We’re trying to get things ready at the house for the BBQ next Saturday (if you haven’t RSVP’ed yet, you’re almost too late. If you know me and you didn’t get an invitation, I must not have your email or it got caught as spam, because I invited everyone, so RSVP anyway.), and although Berta is doing a great job of spiffing things up, we still have the perennial issue with the garage entry area. Between the powder room with the diapers and the litter box for the cats, that area is expectedly a little bit more smelly than I’d like.
Combined with an interest to obtain the usual supplies to take care of that, I also noticed that I was running low on deodorant. Nothing like making the house smell nice and then not smelling very fresh myself. So I decided it was prudent to make a quick grocery run at lunch time to pick up some of these items.
While standing in the deodorant aisle looking for my usual brand, I saw the Axe brand body sprays. I had bought one of these once just to see what they were all about, and it turns out that they’re just really, really strong deodorant-smelling perfume sprays. Not really a surprise, given the commercials. But a lack of another product on the shelf led me to recall the following character-building story from my jaded youth.
I was in 7th grade. This was the year that started out on a great foot when my mom decided that my new school clothes needed to change in respect to my graduation into junior high school, and sent me to school in baby blue dress pants and button-down shirt, trusting in the idea that everyone else would be dressing the same way, not in ripped jeans and t-shirts, as was the norm in the ’80s.
I guess mishap is simply indicative of this story as a whole, showing how naive I was growing up.
In any case, the events of the story I’m trying to tell are really very short and have nothing to do with my apparel, which I thankfully quickly convinced my mom was not quite the norm for my classmates. It involves two people and a walk down the hall. One was a girl, I think her name was Tina Silvestry. She was a very tall and thin blond, and while perhaps not sitting atop the reasonably wealthy preppy kid cult that comprised the “popular” crowd at my school, she was certainly on the board of directors.
The other was a guy, Clay Stevens. If the name evokes images of the sterotypical muscle-bound meat-head who liked to shove scrawny smart kids like me into lockers, then you’ve got the right idea.
So I’ve just changed my books out of my locker for my afternoon classes, and am heading to Spanish class. I’m sure that the book load that they burden students with these days hasn’t changed for the better, but you can imagine me - only 11 at the time - trying to juggle four classes worth of tomes the size of the Gutenberg bible while walking down the hall. I wasn’t going fast, and was quickly overtaken by Tina, coming up on my right side.
I heard her say, “What’s that smell?”
At some point while reading this you might wonder “What were his parents thinking? Why didn’t they offer some counsel that would have avoided this?” I sure did afterwards. But I really don’t fault them for not being “hip”. I think it’s the classic case of parents wanting to do best for their kids, but not really being - by nature of how life works - in the know. Besides that, it’s really just not their fault.
What Tina was referring to wasn’t my own stench. No, it was my deodorant. I don’t know why I selected the Brut from the shelf of options when we went shopping. It’s just what they had, and it looked like, well, deodorant. Perhaps more so than the other brands did, at least to my inexperienced eyes. In fact, in is deodorant. It’s just the stinky perfumy kind, like Axe.
So yeah, she says, “What’s that smell?” At this point I have no idea what she’s talking about, but it’s clear that she’s directing her words toward me. That’s when Clay passed me on the left. With his light shop notebook covered in doodled boobs and AC/DC logos tucked neatly in his left hand - his only “book” - he was easily able to make a jerking thumb motion with his right hand and say, “I think it’s Owen.”
So, I’m really confused now. I stink?
Tina turned around in the hall and faced me while walking backwards, almost bending down to bridge the divide between her height and my age. Others in the crowded hallway took notice of the pretty popular girl making an example of me. It was if this surreal confrontation had finally left weeks of rehearsal and entered my reality.
She said, “Is that Brut?” Then she and Clay turned back down the hallway, laughing heartily, arm-in-arm, probably on their way to cut their class and plan their next raid of Clay’s parent’s booze cabinet.
Yeah, maybe it doesn’t seem like such a sting, but it was quite a bit humiliating to me. I switched deodorants soon after that. “Soon” only because I couldn’t really bear to tell my parents that the peer pressure had done me in. You’d think I was stronger than that, but some battles just aren’t worth fighting, and I’d learned my lesson from the baby blue suit.
“Mom, I’m out of deodorant?” “So fast?” “Yeah. Can I get something else this time?” “What’s wrong with the Brut?” “Uh…”
What amuses me most about this story is that it’s more than half a lifetime since then, and I still remember the details. Sure, I might have gotten Tina’s name wrong, but the look of her. The crowd. Her scathing emphasis on “Brut”. The overwhelming smell of the deodorant in my nostrils for the rest of the day, not having even thought of it prior to then. It makes me feel embarrassed even to think about it now. It’s so vivid and at the same time such a pointless nuance in the fabric of my life. Weird.
This story of odors also requires that I tell the story abut the strange smells at Little Caesar’s. Thankfully, these odors weren’t mine, I simply detected them. I’ve also got some yarns about my vindicating high-school years, but I’ll save those stories until after I clean the odors from my house.
