An early morning run through Central Park sounds like an ideal way to start your week. Sunlight through the trees, the reservoir glinting, that particular New York silence that isn’t silence at all but feels like it when you’re moving fast enough.

The run should promote an image of health, of discipline, of the best possible way to begin a Monday. What it should not promote is the image — forever burned into your memory — of your friend’s burning ass.

Ten miles in July heat, sweat, and abrasive underwear can create a spectacular fire between the cheeks. Think of it as a skinned knee, but on your crack. If that sounds lovely, I can assure you: it’s not.

You don’t necessarily feel chafing as it forms. That’s the cruelty of it. The friction does its work quietly, patiently, like a bureaucrat filling out the paperwork for your destruction. You don’t notice the raw steak forming above your ass. But you will.

He discovered it the way most people do — in the shower.

Only seconds after the water hit him, I heard what sounded like a P-51 Mustang firing up its engine behind the bathroom door. A scream that started in the lower registers of surprise and climbed, rapidly, into the upper octaves of genuine agony. Chafed skin and hot water. If you know, you know. If you don’t, consider yourself fortunate.

Now. Chafed ass is a twisted, back-country, inbred cousin of diaper rash. And back in the days, what did mom use to make diaper rash go away? Vaseline. So what’s the remedy for a grown man with a chafed crack in Midtown Manhattan? Exactly. Lather yourself up with the same and walk around smelling like an enormous baby.

We went to the nearest grocery store. After rummaging through the shelves with the kind of quiet desperation that only a man with a burning ass can produce, he bought the largest tube of Vaseline known to mankind. A tube you could use as a weapon. A tube that, in the wrong context, would raise questions.

That tube needed to be applied regularly throughout the week just to make short walks possible. Which brings us to the evening that started everything.

We walked into a bar on Wall Street. The kind of place where the whiskey costs two hundred dollars and the men wearing the suits look like they cost more. Bankers, stockbrokers, people who move money for a living and expect their environment to reflect the seriousness of that activity.

He needed to reapply.

He grabbed the Vaseline tube from his pocket — holding it like a baseball bat, because that’s how large it was — and asked the barmaid where the bathroom was. She pointed to a corridor about twenty feet away. He ducked toward it with the urgency of a man whose dignity was already on borrowed time.

The men’s room was too unhygienic. Of course it was. So he did what any reasonable person in crisis would do: he went into the women’s bathroom.

I should have warned them. Three women in business suits, walking toward that same corridor, drinks in hand, having what looked like a perfectly civilized evening. I should have said something. I didn’t.

What happened next belongs to them and to whatever therapist they may have consulted since.

The scream came first. Then a second one. Then a third. Three women walked out of that bathroom looking like they had witnessed something that would take years to process. The entire bar went silent. Every banker, every stockbroker, every person holding a two-hundred-dollar glass of whiskey turned to stare at the corridor.

The barmaid put her hands over her face. “OMG,” she moaned.

And when the three pale women had cleared the area, and my friend emerged — Vaseline tube in hand, looking slightly relieved and entirely unrepentant — the barmaid finally broke the silence.

“Well,” she said, “I think the other danish guy is causing some problems in there.”

We left before the police arrived.

That should have been the end of it. A ridiculous story. A bar anecdote for the rest of our lives. Something to bring up at dinners when the conversation needed rescuing.

But the story kept nagging.

Not the bathroom. Not the screaming. The part before it — the run, the chafing, the discovery in the shower, the Vaseline, the week of careful walking. The fact that a simple morning run had unraveled into a week-long medical event because of the most basic failure of the most basic garment.

What is life without good underwear? We had the answer now, and it was this: miserable, raw, and unforgiving. A tube of Vaseline the size of a rolling pin and three traumatized strangers on Wall Street.

One year later, we started designing underwear so comfortable that this particular apocalypse wouldn’t happen again. The kind of underwear that does its job so well that you forget it’s there. That doesn’t chafe, doesn’t ride, doesn’t betray you at mile seven when you still have three to go.

And when it came time to name the company, there was only one option. The name had already been given to us, by a barmaid on Wall Street, in a moment of chaos that neither she nor those three women will ever forget.

the other danish guy.

Born from the worst run of someone’s life. Built so nobody else has to go through it.

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