For whatever reasons (discretion, embarrassment, etc.), I had very mixed feelings about including all of this in the book, but I thought it through and finally decided to put it in, and I went for a run, and the first thing I saw once I got out along the river was a woman with her arms raised as she gathered her hair into a ponytail with a scrunchie, exposing her armpits, which I took to be an unmistakable sign that including these anecdotes about my dad and the stuffed orangutan was absolutely the right thing to do.
I’ve had an armpit fetish since I was a boy, and I think its origin was this Modigliani painting of a recumbent woman with one arm lifted behind her head that was hung up on the wall in my childhood bedroom in Jersey City. There’s the visual allure…the, uh…the, uh, iconography of that exemplary gesture of sexual surrender, of surrender to one’s own pleasure…and then there’s just the whole erotics, the appreciation, the connoisseurship…I’m trying to think of a word here that doesn’t make it seem overly perverse…the fondness for the animal smells of the human body. In Elizabethan times, lovers would stay in touch by exchanging peeled apples which had been soaked in their armpit sweat before they parted company. Napoleon famously wrote Josephine from one of his military campaigns, “I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.” And Anton Chekhov wrote, “I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.” Well, I don’t understand anything about Chekhov, but I can only assume he meant that approvingly. And I was watching the reality show Couples Therapy on VH1 the other night, and there was this whole poolside conversation between Jenna Jameson and her boyfriend, MMA-trainer John Wood, about men’s fixations on women’s armpits.
So, it’s not just me.
There was a woman at my gym who would work out and get very sweaty, and I loved the way she smelled. It reminded me a little of Wite-Out, and also that smell when you open the flip top of a can of new tennis balls…I didn’t really run into her that frequently, but this one day I walked into the gym and there she was working out…on a tricep machine, I think…and I really, really wanted to get on that machine as soon as she was done with it…while her scent was still in the air. I don’t know if that sounds creepy or not, but I’m just being honest here, I’m really being, like, totally nonfictional. Anyhow…she finishes up, and she’s about to clean the seat and the, uh…the arm pads, or whatever you call them…
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I’m really gross,” she said, an assertion which obviously only served to inflame me further.
And, in order to prevent her from wiping it down with one of those antiseptic towelettes, I threw myself across the apparatus, as one would shield a tree from a chain saw.
And one of those idiotic trainers came over, one of those little meatballs with a clipboard, and he asked her if she wanted to lodge a complaint with the manager, etc., etc.
And out the corner of my eye, I noticed this guy in his mid-sixties whom I recognized immediately as the psychiatrist I’d gone to a few times after my prostate cancer surgery. He was working out sort of perfunctorily with a set of very light kettlebells. I hadn’t seen him for years, and I had no idea he even belonged to my gym. He’s a gaunt, pockmarked man with a gold incisor, who, when I used to see him in his office (on Eleventh and University), always wore very beautiful, very elegant bespoke suits. So it was more than a little jarring to see him so incongruously casual in baggy red nylon shorts and a Jiffy Lube T-shirt. Seeing him again made me remember the first thing I told him in that initial visit — a story about how, when I was in the second grade, at James F. Murray No. 38 Elementary School on Stegman Parkway back in Jersey City, I swindled some color-blind classmate I was supposed to be sharing crayons with out of all the brightly colored ones, giving him basically just the browns and the blacks, because I knew he couldn’t really tell the difference. And I confided to the psychiatrist that ever since then I’ve thought of myself as an almost pathologically selfish, sort of monstrous human being. And I remember him just sitting there and not saying anything at all in response, and then I told him that since my surgery, I’ve had a very disturbing recurrent nightmare in which surgical robots go wild and stalk the countryside, tearing out men’s prostates. And I remember him staring down at his notes, and saying that my dream reminded him of Vincent Bugliosi’s description of members of the Manson Family (specifically Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Tex Watson) as “heartless, bloodthirsty robots.” And then he finally looked up at me and said, “You don’t really strike me as either a bloodthirsty robot or a monstrous human being.”
So I turned to this trainer with the clipboard and — in the way that one sometimes distractedly blurts out something from a reverie that doesn’t quite but, in a weird way, almost perfectly suits present circumstances — said, “I’m not a robot, I’m a human being,” a fact which, by the way, I’m not particularly proud of. But that whole can of worms — cyborgs, prosthetics, DIY synthetic biology, techno-sodomy, posthumanism, whether one’s aggregate self, one’s “mind,” can be downloaded — is something that I’m planning on dealing with ad nauseam in the excerpts I’ll be reading tonight. For now, if you’re wondering what fragrances a withdrawn fifty-eight-year-old man, who still confides primarily in stuffed animals, action figures, and his mother, wears: my three current scents are: for writing, Jo Malone Vetyver; for the gym, L’Eau de Jatamansi by L’Artisan Parfumeur; and for going out at night (e.g., to the mall), Bois d’Arménie by Guerlain.
I don’t know if you guys can smell me from way over there… (The PANDA EXPRESS WORKER and the SBARRO WORKER are ignoring all this completely.)
MARK
We (the Imaginary Intern and I) used to talk a lot about an olfactory art, some kind of postlinguistic, pheromonal medium that would be infinitely more nuanced than language (and without language’s representational deficiencies), a purely molecular syntax freed from all the associative patterns and encoded, ideological biases of language, that could produce the revelatory sensations of art by exciting chemosensory neurons instead of the “mind,” that could jettison all the incumbent imperial narratives and finally get to something really nonfictional. And we both tremendously admired Helen Keller’s militantly pro-olfactory polemic “Smell, the Fallen Angel” in her book The World I Live In. And we both agreed that if all the highly anticipated virtual- and augmented-reality technologies turn out to be just based on sight and sound, they’ll be complete dead ends. And we both thought that Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or Beat Bobby Flay, which are predicated upon olfaction and gustation, are more sophisticated shows epistemologically than, say, something like Bill Moyers Journal or Charlie Rose, which are based on archaic discursive practices. And we both felt very strongly — for a completely different reason (basically because Baylisascaris procyonis worms and Schistosoma mansoni flukes are infinitely more interesting characters than advertising executives or a police commissioner) — that Monsters Inside Me (the Animal Planet documentary series about parasites) is a better show than probably anything else on television.