Les Schwab Tires

The minute I walk in, I’m assaulted by the smell that is not quite burning rubber, but nonetheless thick and toxic and artificial, practically a visual presence in the air. I find it hard to believe that real rubber could smell this industrial. There is an actual dark heaviness to it that is unusual, perhaps it denotes a type of human effort that was initially intellectual (I see people in lab coats), and then factory built by muscle and machines. Is it a dye that makes the tires black, or something else?

Even more disconcerting, the smell which at first seemed so toxic and invasive eventually dissipates to invisibility. The fact that it’s gone makes me wonder what’s being done to my scent receptors the longer I stay. The competing scent of popcorn in the morning doesn’t help matters, though I’ve since learned to wait until the afternoon before doing a first come, first served tire change. I ask the woman behind the counter if she notices the smell or if it just has become something she got used to over time?

Like me, she says that at first it was really obvious, but that now she can’t even smell it until she gets in her car to leave. Then, much like exiting a smoky bar, she notices the scent clinging to her hair and pretty much jumps in the shower as soon as she gets home. I feel fortunate that I only have to spend a short time here.

The Puppy House – first of a short series

It was my very first job. I wasn’t, strictly speaking, legally of an age to work. I cleaned puppy & kitten cages, and fed reptiles and birds and fish for a single summer between elementary school and junior high. I once played in the St. Bernard-sized dog house with a friend, so I imagined that the job would be great fun.

Lysol and bleach were the key components of the watery mixture in which the fake pine would assume dominance until the bleach drydown could reassert itself. The pounding sound of steaming water foaming into the cleaning bucket, the clammy feel of Playtex yellow gloves, and the large greying mildewing sponge complete my memory of the behind the scenes prepwork.

Lysol was not a cleaning substance used in our house, so I had no previous association with it, and I do not use it in my home now. Whenever I encounter it out in the world, I see the metallic cages I used it to clean, and I hear the sound of newspapers I had to tear into strips, which were placed in the clean cage as soon as it dried. Fortunately, this memory is immediately followed up by the ink-and-newsprint smell of ripping newspaper, and then by the damp, doughy, almost-not-that-unpleasant smell of puppy-urine-soaked-strips mixed with whatever moist food didn’t make it from puppy bowl to puppy stomach. Because how can you hate anything that smells like puppies?

Me-n-Ed’s Pizza

Whenever my brothers’ baseball team won an important game, the whole team would be taken to Me-n-Ed’s Pizza Parlour. The dark wood and barely windowed medieval-ish space of my memory is a far cry from their current vaulted and bright pizzeria design, but it has been a few years. When I remember walking in the door, the exciting circus smell of cotton candy is followed by the mouthwatering aroma of thin pepperoni slices, and later a blast of peppery rootbeer making wooden wind-chime sounds in an ice-filled clear or red plastic glass. The long table of rowdy kids would go through several pies and pitchers of soda in no time at all, and as the team’s unofficial mascot, I got to sit with the boys rather than my parents, who were decompressing with the other adults in the relative quiet of the far side of the restaurant.

Craving cotton candy, I once rode my bike to the restaurant on a summer weekday, but they told me that the machine was broken and I left disappointed. The fuzzy pink smell is always related to pizza for me, even now.

Simple Green

Apparently, biodegradable, non-toxic Simple Green is the hairstylist’s secret weapon in the fight against blobs of color that somehow land on one’s forehead during the course of an appointment. The soapy, minty, eucalyptol smell with echoes of Listerine transported me back to college, where we used Simple Green to rinse off the boats (Lido 14, Shields, or North American 40) after sailing them for a class, a race, or a trip to Catalina.

Subsequent waves of nostalgia followed: the greasy aroma of hamburgers and beer after the Wet Wednesday races, the tang or brackish scent of the small harbor where the boats were docked, the race we sailed in fog so dense we all took a turn as lookout on Avanti’s bow, and the times when I was greeted with a chorus of “Saaaam!”s when I finally met or rejoined the group after various absences whose purpose I can no longer remember. I confess that I bought a gallon of Simple Green years ago almost solely because it conjured up these and so many more memories, although the added bonus is that it works as well on land as it did on water.

Underground Parking Lot

Not quite dried concrete, combined with humid remnants of exhaust from all the cars and people that have been here previously. If it weren’t for the chemical smell, the close, warm air would feel luxurious, almost tropical. Since it also smells a little like certain Paris metro stations, there’s also a shiver of that thrilled excitement of being somewhere completely unexplored, with nothing to do but go forth and discover. As quotidian as the environment seems to be, it reminds me of a time when everything felt new, and so it seems to be again.

Modeling Clay

Bill found a package of old Will Vinton Studios Claymation clay in a small side table in the garage this evening. There’s a years’ old fingerprint that reminds me of a crime scene, and even though I’ve been thinking about scent and memory for a long time, I was still surprised by what came up.

One part chemical/plastic, one part earthy, one part grade-school art class, and one small part fear. It smells different when you warm it up – friendlier, but I can’t exactly say I like it, it’s more that I can’t stop smelling it.

I’d been playing around in my room with some blue modeling clay, and went out to talk to my parents about something. I’d been rubbing my eye and my mom took one look at me and freaked out, demanding that I look at her and then hustling me to my dad who took me in the powder-room for a better look. In the wall-wide mirror above the sink, I saw a dark blue bit of clay about half the size of my iris on the white of my right eye – it didn’t hurt so much as it just looked wrong. I started crying from the fear of it, but I don’t remember how exactly the situation resolved. One whiff of the clay Bill found today, and I was back staring wide-eyed at my face in the mirror, vision tunneling to the blue smudge whose irregular shape was the only thing I could see.

Microwave Popcorn

It’s usually around 3pm that the smell of microwave popcorn drifts from the “kitchen” down the hall. In every office environment I’ve worked in, someone, some time has entered the codes that yield the unmistakable odor: a plasticy, semi-burnt, definitely artificial butterish smell that is simultaneously appetizing and revolting. Different in category from movie theatre popcorn, the wafting of microwave popcorn represents the desperate for anything at all to eat triumph of expedience over care. It permeates the environment for hours—if only the taste were as powerful as its overbearing presence.