The Bump

The bump is less than an eighth of an inch wide, and is situated immediately above the point where his pubic hair tapers off into his shaft. He spotted it minutes ago while lying in the bath tub, drinking Diet Coke and flipping through a magazine. He’d come across a magazine ad that had induced an erection; it depicted a topless woman in a basketball court circled by indifferent mostly-unclothed male models, in a sort of mock-depiction of gang rape, the sort of thing that feminists nonsensically hold up as evidence of the evils of patriarchal society. It had taken him a moment to figure out what was being advertised. Oh, handbags. There was a handbag off in the corner, next to a particularly effeminate-looking male model’s ankle.

He examines it again, and presses it with a finger. It turns white. It’s sensitive to the touch, and hurts a little when he presses it, so isn’t that good? If it’s a wart then it wouldn’t be sensitive. Surely it’s not a wart. If it is a wart, he will have to tell Alan, and Alan will dump him, and then he will have to find another boyfriend, and if he succeeds in enticing him to bed, he will have to notify him that he has the wart, or had a wart, since by that time he will have had the wart removed with a laser or that thing that freezes them, and he will have been prescribed the appropriate anti-wart medication. Then the guy will get uncomfortable and say he has to go home, and he’ll never see the guy again. He will only be able to obtain sex through lies and deceit and anonymity, if he wants it, and he knows he will want it. Oh, wait, Alan surely already has whatever caused the wart, so maybe Alan will stay with him out of a sense of shame and obligation.

He squeezes it to see if it’s a pimple. If it’s a pimple, that’s a strange place for a pimple, but if it’s a pimple then it’s not a wart. He’d gotten pimples in strange places before, and each time he assumed that they were not pimples and he was being punished directly for his promiscuity. The first time he’d noticed one he’d called a female friend crying, and had immediately set up a doctor’s appointment. The doctor was a tired-looking woman of about sixty, who lifted his flaccid penis with her hand and could not immediately identify the offending bump. “Where is it?”

“Right here. Sort of right underneath the circumcision scar. Do you see it?”

“I still don’t see it.”

“It’s right…oh now I can’t find it. Oh there it is.”

She glanced at it skeptically and said she didn’t think it was anything to worry about, then proceeded to jam a lubricated five inch long Q-tip into his urethra to swab for gonorrhea, or syphilis, or whatever it was.

He squeezes it a little harder, and it turns from white to red. His heart is pounding. The adrenaline rush in anticipation of a roller coaster ride is more or less identical. The only difference is the shame. Whenever he reads about sexually transmitted diseases, or examines his genitals so closely that the whole package begins to look malignant and threatening, his residual Christian guilt returns. His version of Christian guilt involves less fear of God and more fear of his mother, a fear that he will for some reason have to tell her about a bump, or a discharge, or a deadly asymptomatic virus, and she will be overcome with an uncontrollable bout of homophobic rhetoric, blaming the disease on his sexual preference. His mind is flooded with a montage of nightmarish fantasies of him somehow transferring the disease to her during his weekly visit, through a mistakenly shared toothbrush, or a mouthwash bottle, or a soda can. He sees her face blistered with warts, the direct result of her gay son’s unbridled promiscuity.

When he was in ninth grade, they corralled everyone into the library and showed them a PowerPoint presentation of STD pictures so they wouldn’t have sex. It was titillating because these were the only other school-sanctioned images of frontal nudity they were allowed aside from the concentration camp footage that had induced in him a shameful halfie in fifth grade. Everyone had oohed and ahhed over the corroded, mottled vaginas and penises, but the real star of the show was a picture of a hairy male ass, spread open to reveal a cauliflower of anal warts that completely concealed the asshole. No one present had ever imagined that such horrors existed. The speaker, after pausing the accommodate for the audience’s reactions for an interminable length of time, said curtly, “This is the result of men having sex with men,” and clicked over to the next slide, which featured a comparably underwhelming lip blemish.

He towels himself off, applies anti-perspirant, turns on some music, and lies on his bed before getting dressed. He pulls his laptop off of the nightstand and begins searching for images of VD bumps for comparison. None of them look like the bump. He scans over various medical self-help websites where panicked people submit anonymous rambling questions at three in the morning. “Dear Dr. Help, I have been dating my girlfriend for a month now and I noticed a small white bump on my lower lip that disappears sometimes. What is it?” He reads typo-riddled medical advice columns of questionable authorship. Frustrated, he begins to masturbate, recalling the model sprawled on the basketball court in the magazine.

The love that lives forever

"My darling Krystle, I've had this fragrance created especially for you. I think it's as beautiful as you are. Every time you wear it, remember: I love you forever."

Imagine my excitement when I found a new bottle of this at a local pharmacy that also had a full display of Max Factor makeup from the seventies. I inquired about it and the pharmacist said that it had been sitting there since 1986...a year before I was born. He thought I was crazy when I bought it, but how could I not? I'm a huge Dynasty fan, and already have the nightmarish Linda Evans Rejuvenique facial toning system displayed proudly on my bookshelf.

It's about what I expected, meaning 80's drugstore, meaning still better than most of what is released for higher prices today. It's similar to Vanderbilt in that it's a loud, powdery vanilla rose, but what I like is the extreme muskiness of it. The composition feels to be about 50% musk, and a slightly foetid musk that they might not use anymore- it's certainly not detergent-like or clean-smelling at all.
Yes, it's gauche and cheap, but this is in keeping with the woman it's named after. I love that, before Liz Taylor kicked off the celebrity perfume trend, this fragrance based on a FICTIONAL SOAP OPERA CHARACTER was released and garnered a faithful fan base. The commercial for it is a masterpiece of cheesecloth and syrupy sentiment. Now to seek out its male counterpart, Carrington- I bet it's grim! Anyone know about the Joan Collins one put out by Revlon, called Scoundrel?

Incidentally, Krystle has much better taste on the show; it is mentioned several times that she wears Bal a Versailles, and at one point Alexis lures Blake to Rome, "bathed in Bal a Versailles," as she says, to seduce him away from Krystle.

CELEBRATE THE LOVE THAT LIVES FOREVER.

The dull throb of Giorgio

The final task in my quest to have all the 80's powerhouses in regular rotation- I already had Poison, Opium, Obsession, and Kouros- was to conquer Giorgio. Giorgio appealed to me only because of its reputation as the loudest perfume ever; the ads didn't have a trace of the elegance, sophistication, irony, or immersive fantasy of Opium or Poison, and instead painted a lifestyle of forced, loud, brash good times at the beach or in the convertible, usually involving a woman suspended in mid-laugh, as though she had been cryogenically frozen in Virginia Slims land and carted over to Giorgio without prior knowledge, her magenta-painted mouth hanging open to expose her Hollywood-white fangs in a feral distortion of a smile. It was either this woman or simply a picture of the "Extraordinary Perfume Spray" bottle looming like the 2001 monolith over a black background. Could I be this girl? I'm a six foot four, 270 lb bearded man, so it would be a challenge.
Soon enough I saw the yellow and white prison bars, so familiar to me from repeat viewings of "Troop Beverly Hills", staring back at me in TJ Maxx. I paid the $20 admission price and entered the world of Giorgio. I went back to my car and sprayed on lavishly. "Not so bad!" I thought. Pineapple, tuberose, and pool chemicals; it had that-er-"well blended" quality that I often find in cheap perfumes like Tabu, wherein the perfume seems to contain no discernable individual notes, just one big distinctive stench, the source of which can only be a giant oil drum labeled "TABU": or "GIORGIO" in a grimy factory somewhere, not, you know, "night-blooming jasmine from the fields of Grasse," or whatever. After thirty seconds I couldn't smell much but could feel a dull throb that seemed to be circling my brain-a sinus headache, I assumed. My vision also seemed slightly impaired, everything was blurring. Passersby stared at me as though I were covered in blood. It was DELIGHTFUL.
For three weeks I denied that the headaches that Giorgio caused were caused by Giorgio. I funneled allergy pills and pain relievers into my gullet on an hourly basis. I also sprayed on more Giorgio. I purchased Giorgio Red. None of these things helped. I was in a perpetually crabby mood whenever I had the Giorgio on, too. I didn't ask anyone's opinion of it because I didn't want to know what they thought. At this point in my life, it was perfectly appropriate that I was wearing a perfume that kept people away in droves, made everyone everywhere I went aware of my horrible mood, made me physically ill, cost too much for what it was, and didn't feel right with any of my clothing except for the Madonna Blond Ambition Tour tee.
I haven't been able to track down any old Giorgio for comparison but I would imagine that it would have the same effect in any vintage. As a child of the nineties, it's titillating and horrifying to me to think that the whole world smelled like this in the eighties. Everyone was experiencing that dull throb in their head all the time, everywhere they went, for an entire decade and then some. ON PURPOSE! And FOR A GREATER PRICE! Though it is now practically only found in drug stores and discounters, Giorgio was once THE snob perfume, the one that no one else had but you, or the one you wanted but couldn't afford. It was originally only available in the Giorgio boutique and by mail order, so you had to be on the inside to get it. The point of it was to advertise your nouveau-riche status by beating the whole world over the head with a toxic, lingering cloud of Californian grotesquerie. By the late eighties it was available everywhere, the top-selling perfume for years, and was worn (used, I should say, Giorgio isn't worn but used, with intent) by cliquey high school girls to terrorize their social inferiors. Its veneer of cheerfulness- pineapple! flowers! beaches!- hides a vapid, hollow, black soul and no moral center, capable of doing anything. Giorgio was cruel, exciting, and nauseating, and its success seems unthinkable today. Then it felt glamorous, now it feels like the olfactory equivalent of that scene in David Lynch's "Inland Empire" where Laura Dern is stabbed unexpectedly with a screwdriver and runs around screaming and bleeding on the Hollywood walk of fame until she collapses next to some homeless people and dies. A true classic.

We Need to Talk About White Linen

Last week I enjoyed an unusual flirtation with clean scents. I spritzed on some of the original clean fragrance, Estee Lauder's White Linen. At the time of its release it was considered a light perfume (!) meant to project a sort of detergent, white, tight-skinned Tippi Hedren blond ice queen image but by today's standards it's so heavy that it just...couldn't possibly be thought of as smelling clean. Predictably, my favorite thing about it is the sourness of the beginning, so I kept spraying on more to get that effect. By spray six I was surrounded by a blinding white force-field of aldehydes 40 feet across and must surely have smelled strange to passersby. See, this is one of the reasons I enjoy perfume so much- subverting the intentions of the perfumer in various ways and playing jokes with it- in this case over-spraying a perfume meant to broadcast cleanliness to the point of whoreish vulgarity. Of course I'm the only one that gets these jokes and to others I must just smell unpleasantly loud and outdated, but that's their fault for not making themselves aware of the history of White Linen! What else to say about White Linen...I can honestly say that I love EVERY Estee Lauder perfume, that they're so inexpensive they practically GIVE them away, yet they're all beautiful, sophisticated, complex compositions that could command much higher prices. They have staying power on skin far beyond anything else so accessible or cheap, probably because most of them were created for a different era when women weren't as afraid of smelling "overpowering" as they are now. They don't discontinue any of their perfumes, which is brave and commendable because they probably lose money for it; they know that each of those scents has a devoted following of women that have been wearing them for decades. I mean, just IMAGINE what the typical idiot girl browsing the Macy's counter looking for a tutti-frutti syrupy floral would think of Azuree or Spellbound or Alliage if they sniffed the testers: "EWW this smells so OLD and it's so STRONG I don't wanna smell OLD or STRONG and oh my god it smells MUSTY is that PATCHOULI this smells MASCULINE, GROSS! TOTALLY OLD LADY IN AN ELEVATOR! EWW WHO WOULD BUY THIS?" Imagining it just delights me to no end. That all of these gorgeous compositions completely not in keeping with the current tastes of the masses are still faithfully produced and displayed and sold at absurdly low prices with virtually no reformulations over the years is just incredible. I love you, Estee Lauder! And look, here's loathsome Gwyneth, looking smugger than ever, shilling the flanker Pure White Linen to Japanese people! I kind of like the well-bred, WASP-y mood of this commercial- it's all those D&G Light Blue ads minus the white speedo-ed Guido and sleaze factor.

We Need to Talk About Angel

It happened. I finally got arrested for driving drunk, a favored activity of virtually every Texan I know. I'm now a criminal and will be paying every cent I make to the state of Texas for the foreseeable future because of my bad luck. I'd been up to no good at a strip club called Palazio- my first visit to such an establishment- and I came upon a police barricade about two miles from my house. A cop (with no flashlight in darkest night, I might add) had attempted to wave me down and I had been looking in the wrong direction. I was cooperative and polite to a fault as I slurred and slogged through my sobriety test, they cuffed me, and I was booked for the night.
With the impending suspension of my driver's license and my uncertain future in all other areas of life, I must be productive in some small way and convince myself that I am still capable of forming coherent sentences and making the occasional astute observation. In the year since the death of my previous blog, my life has been overrun by soul-sucking modern conveniences: Facebook and iPhone. The cruelest part of Facebook: after staring at it for long enough, I become convinced that I deserve "notifications" even when I post nothing. The fleeting glue-high gratification of seeing "1 new notification" pop up on the telephone becomes a constant worry. The universal accessibility afforded by smart phones and the internet brings with it an infantile need for constant attention and personal affirmation which, in its most reductive form, amounts to the brief"so-and-so LIKES your status" notification, "So-and-so" invariably being someone you never talk to, hardly know, and don't care about. I went from writing daily to virtual illiteracy, endlessly refreshing my email while talking to people in the vague hope that a distant acquaintance would "like" my four word status update fragment about what perfume I was wearing that day. Don't you shake your head, you judgmental asshole, because we're all in the same boat. I see you on Facebook, with your "so-and-so just got tacos. Yummy!" cry-for-help status updates, attempting to fill the void and connect with some other sad sack who, if you're lucky, will both LIKE and LEAVE A COMMENT along the lines of "I like tacos too!" on your wall. You might as well have "HELP ME" blistered across your abdomen, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

It's summer, and you know what that means? I'll be wearing gigantic orientals, their sillage amplified by a quarter-inch of sweat. It's considered gauche to wear loud fragrances in summer, but I completely disagree; all the big orientals- Youth-Dew, Opium, Angel- seem positively designed for this kind of sweltering provocation. A good layer of sweat really brings out their "COME HITHER, YOU BIG MAN" qualities. Speaking of Angel, I think it might have surpassed Youth-Dew as my all-time favorite perfume. I got my star refilled at Nordstrom last week for the nice price of $45 and I've been wearing it continuously for the past week. It's just such an endlessly fascinating and disturbing fragrance, and it's impossible to categorize or understand. It was released in '92, well into the onset of what Chandler Burr calls the "anorexic oceanics of the 1990s", yet it is a throbbing, room-filling fuck-off power-woman scent in the 80's OpiumPoisonGiorgio style. It straddles the line between male and female despite being intended for and worn mainly by women; an ultra-femme pink cotton candy note is strangled to death before your eyes by a virile, throaty patchouli. It is one of the most successful perfumes in history and is available at Wal-Mart but it does not in any way comply with the American imperative to smell "clean"- in fact, it smells positively raunchy, as though body odor and sweet musky shit-stained panties were layered with rotting fruit and topped off with a post-apocalyptic stripper pole. Its advertising is counter-intuitive and designed to distract potential customers from what it ACTUALLY smells like; the packaging is light blue when the juice smells a sinister glittery brown. Sales-associates will inform dimwitted women that it smells of chocolates and sweets, when it smells of death and the infinite beyond. Ad copy refers to the "tender notes of Angel" and "memories of Thierry Mugler's childhood"; Angel wearers clearly lost their innocence LONG ago and now confront everyone they meet with the olfactory tenderness of snorting jagged shards of blue sugar glass. Angel is worn equally by conservative women (allegedly it is the signature scent of both Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton) and women of the night (numerous sources have told me of its popularity among erotic dancers). AND IT WAS A HUGE HIT! More disturbing is the nicotine-like addiction that Angel induces in the wearer, necessitating the purchase of (literally) hundreds of bizarrely named ancillary products ("Celestial Showers Gel"? "Perfuming Hair Mist"?) in an effort to preserve the scent on skin for the rest of your lifetime. The addictive part of Angel, the really good part, is that first blast of body odor and rotten fruit that fades within a few minutes, so the wearer is forced to continually reapply to get that kick. The more you wear it, the more you become anosmic to it, so you keep putting on layer upon layer upon layer, achieving a Baby Jane-like flaking pancake makeup effect and making you smell TRULY filthy, TRULY like you have been living on the streets and selling your unclean body for weeks. As Anais Reboux says to Roxane Mesquida at the beginning of Breillat's "Fat Girl", "You reek of loose morals." They have soda fountain-style REFILL STATIONS at all major department stores, for Christ's sake! I indulge in dreams of taking foot-tall Slurpee cups to Nordstrom and demanding that an effete, tittering male sales associate fill them to the brim, at gunpoint. How on earth did you get away with it, Mugler? Around the time of its release, sales associates were instructed to forcefully spray it on the arms of confused women, look directly in their trembling eyes, and tell them, mantra-like, "THIS IS A FRAGRANCE FOR A UNIQUE WOMAN. NO ONE ELSE WILL SMELL LIKE THIS. A UNIQUE, UNCOMPROMISING WOMAN WOULD WEAR THIS. IT IS UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE". I'm not kidding, this is how it became a success. They still talk like that at the department stores, too, when they find out you're an Angel fan, in the thick, lascivious tone of a depraved Madame speaking to a whorehouse patron with particularly exotic, violent, and possibly illegal sexual tastes. They'll spray you with the latest seasonal version ("Angel Soleil au Fraiche Summer Fraicheur Energizing Oil Cream" or some such nonsense, available for a limited time only) and hold your arm with their lacquered dragon talons, hissing that there are LOTS of people out there who like Angel and you needn't feel guilty or immoral for it. AND IT WAS A HUGE HIT!

One of my best friends who happens to be a mortician told me an amazing and frightening story. While preparing a corpse for its funeral, she was handed a bottle of Angel and instructed to spray it all in and around the coffin because it was the deceased's favorite scent. Angel, which already smells of death, follows its wearers TO THE GRAVE.