You Smell Good

Before it jumped the shark, Boston Legal used this line (Spader to Rhona Mitra) in place of something meaningful a boy would say to a girl. She muses that when boys are smitten they often say something really sharp like, "you smell good." Yes, they do smell good. That’s how they get you. Or at least that is what I heard on a TV show last night. A little boy had a little girl over at his house and then later when he was talking to his dad about it he said, “…she smells good,” to which his father replied, “...that’s how they get you.”

 

I remember Uncle Doug telling me that he likes waking up in the middle of the night so he can smell Lynnetta – look, I don’t make this stuff up to creep you people out. But when he told me that he didn’t have to explain to me. I get it. My wife smells good. Really good. She is clean and smells fresh and good and yummy. This is the truth: when we were dating and often even now, my wife’s breath smells like peaches. I used to tell her that but she didn’t believe me. It is still true. I should probably study why this phenomenon occurs.

 

I had a girlfriend when I was 19 years old named Ruthie Jones. A year later, while in Japan, I was in a drug store and SMELLED her. I was walking down an aisle and was so convinced she was there that I actually looked over a few aisles just to verify that I was still in Japan and that she was not there.

 

Nothing has a more mind-altering affect on humans than music. Smells, like the cherry-almond smell of lotion or the un-duplicatable smell of Prell, can make you think of something or somebody, but a song can take you somewhere. When talking to a non-drug-impaired adult about an old song they happen to hear on the radio or in a store, they usually use words like, “…this takes me right back to the back seat of the 1973 Country Squire station wagon with my brother playing head-punch...” or something like that. The emotions surrounding music are strong. The song that everyone else seems to dislike but that you rock out to probably brings you back to your bedroom, in your underwear, gazing at the mirror with a Coke bottle mic in your hand screaming the lyrics at the top of your lungs and hoping that you both would and would not get caught while dreaming of being David Lee Roth rocking out on a stage and wishing your hair were longer/chest were harrier/voice were lower/voice were higher/fame would catch on.

 

To put a finer point on it, I was whisked back to the locker room annex at Westwood High School the other day by a rousing and too-loud version of Tommy Bolin’s Post Toastie. What caught me off guard was not the memory of the annex: the sights of the tackling dummies, locker room, powder footprints leading from the shower box, the stacked high-jump pits awaiting a different season, the team and personal record plaques posted on the walls, the orange slump-block construction, the concrete floor worn smooth by cleats, the cage filled with pads and helmets, or the navy blue Volkswagen parked in the carpark in front. It was the smells I actually smelled. I actually identified two smells. One was the smell generated by the sweat so prevalent that it could be wrung from the gray shirt worn under the shoulder pads. The other smell was the musty, sort of old smell of the equipment storage. This smell was not bad to me, but it was nostalgic. This is not the first time nor will it be the last that a song brings back many senses at once. Sight and smell seem to be triggered by sound. Interesting.