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?

Wet Paper Towel

The smooth recycled brown ones on a roll (clunk-clunk, clunk-clunk, rrrriiip) which were a feature of my grade school existence. Mixed in with the wet pulpy, earthy scent is the promise of summer coming soon, and a faint remnant of some kind of cleanser they used on the tiles and mirrors of the 4th grade girls’ bathroom. We’d thoroughly wet the paper towels in the sink and then press them against the walls so that we could make little origami boxes, scratching a hole in the middle of the sheet before folding so that we’d have a place to blow into the finished product to inflate it. We’d hold out as long as we could, but I doubt any of those little boxes lasted more than a minute before we’d slam our hands down to pop them before going back out to recess.

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.

Guest Post: Apricot and Hopsalot

From Joanna, who has no blog, but a keen nose for detail:

“I’m not normally fond of the industrial strength air fresheners you find in many public restrooms: overly sweet, chemical floral scents that only intensify the aromas they’re designed to cover up. So when I first walked into the women’s restroom of my old neighborhood library and heard the soft hiss of the air freshener dispenser, I was unprepared for the immediate rush of nostalgia and longing I felt. It smelled sort of like a cheap, chemical-interpretation of vanilla with a very sweet, slightly fruity undertone. And then I knew: Apricot. Not the fruit, but the doll. Like all of the Strawberry Shortcake dolls, Apricot was scented; like all of the others, she smelled very sweet and artificial and nothing like the fruit she was named for.

Apricot was one of Strawberry Shortcake’s buddies. She was younger than most of the others, and she had white curly pigtails and freckles and a soft hat and a smiling, pink-cheeked pet bunny named Hopsalot, and I secretly longed to be her. I desperately wanted to be so adorable that I was irresistible, to be the child who strangers want to hug and older kids want to look after. And now, when I smell the air freshener at the library, I realize that part of me still longs to be so adorable and perfect that everyone will love me, and then everything will be okay.

And I still want curly pigtails.”

Awwww. Thanks, Joanna!

*If you’d like to send me a submission, use the titleofthisblog, no spaces between the words, at gmail.com to contact me. Thanks to dana-elizabeth for the image.

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.

Clove Cigarette

A bittersweet mixture of Knott’s Berry Farm at night, ripe with the promise of cruising, anonymous teenagers (although I was usually the “friend” in that scenario), and the disastrous Halloween party I attended in high school, when what I didn’t know about the guy I’d been giggling with in the corner all night blew up in my face, in the form of his late-arriving, angry, tear-stained girlfriend. I fled the party in shame, remorseful and angry that I wasn’t able to resolve what I felt was an innocent misunderstanding.

Today, the sweet smell begs to be inhaled deeply, even as the warning that “smoking cloves makes holes in your lungs” claxons away in my head. The mixture of youthful insouciance, anticipation, and hyperintensity is a heady one–practically worthy of reformulating as incense, except that the accompanying entwined emotions of excitement and remorse aren’t really a combination I’d willingly seek out for very long.