Man Smells

by

Peter Valentyne

I hopped on the M11 this morning right into a blind man’s snuff box. After finding a single seat on the sunnier side, I did what most mass transit riding somnambulists do and pulled out my phone and began scrolling through my morning emails; Old Navy Card Member Exclusive: $5 leggings, Mayfair Carpet Tiles Labor Day Clearance, Grubhub Up to 35% Off local Restaurants, Facebook: Chocolate Waters added a new post…When someone I’d not seen got on and passed me in the aisle smelling like beauty personified. “Wow! What was that scent?”, my whole body enthused. I fear I began to visibly sniff, (my inhaling a mini-inquisition of it’s own), as my mind rifled through it’s catalogue of cross-pollinated odors. Unsure if the perpetrator had been a man or a woman, I was free to imagine myself traversing the city in a similarly splendiferous alchemical cloud. If whoever they were were still on the bus at 82nd street, I was determined to follow my nose straight to the source and ask the bearer whatever was that intoxicating (cliche I know) perfume or cologne they were wearing. One could imagine that this was what angel wings betrothed to faint cedar and fresh gardenia blossoms must smell like, a scent that could recalibrate the soul and reinvigorate the weariest spirit. As I was contemplating my somewhat gutsy scenario of identification, other smells began to intrude. Across from me on the left, taking up 2 seats was a disheveled worn-looking man who had just unwrapped a meat sandwich from it’s silver sleeve and released from it’s clammy cave an aggressive stink of wet dog and greasy onions that blared through the body of the bus and assaulted my nose as if my entire face had been shoved against a dirty dog’s damp rear end. “How can he eat that?” I quietly beseeched, as though I might actually become vicariously ill via an obnoxious airborne stench. Think second-hand smoke! Do smells carry germs on their tiny invisible backs like atomic particles? I thought of changing seats as I subtly sniffed my shirt to see if the stink had begun to permeate the fabric. Where had my angelic gardenia and cedar smell gone? It was being drowned out by this filthy little man deigning to eat his revoltingly greasy breakfast mystery-meat-on-a-stale-roll-from-some-squalid-Greek-deli sandwich. I tried not to picture him pulling it from his crotch or having had it tucked beneath his sweaty armpit before climbing aboard the M11 to contaminate us all. Suddenly I couldn’t escape the greater reality that my nose had over-thrown the hierarchy of my perceptions, usurping it’s precedence in the pecking order of my body’s own multi-sensory GPS.

That’s when I left my body and began to smell each passenger without leaving my seat. It was like flying in a dream, only I was traveling simply by steering via the snaking stream of my mindful inhalation. I found I could easily go north, south, east, and west by simply following each recognition that flooded my nostrils. I could tell what my nose was looking at without benefit of any actual image before my eyes. There was the twenty six year old male hustler with poppers in the pocket of his Wrangler brand faded blue jeans, a cold cologne diluted by sweat, he just having smoked his third cigarette before boarding, a faint salty, last night’s gizz smell that was barely a yellow shadow on his T. 

The Chinese lady with the little girl who’d obviously come from the dry cleaners and was letting the girl chew on a piece of cheap chocolate to keep her from humming. The lady had chop suey on her breath and a mothball odor emanating from her cotton knit handbag which was a hand-me-down from her dead mother. She had just that morning painted her daughter’s toe nails with a dime-store quality lacquer. Pink, I think.

The elderly couple towards the back of the bus that smelled exactly the same, both sharing that unmistakable “old man” smell. He had a prevalent denture odor and she had on a sweater that had the faintest scent of rose perfume. On further inspection, the old man’s socks were the chief culprit of the fetid aroma that practically drowned out his wife’s own floral capitulation. 

I decided to turn my nose on myself. What evidence existed totally out in the open that would reveal my own present journey? Before I could self-examine to see what I might ascertain purely with my nose…I smelled the sadness of a 63 year old man.

September 2nd, 2019