A Good Nose

I graduated 'sin laude' from university. Most of my classmates entered straight 9-5 jobs. I drove across the USA with my friend Andy and a coed named Carole. Two months later I returned to Boston. America was in a recession. A banking personnel director said that I had a stutter. He was right. I didn't get the job, but my gay friend Bruce knew of a position at Filene's Department Store as a perfumer.

"I don't know anything about scents." I wore Old Spice.

"Doesn't matter." Bruce was connected in the gay world. We went to baseball games together. He had a thing for Bernie Carbo of the Red Sox. Bruce hoped that he was queer.

The manager of Perfumers' Workshop hired me on sight. Pay was $200/week plus commission. I mixed fragrant oils for old ladies searching a cheaper version of Chanel # 5. We had the combination in our playbook. The boss talked about sending me to New York.

"The Big Apple." Bruce was excited by this prospect. He liked back rooms and dirty sex. New York was infamous for its loose lust.

I failed the final test.

IE sleep with the boss.

Bob fired me the next day and my career has an olfactory engineer came to an end. My good nose went to waste, although the entrails of scents haunted every inhalation. Peaches reminding me on an old girlfriend. Cinnamon of my grandmother's kitchen. Burnt tree of a fire that my older brother set on Easter Morning. The conflagration covered half of Chickatawbut Hill. We fought the blazes with hoses.

Great fun.

But not Singapore.

That straits enclave is notoriously the most unsexy city in Asia. The women work from 8-8. Out of the office they spend two hours at the shopping mall. Dinner is rice balls. That ain't no life, then again Singapore is a city where it is against the law to not wash your hands after urination.

Fine for violation $200 Singapore.

Worst is that the government of that city/state has hired people to smell the hands of its citizens to insure that the masses are following this edict. I could have gotten a job with Singapore, except I'm no coprophiliac or piss lover.

I like flowers and the smell of my son as he sleeps.

Mam too.

She's Fenway's mom.

And a woman you love always smells good.