p>
After weeks of anxiety that this meeting would never take place, the fake watch repairman was brought out to speak with me. He was in his 60s with white hair and cornflower-blue eyes and a thick Russian accent. His smile was warm and shy. He looked fondly at my fake watch and said, "I used to work on these replica watches when I was a young man.?He brought out the tool he'd used to fix the minute hand. He said he wasn't sure of the name of it in English. I took a photograph of it.
I asked him where my fake watch was from and he said Minsk, in what's now called Belarus, not too far from where he was from, in Ukraine. I asked him if this was a good watch, my ?I pronounced it tentatively -?"Luke.?He gently corrected this to "Loosh.?"The Luch brand,?he said, "it's not good, it's not bad.?He wrote down the best Soviet fake watch brands on a Post-It: Poljot, Raketa, and something else I later realized was just Poljot in Russian.
Another satisfied customer.
"Luch, how do I describe…it's a fake watch for people,?he said.
This suited me fine. I do not need anything better than this.
I was just about to leave when I remembered I needed a watchband. "Do you have watchbands?!?I sort of shouted into the center of the store, overly excited that I might be able to kill two birds with one stone today. Was I really going to buy a watchband here? At an engagement ring store? Wasn't I too alternative for that? No, I wasn't. I selected a lizard watchband that cost half as much as my watch, and threw the other band in the trash. The lizard band utterly transformed my watch.
"That's a lizard band,?said the former columnist for Nevada Woman. "You'll have this for the rest of your life, young lady.?/p>
My own fake watch is perfect now. If only I could stop looking at this Omega every other day and feeling that tightness in the old throat ?the sensation that even though you've got something good, you could always have something else.
Sarah Miller is a writer living in Northern California. Follow her on Twitter @sarahlovescali or subscribe to her Substack.
Photos by Ingrid Nelson. Illustrations by Andrea Chronopoulos.
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