Essence
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They didn’t smell white to me. They smelled like wet dog, burnt flesh and hair, shriveling and smoking in the sun. They smelled of dirty dishrags, and the sweat of putrefying water stewing in a moist earthen space of seeping clay and chalk. They smelled of aging milk. My father's girlfriend didn’t stink. Maybe that was the white in her. I wondered if they thought white people smelled; if they thought I did. The line moved forward; I did a left face, turning on my left heel and right toe. There was only two smells both insidious and creeping that I could recall which reminded me of white people. And not just any white people. Cyane was one of them; she had a smell, and not the CK1 that she wore, but her raw, natural warm-funk that seeped out of the pores in her skin. I thought about her then, her scent, her essence, her sex, her sweat and her hot piquant heat: how I had crawled up her side and tasted the sweet rind of her salty pheromones in the space between her meaty tits and drunk on her sex-smell like morphine. It was her personal fragrance, a signature, and it drove me mad. I loved it, craved it, and desired every bit of her. I breathed in her armpit and tasted it on my lips, feasting on it.
I left none of her untouched. I relished the sticky wetness of her muscular slit on my tongue, on my cheek, in my nostrils. The other smell was that of my father's and his girlfriend's fusty bed funk that poured out of their room and followed them down the hall to the bathroom after they were finished. It smelled as if something crawled in there and died. That smell made me sick.
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Maybe that was all it was, pheromones. Maybe, black people have a personal smell that is more insidious than white people have. Maybe, if I had grown up with black people I would be attracted to it, drawn to it like a bee is to pollen, like a bee drawn to the sticky wetness of a flower’s muscular slit. Maybe, black people are turned off by the smell of white people: a mouthful of rancid whey.
I did another left face.
Red was in front of me; he was black. He had light skin like red earth, southern dust. We had just been to breakfast. We were in a line nut to butt, heel to toe, waiting to piss.
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“Red,” I said. “Do I stink?” I was thinking about the baby oil in my clothes, on my skin, and in my hair. It made my flesh breathless and suffocated. Hot.
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“Do I smell like baby oil? Do I stink,” I said. Red turned his head to hear what I said. He stepped forward. I did the same. The line inched toward the porcelain drinking fountain in the corner like the segments of a worm expanding and contracting.
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We drank from the fountain, filling our bladders so we could piss for the urinalysis.
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I thought about the night before. I woke up at the airport with a girl next to me that wasn’t Cyane. Her over-treated hair lay over my face, moist with sweat from fucking. The room was dry and hot. I felt her breath on my chest tickling the wiry hairs around my nipple, her left arm stretched over me. I felt her clammy flesh, her breasts, and the coarse hair of her bush on my hip. An empty bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s baby oil dripped over the side of the nightstand next to an empty bottle of Apple Pucker and an ashtray full of white filtered cigarette butts. On the table were a bucket of ice and an open bottle of champagne. Champagne. That may have been the girl’s name.
“What,” he whispered.
“Do I smell like baby oil?”
“No— I don’t know.”
“Shut up,” somebody in the line whispered.
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The starched white sheets were at the end of the bed, kicked off in the middle of the night. I was insufferably hot but I didn’t care. She smelled of hair spray, whiskey and cigarettes. I didn’t care about that either. I had taken a deep breath of her, of the stale stuffy air in the hotel room and relished it. My cheeks stained with tears, glowering at the ceiling. Glacial pressure mounting in the carcass of my mind. A paroxysm of grief. Wincing I rose.
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“No talking. Shut your stupid mouths,” one of the petty officers commanded.
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Red did a left face, and then I did. When he reached the drinking fountain, he took a sip, did a left face and moved on. I did the same, each of us like wooden sentinels. I thought of a toy soldier, a Smurf soldier, stepping out of a miniature palace on some kind of antique Swedish wall clock that just struck the hour and wondered what Smurfs smelled like.
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—Get off my bulkhead!
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—Stand up straight!
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—No sleeping in ranks! Nobody gave you permission to sleep!
I had never seen so many black people before, actual black people, not brown, but black like tar, like dried pigs blood. They looked hard, sharp, and virulent. Their eyes reminded me of liquid eight balls, but inverted, wide and gleaming.
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I had wondered why they were called black people when mostly they were shades of brown like nutmeg, cloves, pumpkin spice, and black peppercorn, but even peppercorn is not black— it’s more of a dark brown. My father's girlfriend is black, or a mix of black and white. Tara. Her skin is not as dark; it ranges from a smooth milk coffee to rich amber brown, plum, and brass.
Left face.
I wondered how long we were in the little room doing circles. The room was hot. The chemical smell of synthetic carpet, of human sweat, baby oil and black people crept up my nose. I had trouble breathing packed in among all the bodies. My eyes were hot and itchy and the white lights fluoresce tunneled into my skull. My stomach turned a septic pool of the green eggs and bacon they served us at breakfast. The room began to breathe and oscillate; I thought about laying my head on Red’s shoulder. I rested an arm on the wall and wondered what would happen to me if I were to sit down and close my eyes?
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My head was panging. Why? Why? Why? I had gone into the bathroom to piss, tortured by the loss, mourning my desire. A gamut of emotion. Howling rage in the acid pit of my stomach, I sat naked, rocking on the porcelain edge of the tub, ignoring the soapy water greasing the skin of my ass, holding my feverish head, wracked by grievous sobs, retching the essence of Cyane. With wretched desire I conjured her there. Why? Why? I asked her. Why wasn’t she… why didn’t she…? Naked, she stood close to me, stroking my head. I groped, holding close her yielding flesh, my tears on her stomach and smelled her sweet Cyane seal, her sex. I remembered her feel. I remembered her cunt. Mine. Mine. Us.
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I did another left face without thinking, towed by the man in front and willed forward by the man at my rear. We were links in a chain, an invisible weight dragging us over the bottom of a river. Twisted round each other in our sweat, heat, and smell, we became less and less individuals and more like a slick organism, mindless and oozing in the corners of the small white room.
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There was no real concept of time. Nothing seemed real to me. I felt far away, belonging to another world with a different past. As I stood in the maggoty line inching forward I didn’t know who I was or where I was going, or how I got there. I went back into the space where Champagne slept in the stains of our fucking, the sheets twisted around her ankle. Face covered by the frazzled hair buried in the pillow she was clutching. Her stomach breathing. I grabbed the baby oil and came to stand over her at the end of the bed, drying the last of my tears. I could feel my face burning, mucus draining from my nose. In the mirror, my eyes were swollen and red. My breath ragged. I sniffed. Her legs and the cheeks of her ass were spread just far enough that I could see the rising cleft of her wetland, her woolly moth-eaten fuck hole. My famished, trembling eyes crawled over her, devouring. In the bleak half-light, the bone-gray tone of her flesh was marked by pale striations in the skin, the supple curve of her cheeks and the backs of her thighs slightly dimpled by cellulose. Swallowing hard, my head screaming, I climbed onto the bed and emptied what was left of the oil onto her fleshy rump, letting it drain into the cleavage of her ass, and then tossed the empty bottle on the floor. Rubbing it into her, she sleepily humped my hand, yielding up her ass, giving it to me. I possessed her.
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My mouth was dry and cottony. Stepping forward, moving closer, reaching the lukewarm water that would eventually coat my throat was all that mattered. The fountain was my only real comfort. Nothing else mattered. The outside world wasn’t real and time was a cryptic device left to fester in our minds. Blood rushed in my head, my heartbeat thumping in my ears, amalgamating with the rhythm of the heartbeat in the new animal that skirted the walls. We existed only in that tiny blank room, oozing forward, nut to butt, heel to toe, with the memory and longing for water a mantra in my head, keeping time with the flow of blood.
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