Thursday, September 23, 2004

Pretty Stinky

Pete and I had lunch yesterday and then went on a shooting spree in a downtown bus station.  Sadly, I failed to re-set my ISOs so most of my shots are not much worth sharing, but
this one seems good enough to keep from where I’m sitting, which is sure as hell not on that grungy bench.  The bus station has suffered for years from deferred maintenance, then from planned obsolescence, and throughout it all, from the hard use of the hard bitter people who spend time in bus terminals.  There were a lot of travellers there yesterday doing their best to get the hell out of Dodge, but there were probably just as many vagrants and homeless wandering about in widely various states of sentience and cleanliness.  Some of the darker corners of the terminal stank badly of human waste and wasted humans.  Regardless, I very much enjoyed my photo excursion to the TBT - decay and deterioration are just about my favorite things to photograph. 

Later on, though, the thing that stuck with me wasn’t the visuals, but the smells.  Bus terminal as enormous outhouse.  And this in turn reminded me of a story or two:

I was reminded of an incident that happened to me when I was on the bus not too long ago.  The seat next to me is almost always one of the last to get taken and I therefore usually have a nice long time to wonder who will sit beside me.  This particular morning I was next to an empty seat, as usual, and, in a strange twist of fate, I didn’t even notice when she got on and strode over next to me.  The first that I noticed her, she was planting her shapely butt next to mine.  I looked up from my notebook and smiled courteously; she flashed an imperious glance over me and almost sneered as she looked away again.  She could pull it off, too - tall, built, blonde, and expensively dressed.  It was clear immediately that I was totally outclassed; our merely being on the same bus together was no evidence of my parity with her.  I went back to my writing.  Then a wave washed slowly over me - a wave of warm raunch, a stench, a biological stink.  Without looking up I evaluated the situation.  There was no mistaking what I was smelling, and though I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, I had my suspicions.  Within a few minutes I smelled it again and my suspicions were confirmed.  She shifted slightly on our bench, her new stylish shoes shuffling a fraction of an inch on the gritty floor of the bus, her upper thighs working in tiny increments.  The smell got worse, then went away, only to return again in a cycle that repeated several times.  I didn’t move my head but I wrenched my eyes to the left and checked her out.  She was an ice queen all right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t blowing some of the nastiest farts I’d endured in a long, long time. 

And, as olfaction is the sense most tied to memory, I was in turn reminded:

I worked at one time in a small administrative office under the direction of the most beautiful boss I’ve ever had.  She was tall and shapely, with a pert upturned nose and large deep eyes, long fingers, long legs.  She’d done some modelling while in college and still carried herself like a style professional.  She was smart, too, and funny, and quite good at her job.  She worked very hard and to this day I hold her in the highest respect. 

She strove to maintain a smiling attitude but I learned, over time, to read her real mood in a number of ways: how she closed her office door, or how she said her name as she answered the telephone, or even how she walked down our short hallway.  She successfully maintained a constancy of affect, a regular style of acting and moving, with coolness and elegance, but tiny subtle changes in her behavior provided significant clues to her state of mind and the conditions prevailing in the workplace. 

It was easy to identify the simple moods - elation, anger, frustration, sorrow.  She had some medical issues that caused her significant discomfort on occasion; I learned to distinguish her corporeal pain from her corporate irritation. 

But the most important hint had to do with how she left our shared unisex bathroom.  If she walked out like a normal human woman, I usually didn’t even notice.  But if the door swung open slowly and she emerged after a dramatic pause, head high and brow lowered as if she were walking a 7th Avenue runway in an evening gown with a Bobbi Brown book balanced on her head, her gaze serene and regal and focused on an imaginary horizon, so lovely and composed that any natural man would stammer and stare in silent admiration, I knew immediately one critical fact: that bathroom badly needed to air out. 

MORAL: You can be as pretty as you like, but you just can’t gussy up your gas.