/We Are Mammals Under Our Thin Skins
And there is more to memory than a Madeleine
By Chelsea G. Summers
I wish I had scratch-and-sniff remembrances for all my favorite lovers. I imagine thin cards, slick and white and vaguely clinical. A swift scratch on the rough patch and the sudden call to mind of this one, his roasty rosy odor; or that one, her perfume of strawberry and algae; or that one, his strange but not unpleasant dusty must. I’d love to collect them all, and in the dark of night summon them at will.
The first time that I thought I fell in love, I was twenty, an impressionable age. My boyfriend, this young guitar player who bobbed in the attitudinal ether somewhere between punk and hippie, had this tie-dye t-shirt that was ripped and held together by safety pins, sort of Sid Vicious on a lesbian dairy collective. This guy wasn’t large with the personal hygiene. He bathed when it mattered, and he felt passionately about his hair gel, but his pits and his tender bits had a tendency towards the funk.
Which, quite frankly, I liked. I liked the smell of his body, toasty and sharp, and I’d spend long lingering moments with my nose buried as close to his arm pit as I could without feeling self-conscious. I’d sneak-read Joy of Sex at thirteen; I justified my nose-moling by remembering how the book said that the French referred to body odor as cassoulet. If it was good enough for the French, it was good enough for me. (Years later, waiting tables at the Café Shelburne, I’d dismayingly discover that cassoulet meant stew.)
This guy and I, young and thus immortal, we smoked. We’d fuck for hours, punctuating our inelegant copulation with copious cigarettes. By morning, the bedroom would reek of sex and smoke, a weird red-smell conflagration of tang and bleach and musk and greige and sharp. I loved it. If I could have wrapped my arms around it and corralled it into a trunk to save for later, I would have. Instead, I just commandeered the boy’s shirt. For weeks I wrapped it around a pillow and slept with it, until finally it smelled more like me and less like him, and I just wore it, which was also cool.
Scent has much to do with chemistry. We are mammals under our thin skins, and there is more to memory than a Madeleine.
Pheromones play a part, of course, but there is always that intangible, that inescapable, that unutterable. That thing that makes us meet a person and feel that strange disjoint, that moment when our brains go all ticka-ticka-tick and we think, “I should be attracted to this person. And yet.” Or, more interestingly, when we ought not to be but are. There are people whose smells have compelled me to disrobe them right then and there, to strip them down to their soft fleshy nubs like bananas and, like bananas, devour them whole.
One was this hippie whose name I forget. He had been to a Dead show, and he walked into the campus newspaper office tripping balls. He was throwing off this crazy smell that I could almost see like those squiggly stink lines in comic books. I would have rolled in it like a dog in dead deer. I wanted to throw him down right there and fuck him on the light table for god and the Sports Editor and all the Student Union to see. His b.o. was banging and his eyes were big as Alan Ginsburg’s ten thousand thoughts; I shelved my desire for the moment, and when we finally fucked, his trip was well over, and his scent had returned to pallid normalcy. Not all the shake weed and patchouli in the world was going to return him to his tweaked-out demigod status.
I liked the smell of his body, toasty and sharp...
Which, quite frankly, I liked. I liked the smell of his body, toasty and sharp, and I’d spend long lingering moments with my nose buried as close to his arm pit as I could without feeling self-conscious. I’d sneak-read Joy of Sex at thirteen; I justified my nose-moling by remembering how the book said that the French referred to body odor as cassoulet. If it was good enough for the French, it was good enough for me. (Years later, waiting tables at the Café Shelburne, I’d dismayingly discover that cassoulet meant stew.)
This guy and I, young and thus immortal, we smoked. We’d fuck for hours, punctuating our inelegant copulation with copious cigarettes. By morning, the bedroom would reek of sex and smoke, a weird red-smell conflagration of tang and bleach and musk and greige and sharp. I loved it. If I could have wrapped my arms around it and corralled it into a trunk to save for later, I would have. Instead, I just commandeered the boy’s shirt. For weeks I wrapped it around a pillow and slept with it, until finally it smelled more like me and less like him, and I just wore it, which was also cool.
Scent has much to do with chemistry. We are mammals under our thin skins, and there is more to memory than a Madeleine.
Pheromones play a part, of course, but there is always that intangible, that inescapable, that unutterable. That thing that makes us meet a person and feel that strange disjoint, that moment when our brains go all ticka-ticka-tick and we think, “I should be attracted to this person. And yet.” Or, more interestingly, when we ought not to be but are. There are people whose smells have compelled me to disrobe them right then and there, to strip them down to their soft fleshy nubs like bananas and, like bananas, devour them whole.
One was this hippie whose name I forget. He had been to a Dead show, and he walked into the campus newspaper office tripping balls. He was throwing off this crazy smell that I could almost see like those squiggly stink lines in comic books. I would have rolled in it like a dog in dead deer. I wanted to throw him down right there and fuck him on the light table for god and the Sports Editor and all the Student Union to see. His b.o. was banging and his eyes were big as Alan Ginsburg’s ten thousand thoughts; I shelved my desire for the moment, and when we finally fucked, his trip was well over, and his scent had returned to pallid normalcy. Not all the shake weed and patchouli in the world was going to return him to his tweaked-out demigod status.
I wonder how much of this olfactory Spanish fly is seeded uncomfortably in childhood. I don’t remember the book, but I recall this scene in some ‘70s novel where a bunch of kids put on a production of Hamlet. The director tells Hamlet to think about the scene when he confronts Gertrude in her chamber as clouded with that smell of when you walk in to your parents’ room after they just had sex, and your mom hangs with that weird, Oedipussy smell. Growing up, I knew that smell well. It felt like a magnet, pushing me in opposite directions as it pulled me close. Maybe we only grow up when we make that stench with someone else, someone strange and then, our bodies slick with his or her smell, suddenly not.
If I’ve welcomed some men into my tender pink for the way they smelled, I have also kicked them out for the same reason. Each one made me gag with his scent; it wasn’t his fault. It was faulty chemistry. Our smells were incompatible, or at least his was for me. How tragic when these smelly affairs are so one-sided. I had a boyfriend who, like African lover of the whore Bijoux of Anaïs Nin’s invention, would beg me not to bathe. I didn’t smell enough, he said. He wanted to lave in my lemon-and-sea-water scent. He wanted me fetid, fecund, filthy. I can respect that, even if it was hard for me to give him my full effulgent flower. I may be too American and squeaky.
The mushroomy bloom of cock, the animal tang of taint, the pointy curl of pit, the feral metal of blood, the awful offal of shit. The sea-salt chemical of condoms, the fusty white of fellatio, the sugar and oil of lube. Fucking is a smorgasbord of scent. One of my exes hardly had any discernible smell at all. His scent reminded me of the scent of maple sap in the buckets we would gather in Vermont in February. I wish I could have boiled his smell and concentrated it, made it turn thick and syrupy and poured it over the slope of my breasts and belly until it puddled at my pudendum. I loved him, and I’ve no doubt that love had as much to do with the water-and-beech-tree smell of his skin as anything else.
I once fucked a guy for his cologne, but only once. He was Italian with this gorgeous, enormous Roman nose, head of David curls and a cologne smelling faintly of licorice. We’d duck out at work to smoke cigarettes, and when I leaned close for a light, I’d inhale. His cologne tripped through my lungs to land in a tight clench in my cunt. Nin has a story about a man with cologne too; only her tales of scent resonate for me. She got the smell thing down. I fucked this man until his perfume ran out, and in this respect, life imitated art. His nose, though, stayed sublime.
This morning, I woke in a pale miasma of smoke and glee. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. It fills my nose with a sharp, greige fug. I loathe it, and yet this morning, waking in that apparitional smoke cocoon, I was fucking delighted, for I woke wrapped in the transparent smell of smoke and with it the memory of kissing a man whom I’ve loved, well, forever it seems. The taste of his tongue touched with tobacco and the Marlboro Medium tea spit. The smell of him ghostling through his black cashmere coat and stupid expensive scarf. I couldn’t actually smell him, not with the winter night whipping his skin and the scotch I drank and his cigarettes, but it was there. It was there and it called primordial, atavistic, it called and it called and I answer, tight and taut and hot and slick. It called and the next morning, alone in my bed, swaddled in scent and unuttered memory, I answered.
If I’ve welcomed some men into my tender pink for the way they smelled, I have also kicked them out for the same reason. Each one made me gag with his scent; it wasn’t his fault. It was faulty chemistry. Our smells were incompatible, or at least his was for me. How tragic when these smelly affairs are so one-sided. I had a boyfriend who, like African lover of the whore Bijoux of Anaïs Nin’s invention, would beg me not to bathe. I didn’t smell enough, he said. He wanted to lave in my lemon-and-sea-water scent. He wanted me fetid, fecund, filthy. I can respect that, even if it was hard for me to give him my full effulgent flower. I may be too American and squeaky.
The mushroomy bloom of cock, the animal tang of taint, the pointy curl of pit, the feral metal of blood, the awful offal of shit. The sea-salt chemical of condoms, the fusty white of fellatio, the sugar and oil of lube. Fucking is a smorgasbord of scent. One of my exes hardly had any discernible smell at all. His scent reminded me of the scent of maple sap in the buckets we would gather in Vermont in February. I wish I could have boiled his smell and concentrated it, made it turn thick and syrupy and poured it over the slope of my breasts and belly until it puddled at my pudendum. I loved him, and I’ve no doubt that love had as much to do with the water-and-beech-tree smell of his skin as anything else.
I once fucked a guy for his cologne, but only once. He was Italian with this gorgeous, enormous Roman nose, head of David curls and a cologne smelling faintly of licorice. We’d duck out at work to smoke cigarettes, and when I leaned close for a light, I’d inhale. His cologne tripped through my lungs to land in a tight clench in my cunt. Nin has a story about a man with cologne too; only her tales of scent resonate for me. She got the smell thing down. I fucked this man until his perfume ran out, and in this respect, life imitated art. His nose, though, stayed sublime.
This morning, I woke in a pale miasma of smoke and glee. I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. It fills my nose with a sharp, greige fug. I loathe it, and yet this morning, waking in that apparitional smoke cocoon, I was fucking delighted, for I woke wrapped in the transparent smell of smoke and with it the memory of kissing a man whom I’ve loved, well, forever it seems. The taste of his tongue touched with tobacco and the Marlboro Medium tea spit. The smell of him ghostling through his black cashmere coat and stupid expensive scarf. I couldn’t actually smell him, not with the winter night whipping his skin and the scotch I drank and his cigarettes, but it was there. It was there and it called primordial, atavistic, it called and it called and I answer, tight and taut and hot and slick. It called and the next morning, alone in my bed, swaddled in scent and unuttered memory, I answered.
- 02/05/2011
