A was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth with a toothbrush he’d thought to bring with him before coming over last night. I was stretched out on the bed, looking up at my green ceiling and feeling more content than I thought I ever could have felt again every time I’d broken up with some other boy who never would have remembered to bring his toothbrush to my house. I rolled off the bed and landed on my feet in one smooth motion, smiling to myself and shaking my sheet out from where it had bunched up beneath the comforter last night. A’s underwear fell onto the floor so I picked them up and took a good look at them. Gray boxer-briefs; sober, practical, and comfortable. The kind of underwear worn by the smilingly regular man on the Folger’s coffee can. Exactly the kind of underwear A would like and own. Feeling smug about my ability to capture such a man in the flowered tangle of my bed sheets, I put them up to my face and sniffed.
My shriek of horror found him poking his head out from the open bathroom door into the bedroom and I was caught with a pair of boxer-briefs that smelled like they hadn’t been washed in about three days still suspiciously close to my face. “What are you doing?!” he yelled across the room, toothbrush still in his hand. I started laughing because it was so horribly obvious what I was doing that there was nothing I could say to defend either one of us. This was maybe the second time he’d slept over, not counting high school. We were not ready for this conversation. I don’t know if anyone is ever ready for this conversation.
“I guess I was… smelling your underwear.”
“I could have told you not to do that! They smell really bad!”
“Yeah… yeah, they kind of do.”
“What made you suddenly decide to smell my underwear?” he shouted, and I bit my lower lip, trying to stop myself from laughing. A’s face was eloquently stricken, eyes hot and cold at the same time under a pair of eyebrows that still did not understand how I could do this to him. Knowing that whatever I came up with would be completely insufficient by way of explanation, I said, “I guess I thought they’d smell, you know, pleasantly like your balls? But I mean… really, I have no explanation for my behavior here. I’m sorry. I have no idea why I did that. I didn’t even think about it.”
He turned around, stomped back into the bathroom, and finished brushing his teeth. Even the splat of his toothpaste when he spit it into the sink sounded pissed off. I sat on the bed feeling awful but also still laughing a little. Didn’t he shake his dick off after he peed, or had he really just been wearing them that long? You think you know someone until you violate one of those boundaries that exist for what were turning out this morning to be very good reasons.
A came back out and stood in front of me, arms folded across his chest. “The next time you feel like sniffing my underwear, can you at least warn me so I can wear clean ones?” I nodded, looking up at him. He was in no way ready for a hug. “I need to do laundry, okay?” he said. “I was going to do it last night but then I wanted to come here and see you so I didn‘t.”
“Look, if it makes you feel any better, I’m completely embarrassed that you just caught me sniffing your underwear in the first place. It‘s kind of what I deserved if they smelled bad. I mean, I think we might be even.”
He reached down, picked the underwear up off the floor, and stepped back into them, sighing. One of the things I liked about A was the way you could see everything he was thinking on his face. Even when what he was thinking was specifically unflattering to me, I could not help but be flattered that I was allowed to see it anyway. Right now, for example, I could pretty much watch the argument unfold as the A head-voices bargained with each other about the cost versus the value of staying angry with me. When it looked like they were almost finished, I held my arms out. He ignored them and sat beside me on the bed. “It doesn’t change anything,” I said, taking his hand. That worked. A’s eyebrows smoothed out and he began to breathe normally again. I love you, I thought. He kissed me. “You want some coffee? Let’s get you some coffee.” I kissed him back.
This is the story of how I came into the creepy practice of surreptitiously sniffing my own underwear every time I thought a boy might go anywhere near them. If I was capable of random and inexplicable acts of panty-sniffing, anyone could be. I knew A loved me, but how could I be sure that whoever I ended up sleeping with after he left would love me? Precautions were in order. Usually, I did a check in the bathroom after peeing, but I wasn’t above taking my underwear off in the heat of a moment and passing them casually in front of my face before depositing them wherever they ended up. If I had any doubts, I hid them somewhere the boy would never think to look.
This is an old story, and I feel like my promise not to tell it has expired. Plus, I’m fairly certain that if A can forgive me for sniffing his dirty underwear, he will forgive me for the rest of it, too. Won’t he?
Filed under: Hyperbole, Nostalgia | Tags: Anais Nin, Blizzard, Henry and June, Incest
The house where we all lived on Rodman Street opened into a short hall that lead to a long flight of stairs, and I don’t think this typical quirk of Old Philly townhouse architecture found its true purpose before the blizzard that April. We had over three feet of snow when just the day before we’d all been running around in sweatshirts. I woke up late and found Jonah, Hershel, and Natashia at the top of the stairs with their BMX bikes. They were riding them down the stairs, out the front door, and into the enormous wall of snow that had been plowed directly in front of our house.
Part of me wanted to join in but I didn’t, satisfied with the way this event filled the house with shouts and laughter. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and curled up in my quilt at the kitchen table, reading Anais Nin. I had moved past all the Henry and June stuff and was now getting into Incest. There were certain things for which I could forgive old Anais and certain things I could not. I thought of her as a kind of moral abomination and hoped I never got like that myself, but found it very exciting that she had written the warning signs out for me with such detail and density. I was irritated by her insistence on portraying herself as this fragile, empathic ingenue who even while laying waste to the lives around her was perpetually laid up with the vapors in a home someone else was paying for and trying to work up the energy to write, but then again, that seemed real to me; the way it would actually go. The thing that really scared me, though, was the way she just let everything and anything happen to her and wrote about it with almost zero implied responsibility. Kind of like, “ooopsie… did I really just have sex with my estranged father?”
The Rodman Street house was maybe a step away from being a squat. None of us cleaned, although sometimes one of the people crashing there would try. There were random holes in the wall. The outside blew inside regardless of the season through the walls, the fireplaces, the cracks in the foundation. It had the most sinister basement imaginable. Everything could be used as an ashtray. My own theoretical morally abominable affairs would necessarily be prefaced by a statement like, “just move that stuff over.” The door was wide open and there might have been almost as much snow in the hall as there was outside that day.
Later, we went down the street to Dirty Frank’s for pitchers. My ex boyfriend showed up there, as he inevitably showed up everywhere in those days. I’d thought I’d been safe, in the aftermath of a blizzard, with him living at least fifteen blocks away. “How did you get here?” I asked, not very nicely, ignoring the girl he’d come with. He made a gesture that suggested he swam to the bar through the banks of snow. He looked as though he thought he was going to sit down and join us. “But why?” I persisted. That worked. He left. If I were Anais Nin, I would have gotten yet another journal entry describing in exquisite detail my torture at having to sit through yet another evening of the same thing happening the way it always happened. But it occurred to me then that Anais never had much in the way of territory to defend, which must have been the entire problem.
Back in art school, my friend Sara and I had this obsession with the concept of Incognito Chic. Incognito Chic involved sunglasses, a trench coat, a head scarf, a taxi cab, and a good reason for all of the above. It’s not a style so much as a still in the film that we were sure our lives secretly were, or would be someday. Every long friendship has its memes, and this was just one of many. Sara moved to Portland a couple of years ago, but we have been friends for so long that she doesn’t need to live nearby for me to feel close to her, something I accredit to the fact that we both still live in a world full of the accumulated ideas we have shared over the years. When she wrote and asked about Jean Couturier’s Coriandre, the first thing that came to mind was our old Incognito Chic.
I have to smile at our mutual naivete in thinking that disguises were not only useful, but the kind of thing we really wanted an excuse for someday. As if all the drugs and boys and dancing and Truffault films weren’t enough, in and of themselves. This perfume speaks of a similar spirit, Coriandre being the kind of quintessentially wise perfume that makes the most sense (to me, that is–lord knows what Sara thinks) when worn aspirationally.
Were I to go incognito these days, my perfume of choice would surely be a chypre, one of those moody and mysterious compositions of cool dark woods, old-fashioned hothouse-corsage florals, dry bergamot, and the compelling if not entirely pleasant vinegary bite that results from combining the three. I’m not a chypre girl, and as you see, that’s the point. These are the sorts of perfumes reserved for a woman far more private and controlled than I am, a woman who hides because it is her nature and not because she gets a kick out of it, a woman whose life is an endless succession of high stakes and just-in-time taxi cabs cutting through stormy city streets by night.
Coriandre by Jean Couturier is no exception, although I find it somewhat more approachable than the Mitsoukos and Paloma Picassos of the world. Perhaps that is because it is indeed cheap, at maybe $19.99 at your local beauty bodega for a big spray bottle with a fake-malachite plastic cap and spare, clean lines. Perhaps it is because its top notes perform the neat chypre parlor trick of starting off as something unabashedly dreadful before morphing into the fuller, rounder heart notes very quickly, leaving less room for the panic at having sprayed the wrong thing. When I give Coriandre a bit of time to develop past the strange prickling spice-rack top notes, I smell the kind of shameless red roses that a hooker might receive with a roll of her eyes from a smitten john resting on a base of mossy black velvet. It’s dark and spooky while also giving off the impression of bracing and possibly perverse good health. It is the kind of fragrance you can wear many times without ever being able to decide whether or not you like it.
I reach for Coriandre only in the Spring, and only on the right kind of gray, drizzly Sunday that is not too rainy for a solo mission to the museum or a used bookstore. It goes with the trench coat I wear on those occasions; goes with a black umbrella and the yearning to poke around someplace dusty. I would have liked to have known about it in college, the Incognito Chic times, where every day was an excuse for unironic Godard Girl drag and I had more time set aside for flea markets and emotional turmoil. Being slightly used was something I romanticized before it happened to me. Now I need the right gray, drizzly Sunday for it to feel cinematic.
It makes the world seem a very small and cozy place when I think of Sara, somewhere in Portland right now, wearing Coriandre and pearls, riding her bike through the rain in high heels, turning pseudo-famous musicians into her boyfriends, having her picture taken at art gallery openings, and living the kind of life everyone needs to have for awhile before they can settle down into something without quite so many jump-cuts.
Kind of like this, but not.
Uhhh, I just dug up my infamous “first novel.” Sorry I have to do this to you, but I really, really do. Laughing at yourself with yourself by yourself is not as satisfying as it should be.
*
I have sex with Sam and as far as sex goes it’s basically standard. The kissing-with-intent, the self consciously consuming passion, the first genital contact alien and formal as a UN handshake, but far from bad, it’s just not anything except sex. The usual series of sophomoric writhings, little breathless whimpers, my weak almost-an-almost-an-orgasm achieved during the dry hump phase, his premature ejaculation, the post-premature-ejaculation-apologies, noncommitally tender caresses, spooning, faux-sleep, real sleep. Sex, sex, sex, blah, blah, blah. I’ve had better times with my hand and PJ Harvey.
Oh, Sam. I’ve betrayed you at the last like you always knew I would. I think of your free espressos and shiny smiles and clean shirts and heartless manipulation and unreturned phone calls and casual sex with hippie girls and contort motionlessly in an agonized pathos between these itchy motel sheets because none of it helped, Sam, and I suspect you must be heartbroken. But I don’t really. I don’t even get that much out of it.
*
Sweet dreams, internet! I’ll be over here, contorting motionlessly in an agonized pathos.
BB
Would you put these down your pants? WHY?!?!
You know that one moment when acquaintances unequivocally reveal themselves to you in something of a regrettable fashion that is almost certainly a mistake? It’s always awkward, because while they are the ones who cannot go back in time and undo or unsay whatever has just been done or said, you are the one with the burdensome choice of either pretending it didn’t happen or in some way commenting on it. Both of you will stare at each other for a few seconds, knowing that regardless of which option you pick, it will cause the other person to dig themselves even deeper into what is now your mutual uncomfortableness. This is a crucial point in human relationships, because there is no recovery, only a deepened understanding or a swift rejection. Most people avoid this moment like the plague. Others, myself included, have been known to encourage it. I do not have any friends who have never made a complete ass out of themselves in front of me. It suggests to me that I have full reciprocal impunity to make an ass out of my own self, and I find this comforting.
Even so, someone should have told Mrs. F back in junior year that high school girls were not her friends. She was a small and energetic brunette sporting a shaggy, mousse-curled mop of hair that combined with her saucer-sized blue eyes caused her to resemble a muppet. One of the pretty-girl muppets, but a muppet nonetheless. Anyway, Mrs. F was the choir director. High school choir is intense, man, and requires something of a charismatic leader to inspire in its teenaged singers the appropriate sense of being part of something important and challenging. The teacher before Mrs. F, Mrs. B, had this quality in spades, but the downside of this was that she was totally and completely evil in that Jean-Brodie-meets-David-Koresh kind of way. While Mrs. B loved nothing more than to do things like miscast the school musicals with sophomores in the lead roles and then sit back to enjoy the ensuing macrodrama, Mrs. F just kind of did her job. When people sang solos, it was because their particular voice fit the particular piece of music. Choir members were not pitted against each other so that Mrs. B could catalog who would crumble under her perversely-applied pressure and who would take it up as a cause. With the advent of Mrs. F, choir was suddenly a simple endeavor: we sang, Mrs. F directed us.
As much of a relief as this was, it was also boring. We had no sense of knowing who Mrs. F was, or what we needed to do in order to work with her to our own maximum benefits. For this reason, she was dismissed as an authority figure and we began to more of less self-govern.
Since we hadn’t been looking to Mrs. F as any sort of personal role model, the day that her inherent authority as a teacher made itself known brought with it a heightened sense of shock. The story that ensued is one that is capable of sending my friend Jamie (who was there too) and I into spastic states of mirth and disbelief to this day. It is also one that terrifies me when I remember that I’m also a teacher now, and infinitely capable of creating a similar effect in my college freshmen in the space of one misworded sentence, one personal anecdote gone awry.
Anyway, we were all on the bus home from a choir competition in Boston. We’d done decently. Everyone was tired. A few of us were sitting in a little five or six girl knot in the middle of the bus when Mrs. F stopped over for a chat. I don’t remember what we’d been talking about, but it was probably something having to do with boys or sex, subjects that most of us knew little about and were therefore required to carry on conversations about at all times. The level of girlish bonhomie was high, enough to intoxicate Mrs. F into a state of security. She sat listening to our chatter for awhile before interrupting with a naughty fable of her own:
“I went to a bachelorette party once where we got drunk and put gourds down our pants and… you know.”
Crickets.
“What?” someone finally asked.
“You know,” said Mrs. F, popping her giant blue eyes at the speaker.
“I don’t know,” said Maureen McEvoy, who sealed it right there because if any one of us would know, it was probably Maureen.
“Me either,” I spoke up. We all looked at each other with a combination of puzzlement and horror, Mrs. F included.
“You know,” Mrs. F repeated one more time before going to sit somewhere else in the bus. Her insistence that we must know of a probable course of action following the part where a bunch of women put gourds down their pants was sincere, and tinged with an eye-rolling certainty that we were trying to embarrass her by suggesting that she elaborate on this.
“What kind of gourds were they?” I asked after she’d left. None of us knew, and having been left to figure this out on our own, Mrs. F’s story took on an added element of the sinister. Did they like… masturbate with them? I didn’t see how Mrs. F would have felt comfortable telling us this partial story fragment in the first place if that were the case, nor could I imagine the logistics of how a gourd down one’s pants would provide any kind of sexual frisson, especially while hanging out with girlfriends at a party. Had Mrs. F told us that she and her drunk friends had merely pretended that the gourds were boners or something, it would have been met with a relieved, “Oh, haha, that’s funny.” But it made no sense that after beginning this story, she would refuse to elaborate on the very part of it that would make the telling of this story in the first place in some way okay. Was there some third option that possibly had nothing whatsoever to do with sex? The “down the pants” part seemed to deny that possibility, as did the mysterious, “you know.”
Had any of us for any reason put gourds down our pants and then told a story about it, we would have told the entire story, but the only clue Mrs. F left was the fact that she was a teacher, making whatever had happened next something necessarily inappropriate to tell high school girls.
Suddenly, we understood the deep ambivalence of authority, perpetually torn between allowing one’s true self to do the governing and fearing the resultant loss of respect. We also understood that we ourselves held a certain degree of power over authority, capable of deciding whether or not to allow our authority figures their humanity. But the thing we understood best was that we really had no idea what to expect from life if our slightly dopey choir director was a woman with a secret life, a life in which she put gourds down her pants and… you know.
Filed under: Nostalgia, Perfume | Tags: Fleurs d'Oranger, Fracas, Kiehl's Original Musk, Serge Lutens, Shalimar
Gilles Balmet, from Untitled (Rorschach-2005)
“To the extent that I wear skirts/ and cheap nylon slips/ I’ve gone native/ I wanted to know the exact dimensions of hell/ Does this sound simple? Fuck you!”
Sonic Youth, The Sprawl
It must have been almost six years ago, the day my friend Moe was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the bathroom of the Walnut Street Barnes and Noble, trying to pull herself together. This sounds extreme unless you know Moe, who exists in a perpetual state of trying to pull herself together as well as being in a general habit of sitting down on the floor of places that most people would not. “Shit, I have B.O.,” she said after putting her face down the front of her shirt and sniffing loudly. She pulled a bottle of perfume from her briefcase purse thing and sprayed herself down good. I took the bottle from her and sprayed some on myself too. Moe was putting on dark red lip liner while talking, not bothering to look in the mirror, and she was talking about how a married Nike exec man-friend she’d met while doing a piece for the Wall Street Journal had just sent her, of all things, perfume. “Do I seem like I would wear perfume?” she asked, using her finger to blend the lip liner. The bottle was small and black and severely square. The entire bathroom reeked of gardenias and bad-idea sex. I didn’t know whether Moe seemed like she’d wear perfume or not, but it was a fascinating question for its lack of an immediate and precise answer. The perfume was Robert Piguet’s Fracas.
It wasn’t that Moe is the sort of person who seems like she wouldn’t wear perfume, it is more that she seems like the sort of person who wouldn’t wear Fracas. Fracas, you see, is a very serious tuberose-heavy fancy-lady bombshell of a perfume, renowned for its favor with the likes of Madonna and Princess Caroline of Monaco. It goes on strong and gets continually stronger as it wears on, blooming like some illegal hothouse hyrid on its wearer and sending out gigantic, glorious plumes of sillage. And Moe is a girl who defiantly buys her shoes at KMart and is so busy doing her job, which is writing about economics, that she frequently forgets to shower. Moe and Fracas seemed like a mismatch for the ages, but somehow it wasn’t. It was freakishly just right on her, sprawled out indian-style on the floor of a public bathroom, wondering objectively if this meant that Nike guy would possibly leave his wife and wreck his entire life over some kiss in a different state that didn’t mean anything except that she was lonely and he was there, and only in between various musings about the stock market and inflation and which rapper was endorsing which pair of sneakers. In her own messy, haphazard, too-smart-for-her-own-good way, Moe is exactly the kind of Killer Queen Fracas is meant for. It was one of those glorious synergistic mistakes that works out in the end: Moe’s Fracas Effect.
Becoming a perfume nerd involves something of a typical process. You remember something you used to wear in middle school, go on a hunt, realize it isn’t made anymore, and start trying to track it down on the internet. You stumble across websites that tell you all about other perfumes similar to the one you can no longer have and realize that there is an entire quantifiable universe of knowledge that one can have about perfume. There are more of them than you ever imagined, and there are so many shortcuts to figuring out what kinds of scents you like in order to locate them that you pretty much go crazy trying to pinpoint things like which family of scents is for you, which notes you consistently like, what kind of mood you’re going for–all in the name of the Holy Grail, or Signature Scent. You didn’t sign up for a new hobby, see. You just want The One. But as with men, once you realize how many of them are out there and how many of them will be perfect in a given moment, The One becomes buried under an avalanche of possibility. Maybe you just aren’t the monogamous type, after all. There are orientals. And florientals. Chypres! Musks: white musks, dirty musks, vanillic musks, Egyptian musks. Which is to say nothing of the pure florals, the green florals, the gourmand florals, the white florals, all of which have their charms. You attempt to sift through all of these scientifically, until you realize that selecting a perfume is not a scientific process at all, it’s a way of asking yourself, who am I?
Sweet baby Jesus, not that again. And as with men, you begin to realize that you have probably screwed up your chances of finding The One by refusing to remain naive and passive about it and letting it come to you. You are now among the faithless and calculating. You cannot duplicate the magic behind Moe’s Fracas Effect anymore; you know too much.
I now know, for example, that there are several perfumes I could have worn happily for the rest of my life had I not understood how vast and deep the rest of the perfumed world is. Shalimar is one of them. Kiehl’s Original Musk is another. If I’m only picking three, the third would have to be Serge Lutens’ Fleurs d’Oranger. And I could probably forgo wearing Shalimar entirely if I knew I could still smell it regularly, stick to Kiehl’s during the day and bust out the Lutens for hot dates and lazy summer evenings. So there you have it; my holy trifecta. It’s fully possible that all of my other dalliances are just aborted attempts to recreate Moe’s Fracas Effect. The problem with that kind of thinking behind Moe’s Fracas Effect is that it seems to be contingent upon the concept of One and Only. If you go back to Shalimar two weeks later, it just doesn’t count. And I very rarely wear the same perfume for more than a week straight.
I know this is the reason that I have failed to associate myself exclusively with any one particular scent, as opposed to a simple belief that The One does not exist for me. I have not forgotten the way I was claimed by the deep nostalgic undertow of Shalimar, the slow, steady way that Kiehl’s Original Musk grew on me, and the way I was smitten at first sniff by Fleurs d’Oranger and spent the next month desperately plotting a way to have it. It’s just all been so… labored. The appeal of Moe’s Fracas Effect was that it was ordained by someone other than her, almost at random, and all the factors came together by chance. I forget that it was for me and not her that this chance effect was meaningful, and that she doesn’t even wear Fracas anymore. This thing I want isn’t something that anyone else particularly has, or at least has in the way that I would like to have it. This thing being, what now, identity?
I think it’s high time I went to bed.
“Watch later tonight. When the lights go on, they scatter like cockroaches.” I shiver at the way PJ draws out the syllables in that last word. From my vantage point in the raised DJ booth, I can see how it might be an appropriate metaphor. I think of the sick feeling it used to give me in my old apartment when I woke up in the middle of the night for a glass of water and turned on the light only to see what seemed like hundreds of the scaly vermin waddling their fat stoic little bodies across the countertop, the oven range, the floor, and disappear. A righteous human disgust made unpleasant only by the accompanying suck of terror at catching what hides in the corners in the act of not caring about you. Then I think of the moment in the nights when the lights switch on, exposing pores, smeared makeup, stretch marks, basic imperfections that the black-lit darkness smooths and sculpts into the impossible aquarium perfection found only in subterranean places. The way we all walk in those ridiculous stilt-like shoes, like our hips are disjointed from the rest of our bodies; the way that might look if someone were doing it fast; scurrying for a safe crack to hide from the light.
“This never stops being surreal. It doesn’t matter how long you stay. I know you’ll try to intellectualize the whole thing, it’s how you are, but you won’t be able to. There is no rationale for any of it. It’ll always keep moving out from under you.” He spreads his hands out, palms down, in the direction of the stage, where legs and hair sway, gentle as seaweed, accompanied by the grinding guitars of Marilyn Manson’s “Dope Show.” He looks at me. I look at him. I don’t know what I’m thinking; it’s all visceral recognition, the kind you get when someone makes it impossible for you to write them off.
“Okay, I think this has gone on a little too long; people might catch on,” he says and I’m surprised, although he’s probably right. I don’t want to leave. I also don’t want to be having this conversation with him here. Something about standing in the DJ booth at a strip club, dressed in wisps of glow-in-the-dark violet leopard print and struggling to connect with someone in a healthy, humanish manner strikes me as both absurd and some less weighty synonym for tragic. “Oh, am I being dismissed?” I ask.
“You and the vocabulary words,” he says, laughing.
“Well. Thanks for the dialogue,” I say, and he smiles. I leave and retreat into the dressing room, feeling my little tendrils of feeling retreat back into the flesh armor I use to keep everyone else here off the important stuff.
*
“No, you come to the club where I work tonight. It’s so slow and I miss you. I need you start driving your car here right now, okay?” I’ve never seen her here before tonight, but her name is Genie and her high-pitched, strident voice is every imaginable stereotype of an asian girl talking loudly in public on her cell phone, complete with switched L and R consonants. I’m back in the dressing room alternately brushing my hair and staring at the wall. There are a bunch of us back there doing more or less the same thing: Alexis, Kiki, Keisha, and Sincere. Slow, boring Friday night. Having been dismissed from PJ duty, I have nothing better to do, but now I’m glad for it. “You come to the club right now? What you mean you can’t? You get in your car and drive here.” Then Genie’s voice picks up an added register of low-grade menace: “Oh, you little fucker! You fucker! This is good cookie, mister, good cookie, and you don’t even know what you getting, dumbass!”
Alexis catches my eye in the mirror. We raise our eyebrows at each other. “Is she for real?” Alexis mouths. I nod at her like, I think so. When I look over at Keisha, she’s smiling into her eyeshadow palette. Kiki’s got a hand to her forehead and the strained expression of someone holding on to their composure by a thread. Only Sincere is doing a good job of pretending she’s not listening to this, but she probably actually isn‘t.
“Look, dumbass, what I tell you when I meet you and you don’t know how to do pussy-eating? I tell you I show you how and you do pussy-eating okay now. I teach you fucking, before you don’t even know. You get another heart attack now I take away this good cookie. You fat and bald and you already have one heart attack. I give you another one, fucker!” I can’t help it, I start laughing out loud and can’t stop. Alexis plasters both hands over her mouth, shoulders shaking helplessly. Sincere looks up from an In Touch magazine and her eyes go wide. That pushes all of us over the edge. We are howling like monkeys.
“I may be stripper but I am no stupid. The pussy, it come with me when I leave you sorry fat bald ass, fucker. I know things. I know about art. That was my ex who sell that painting at garage sale, dumbass. He don’t know what it was, he don’t know who I am. And I need sewing machine. Go to Wal-Mart and get sewing machine for me, sewing machine’s cheap. I gave that one to my teacher. She had no sewing machine so I have her borrow. Dumbass, just go to Wal-Mart! Not like sewing machine going to break your house!”
“Oh my God,” Alexis yelps between spasms of laughter. Kiki puts her head down on the counter, moaning. I can hardly breathe and my stomach hurts and it feels good, like something I needed tonight.
*
“What are you thinking about?” asked PJ. I was looking at his three gray eyelashes and mentally turning them into something far more profound than they actually were.
“Just looking.” Pause. “What are you thinking about?”
“Just looking.”
He bent down and kissed my left nipple so cinematically I was sure he knew I was watching this and thinking it was beautiful. “Okay, I’m leaving in five minutes. Unless you want to kick me out now,” he said.
“I think I like the company,” I said, burying my face in the pillow. I stretched out next to him and he spooned me, head on my shoulder, hand artfully arranged around my waist. It felt so good I toyed with the idea of kicking him out right then, before I had the dangerous chance to get used to it. I listened to him breathe for awhile, feeling my heartbeat slow down and my thoughts fade out into a lulling static.
“All right, I have to get out of here,” he said. “Places to see, people to do.”
Yuck, I thought. He got up and put his shirt on. I turned my face to the wall. “Are you letting me out or am I letting myself out?” I got up and put a big shirt on over my underwear, and we walked out of my apartment, down the stairs, half-blinded in the hazy morning sun. I wasn’t ready for it to be morning yet. On the doorstep, my half-naked self half-obscured by the door, we kissed. PJ smiled at me. I smiled back. “See you next week?” he asked and I nodded. I shut the door right as he was looking back to see if I was watching him go. I slitted my eyes against the hollow darkness of the hallway.
“This is good cookie, mister,” I whispered to myself as I walked back up the stairs.
“Andy would bicycle across town in the rain to bring you/ candy and John would buy the gown for you to wear to the/ prom with Tom the astronomer who’d name a star for you/ but I’m the luckiest guy on the Lower East Side/ cause I’ve got wheels and you want to go for a ride”
–From “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” Magnetic Fields
It could be said that one of the major reasons I have never gotten my driver’s license is because there have always been people around to do the driving for me. And by people, I mean boys. These boys weren’t my boyfriends, they were other boys, boys who were content just to have company as they glided over the roads in the most satisfyingly corporeal proof of adulthood imaginable. I don’t know why I never wanted a piece of this for my own, or why I equated the cars of boys with freedom when I was not the one doing the driving. But ever since I was finally old enough for my parents to allow me to get into the cars of my peers, I have been an avid passenger: all rapt eyes and enthusiasm, even when we weren’t really going anywhere. The same could be said for these not-my-boyfriends and their company. I wanted the sensation without the commitment. And the times that I have been able to obtain that have been among some of the happiest and most terrifying moments in my life.
First came Josh, in high school. He drove me to school (or, often, not) every morning in a secondhand white-and-wood-panel Wagoneer like the very privilege of owning a car was a dare from the universe to drive it as fast as he could. I wasn’t scared. Josh was an honor student. He had a mix tape that we used specifically for driving called “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.” This was my first exposure to bands like Archers of Loaf, Man or… Astroman?, Stereolab, and Shudder to Think. I had a copy of it to listen to at home, but it only seemed to work its indie rock magic when we were going somewhere: the mall, the lake, High Rocks, some faraway diner. I have always thought that music was best experienced in someone else’s fast car; I still do. The freedom of being able to get Josh (who never needed much coaxing) to drive somewhere other than school was freedom as pure and absolute as I have ever known it. As Ntozake Shange would say, “WE WAZ GROWN. WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN.”
Eric was a Jersey boy, a pragmatic Virgo in an avant-garde prog band who made my acquaintance when he walked up to the coffee shop table where I was sitting with my college girlfriends and asked us if we wanted to go smoke some weed. From that point on, he and his car were mine, all mine. He’d drive into the city from Jersey at the drop of a hat, get me stoned, and play bootleg tapes of bands whose names I wouldn’t be able to remember even if I’d been sober. Eric was wise to my specific form of crack: he knew I just liked to ride, didn’t matter where. So he’d just drive anywhere. Sometimes we would go to his band’s practice space and I would lie on the carpet while they played, feeling the music’s vibrations through the floor, and it was almost as good as riding. We lost contact for a year or so and then I heard that he died in a car crash. This news reverberated deeply: I’d often experienced such passive ecstasy in his car that I’d thought if I died, it would be a good way to go, with the stereo up and the windows down. But I’d never thought it would actually happen, not to me or to him.
By the time Derek made his big move, my affinity for the cars of boys I was not necessarily going to even kiss must have been notorious, because he knew all about it already. He waited until he had a vintage navy-blue Benz in his driveway before beginning his campaign of phone calls and flowers left on the steps of my job. In the end, all he really had to do was let me see it. As soon as I was situated inside this beautiful beast with the seatbelt buckled firmly across my chest, Derek demonstrated the sound system by blasting Ink and Dagger so loud that I couldn’t even hear my own protests as he drove wildly over the bridge and into New Jersey in the space of about three minutes. This was a trip that should have taken at least ten. I almost pissed myself. It didn’t help when he started screaming over the music, “I’m Batman and you’re Vicky Vale!” I was grateful that I made it home to slam my front door in his face. Later I learned that he had been flush in the middle of a bona fide psychotic episode. Later still, I would get into a different car with him and hold his hand that wasn’t on the steering wheel. Later than even that, I would understand that a passenger was probably the last thing Derek needed, in his car or otherwise.
Bader drove me out to Ocean City one afternoon in October with the sun setting spectacularly beyond the bridge. I was wearing a fuzzy white sweater. My boyfriend did not understand why I would do a thing like this to him, even though Bader was just a friend. He wasn’t just a friend, really. At least, he didn’t want to be. I didn’t care. It was shortly after September 11th and I felt this painful but irresistible pressure to live my life the way it was meant to be lived: the edges blurred, as though glimpsed through a passenger’s seat window. My boyfriend drove me all over the city, wherever I wanted, on his Vespa, and it should have been enough. But it wasn’t. I needed Ocean City, too. Mostly because it was such a luxuriantly long drive. To the amazement of probably all parties involved, I didn’t cheat on my boyfriend that night. But the damage to that relationship had been done. My boyfriend knew all about me after that; he knew I’d get into a car with anyone regardless of where they were going.
PJ was the last of my great platonic chauffeurs. I’m not quite sure where I get off calling him platonic, either, except that he was always someone else’s and therefore not to be taken seriously. He had one of those special cards that police give to their friends to keep them out of trouble and put a lot of faith into this thing. PJ was like that generally; prone to discarding reason for superstition. You couldn’t convince him that the reason police stopped people in the first place was because they were already driving dangerously. I didn’t like this, but I liked the way it felt when he drove like we were in a video game, like the road might suddenly drop out from beneath us and his SUV would just rise into the sky like a shiny black bird. It was like we were eighteen even though we were both much older. Something about the combination of his recklessness and the fact that he was so pretty that he turned everything around himself into a movie soothed me. I knew how these things went; I did not have to worry about permanence. All I had to do was go along for the ride.
I’m not sure whether to be wistful or relieved that there hasn’t been a solid boy-with-car situation in my life for a few years now. My last boyfriend had one, but he doesn’t like to drive and lacks, mercifully, that romantic outlaw quality that makes for what I used to consider a good driver. If he is any evidence, it would seem that I am ready to slow down a little and take in the scenery from a more stable point of reference. By my own rules, though, boyfriends don’t count for this sort of thing. The boy has to be a not-my-boyfriend, has to be willing to work without return, and the conversation has to be tense and hormonal. And the simple fact is that unless I want to take up with someone much younger than myself, these boys have all grown up. Which makes me think that it is high time I grew up myself.
My risks have already been considerable, if prosaic enough. It’s worth noting that I have never found these risks more dangerous than the one I would take by learning how to drive myself. I worry about being my own kind of bad driver–a nervous, joyless one who slows down at approaching curves in the road and keeps the music low so they can concentrate. I worry that even this won’t save me from accidents, disaster, death. I worry that I will be one of those people who never truly feels comfortable behind the wheel. But mostly, I worry about my potential passengers. How will I ever keep them happy?
One look at his face and I knew the whole story before it even happened, but that’s not the kind of thing you can just walk up and say to some boy sitting in a coffee shop. What freaked my twenty-one year-old mind was that he felt the same way. When after months of stilted, difficult conversation we finally made the journey from my front porch to my twin bed, he said, “I have dreams about you.” And I knew exactly what he meant because of course I had dreams about him too. Looking back, only a complete dummy or the extremely arrogant would believe that things would just be that easy; that our commingled dreams would simply manifest themselves in our current reality as seamlessly as a bird landing on the tree branch its been thinking about all winter. But that’s not right, either–too cerebral, without allowances made for that mushy-headed side effect of constant, obsessive sex.
Back then I had this little blue plaid jumper that had once been part of someone else’s school uniform. It was a kid’s size 12. Let’s just say that I was always sure to wear nice underwear when I put it on with my black Doc Martens and stepped out into a spring so full of soft-focus life that I was petrified at the thought it would end. Had I been more Bridgitte Bardot than Jean Seberg, some stranger on the street would probably have called me a whore and put a stop to the dress much sooner. As it was, the draft felt good and my man had these big hands that would fit over my butt cheeks like they were baseballs every time I wore it. Plus, I was fairly certain that the world would end at any moment and in that case, I wanted to go out fucking. This certainty became more and more pathological as spring turned into summer. By July, I was as brittle as a cicada husk and the only time I felt safe was when I was snuggled against H’s enormous chest.
But listen, the spring will make anyone crazy. There’s a week every year, right when the city’s tame little treelets break into a wild froth of sperm-smelling white blossoms, that you start seeing dead baby birds on the sidewalk if you’re looking for them. Here’s the gentle sun making filigree of the cement through the flowers, here’s that sweet warm breeze tickling your legs, here’s the whisper-quiet rustling of new promises–oh, and down there? A fluffy little gray and yellow casualty, crushed by its own meager weight after a fall from a tree barely bigger than a grown man. That spring, I felt like the bird and the flowers and the sky as well as myself in a slutty school uniform dress trailing on legs shaky from all this shit behind a man who seemed, with his stooped shoulders and Brothers Grimm plaid, to be the only terra firma I’d ever known. And, well, we all know the one about the bird and the sidewalk.
All this has less to do with love and more to do with the excruciatingly beautiful torture-by-sweetness that is Provence Sante’s Tilleul Eau de Toilette. It’s all right there in the bottle: the dried-honey brittleness of hay, the startling lewdness of a lot of flowers blooming at the same time, the tender wafty kiss of a miniskirt draft, the comfortingly sad promise of the old story being told exactly as it was and exactly how it was always going to be. And thank God I found a new perfume to not wear in honor of my upcoming twenty-seventh birthday, upon which I am giving up tragedy forever.
Illustration from Stories and Fables: Childcraft #2: The How and Why Library. Maaaan, I was raised on this shit and had forgotten about it until just now. The next time I’m in my parents’ house, I’m taking all of them back with me.
Filed under: Drugs, Nostalgia, Perfume | Tags: Betsey Johnson, boys, Guerlain
I put on this old Betsey Johnson dress I’d bought secondhand and worn to a New Years’ party or two because he was coming straight to my house from the airport. It was black stretchy velvet, long sleeved and high necked and swirly-skirted with a sober crocheted lace collar, buttoned up the chest by what seemed like a hundred tiny pearls. I loved this dress but I never expected anyone else to, particularly not a boy. It was more 1992-mall-goth than I normally felt comfortable being in public; perhaps a little too close to home. I wore black tights and my Doc Martens and sprayed myself all over with Samsara, which seemed to strike the same chord as my dress. This was last October.
Anyway, the boy came home and I gave him chocolate croissants and a backrub because he’d had the presence of mind to say, “wow” when I opened my door in my inappropriate party dress. It was too late to go anywhere fancy or even anywhere gross; he’d come in on a late flight from I think L.A. The dress was purely for him, equal parts tribute and test. This boy was crazy. I knew that. Everybody knew that. Years ago he’d given me what he’d called an engagement present that involved a random pair of not-new socks, a red light bulb, an extension cord, a skateboard catalog, a heavy brass paper clip, and a paperback novel based on the film “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” I had not been particularly receptive then, but whatever slow-acting voodoo he had infused into this gift apparently decided to work three years later. He didn’t seem crazy to me anymore, but maybe that was because he’d voodooed me and I’d always been fluent in Crazese to begin with.
So it was October and my emotions were doing the same thing the foliage was: going out in a blaze of glory. This boy made me unbelievably happy, like whatever I was doing at any given moment was the best possible thing in the world for a female human being to be doing. We spent hours upon hours Practicing Restraint from sex, which is what we did the night he came home from L.A. Practiced Restraint, that is. Practicing Restraint feels a lot like doing ecstasy when you do it for a long time, like weeks of near-constant contact, and don’t give in. It’s excruciatingly pleasant. I think we thought we’d invented some new kind of drug or something.
Samsara is a Sanskrit word that means the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, used with a negative connotation by those seeking nirvana, or the end of all that. Finding the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth about as excruciatingly pleasant and frustrating and wild as Practicing Restraint with my sleepy-eyed nutcase, the two concepts are forever entwined in my mind as one in the same. Along with, of course, the perfume by the same name and my black velvet party dress.
Samsara smells like sandalwood and ylang ylang while managing, for all its strength, to convey a murky softness that speaks of dark bars, lingering kisses, and assorted existential aches and pains. This boy disappeared without a trace or word of explanation shortly after I met his parents and we made Thanksgiving plans. Restraint was Practiced until the last. You’d think this would make me hate the perfume I wore for him, but I don’t. It just sort of reminds me to hope that wherever he is, he’s okay. It sounds callous to suggest that I might need this perfume as such a reminder, but such is samsara.
