Stepping off the plane in the Vienna airport I am reminded how wonderful it is that some things never change. I could be blindfolded, drugged, flown here, and taken off the plane . . . . and instantly I would know, from the mixture of musk and expresso, that I am in the Vienna airport. To me this scent says "welcome back Bud".
I don't even know the people here . . . not a soul . . but they are almost all smiling . . . and welcoming me . . I pretend. They are glad that I'm here even though I'm leaving again in two hours. I stop . . . closing my eyes . . .and tilting my head backwards . . . I take in the scent. I stand so long with my face upturned that the Austrian Air attendant comes up and says "Sir? Are you ok?". I smile and say "yes, I'm ok, I'm only intoxicated". And with a puzzled look on her face, I will walk calmly away.
I have always heard that to get to heaven you have to first make a connection in Atlanta. I'm not sure about that, but I do know that on the plane trip to Odessa, Ukraine you must always connect through Vienna. They tell me that the Austrian officials pay tremendous sums of money to keep Odessans from building an international airport. They legally keep people from flying directly to that beautiful city on the Black Sea that Catherine the Great ordered to be built. Unfortunately, Catherine's authority did not extend into the 21st century or international air travel. But it doesn't bother me this morning . . . or really any other morning I arrive here . . .because I would prefer to make a seven hour flight and a three hour flight, rather than one ten hour flight . . . any day. The man who wouldn't let me sleep last night on the flight from Chicago says that this is a unfair traveling penalty imposed on the Ukraines by vengeful Austrians in retaliation for Hitler loosing the war. Well if it is, then it must be something similar in severity to having your parents punish you by making you finish your chocolate cake before you can go outside and play. Today . . . this moment . . . I am not being punished. I am being aroused. My memories are being stirred. I am in another world.
I have always been more sensitive to smells than other people I know. Which is not a strange thing to me, because I seem to be very different from almost every one I've ever known.
I've been told that the sense of smell is the most closely associated with memory than any of the other senses. I know this is true for me. Smells take me back to far away places, and forgotten friends, and even memories that I wish I didn't remember. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to turn off your nose, but then I wouldn't be able to smell the good either.
I have memories associated with Root Beer, Tide Detergent, PIne Sol, fresh baked bread, vicks vapor rub, cinnamon and Apple Pies. Old Charter Bourbon, hay, cotton seed, and car wax all arouse me in one way or another.
A movie character, Dr. Lecter, taught me how to construct my memory palace and I can go back inside its rooms to many different places or events at the faintest whiff of Garlic Bread or bus emissions or Old Spice Cologne. Some days seem more "scentfull" than others and on those days, I probably spend more time in the past that I do in the present.Scent of Woman was a great movie and one of my all-time favorites. I am like Al Pacino's character in at least two ways. One, I can tango and will do so with a partner as the only couple on the dance floor. And two, I can pick up a lady's fragrance from across the room. I know that to this very day, when I smell Jungle Gardenia perfume near me, I can still sense the presence of my 7th grade sweetheart, and I can still remember the first feelings of passion, as a young boy . . . having a girl slow dance close to me with "real" boobs . . . as opposed to the false ones the 6th grade girls had. I smell that perfume and I can even hear in my mind's super-high-fidelity-stereophonic-speakers, the harmonious strumming of Santo and Johnny playing their only top forty hit, Sleep Walk. My goodness . . . how many senses can one person have swirl over them at one time . . . but that night as a boy of 13 . . . I must have had every warm and fuzzy emotion a boy can have. And I can look back and remember that it was tortuous in a way. It was terrible to have all those feelings and not know what to do with them, or how to make them last. Forty years later, I still have this problem. Fortunately nature has a way of taking care of those frustrations. I think that night, dancing, may have been the first time a girl told me that my palms were clammy . . .a problem that I've had since then. But I have danced that dance over and over and over in my mind . . . at least one hundred times since.
This list of my smellories goes on and on. When I smell caramel, I remember a popcorn store in my neighborhood as a boy of seven and walking with my mother the four blocks to get there . . . she spent a dime and got me a bag and half way through the 25 cent movie later, I puked my guts out just as Vincent Price was about to strangle a beautiful lady.
To this day I avoid eating caramel and when I see it or smell it, I always think of that beautiful lady that I didn't get to see die, and having to walk home with semi-digested-sticky-caramel-coated-popcorn all over my shirt. Of course one of my biological discoveries has been the inverse relationship between scents and other scents. The smell of puke now reminds me of the smell of caramel and dying women. And people getting strangled in movies reminds me of puke.
Gardenia flowers, like the perfume are fond stimuli. They take me back to childhood and brief happiness. They make me remember lying in bed late on Saturday mornings in the spring time in my boyhood home. With no air conditioning, my bedroom window was open on any warm day and the scent wafted through my room and across my bed. I had seen a movie with Betty Davis and she had gardenias growing outside her bedroom. I learned attractiveness-through-association, from Miss Davis. I thought she was ugly, but Peter Lorrie thought she was beautiful. And I liked Peter Lorrie so therefor I liked Betty Davis. It was nice to be young and poor and a nobody, and still have something in common with a famous person. I really don't think though, that Vincent Price was a Gardenia-loving-kinda-guy. I imagine that he had deep dark blood red roses outside his window. I wonder though, what the beautiful woman he was stangling had outside her window?
The smell of a new baseball glove makes me think about rejection and being told to go away. It's a smell of sadness and melancholy. Wanting to play so badly, a boy of seven doesn't understand being told that he's not wanted on either team. I was sure that I could do good if they'd give me a chance. I'd even gotten my mother to get me a new glove to show them my earnestness. But the new glove wasn't noticed. It didn't do the trick to make me wanted. In hindsight, I can see that his mother could put a 200 dollar football helmet on Stevie Wonder, but he still couldn't have caught the ball and no one would have picked him either. Unfortunately the hindsight of a seven year old is not focused to wisdom . . but things like caramel popcorn and puke and horror movies.
Today I am older . . .and maybe wiser. And it's probably good that I didn't have a son. I'm sure that I'd have prodded him on to being a great poet, or mathematician, or writer, or dress designer, or something other than normal boyish sporting games. If I wasn't any good at it, how could I have ever taught him to be good. I was always most proud of my daughters in their financial or academic achievements rather than their sporting awards. I just never was comfortable playing softball with them. I should have told them so.
Campho Phenique always reminds me of summer days at the home of my great grandmother . . .she being the one who taught me that it is a good cure for anything that ails you if rubbed it in generous proportions on the disease or sore.
I still keep a bottle of it in my nightstand. I also have one in my travel bag, and one in my vanity, and usually a bottle in my car. I think the small bottles make excellent stocking stuffers. I would rather die or listen to Neil Diamond than even think for a moment about using Walgreen's generic for this miracle drug. It is very likely to me that Mother Teresa used it often in treating her poor people in Calcutta.Cow manure takes me back to the barn next to my great uncle's house and reminds me of hide and seek with my cousins . . .who I found out weren't really playing hide and seek with me, but were simply trying to loose me and get away from me to play by themselves. Maybe I should have tried showing them the new baseball glove that had never been used.
They were actually second or third cousins, I was told, and they were the first snobs that I ever met. My mother told me they thought they were rich because their mother had a lot of rich boyfriends, but that actually they had no more money than we did. I had overheard my mother telling my other aunt that my cousins' mom was a "loose woman". I tried so hard to understand what it meant, and for years just believed it was a woman who dated rich boyfriends. Maybe that is still what it means. My mother always had interesting explanations for why anyone had more money than us.
I was ten and my cousins made me feel so unwanted and like a such a loser that for most of my junior high and high school years I felt like people were trying to avoid being with me. But it also taught me to always gravitate toward the other "apparent" losers in life that I encountered and choose them to be on my team. I say apparent, because I've learned over the years that many people only appear to be losers. . . just like I appeared that way to my cousins. But in fact they aren't. They just need someone to believe in them, like my cousins wouldn't believe in me. I have many good memories of hide and seek with my leper friends from elementary school. I think I would have probably even chose Stevie Wonder to be on my team.
The scent of the salty ocean air reminds me of times in the 6th grade playing at my uncle's beach cabana, north of Los Angeles. It was small . . a shack really . . . but to a 12 year old boy it was grandiose and offered me a chance to live in the lap of luxury. I was sure at the time that celebrities like Steve McQueen did this sort of thing every day . . . possibly in this very spot on the beach. . .but he was gone today . . .because (I imagined) we were there. Maybe even Betty Davis walked on that beach. Of course today will be my fourth time this year to come to the Black Sea, and I have many new memories to associate with the smell of the ocean. But the cabana will never go away when I smell the salty ocean air. Somehow though, I just can't picture Steve McQueen liking it here. He didn't seem much like a Black-Sea-kind-of-guy when he was breaking out of the Nazi concentration camp in The Great Escape.
The smell of new car leather takes me back to being a child, of only five, and being picked up by my biological father for his twice-a-decade visit. His car seemed to have been a sparkling new Cadillac that was at least a city block long. And the lady that was in the front seat with him, with the long legs, flowing blonde hair, ruby red lips, and the plush mink coat . . . well . . . she was the closest I'd ever come in my life to a movie star . . . I thought. My mother had to explain to me that she was "one" of my daddy's girlfriends. Up until that time I didn't realize that boys might have more than one. Actually, I didn't even know until that night that men had girlfriends. I thought that men had wives and boys had girlfriends. I'm sure today that she was the finest woman money could buy. She called him "honeeeeeee" in a way that drew out the long "E" sound into what sounded like she had pinched her finger in a door. I learned later in life that this is the way some people trying to make their voice sound dramatic. I thought it sounded painful and today still detest that term. The back seat had a pull down arm rest that my daddy . . . (his term for himself . . .not mine) told me was in fact a child's seat for little boys my age so that I could see out the windshield. This was why he had bought this particular car . . . (so he said) . . so that I would have my own seat. I believed him of course, just as I would have believed him if he told me the moon was made of cheese or that he loved me. Five years without a father is a long time for a boy of five. I probably wouldn't have cared even then, if I'd known he was lying . . . I just wanted him to tell me anything. All of my friends had fathers who told them things all the time, all five years of their lives.
Looking back now, I wish that if he was going to be a liar to me, that he'd at least gone on farther with the lie and written me letters telling me of why his enlistment in the French Foreign Legion . . . or anything . . .had kept him away and caused him not be able to return to America . . . and to me. I was too young to know about postmarks. If he said he was writing from Africa, I just would have believed it. It would have been much more reasonable . . . if a five year old boy can be reasonable . . . to believe that the reason he didn't take me with him, was because it wasn't safe where he was going. I wish I'd gotten a hundred letters from him full of lies about missing me and loving me. And then maybe a final letter someday, from him, pretending to be his buddy, informing me of my father's death on the battlefield in Algiers after throwing himself on a grenade to save his platoon. Instead I got no letters to remember him by. Just the memory of the smell of new car leather, and a ride in a luxury car with a seat for a child, a trip to Mooreland's Drug Store for a hamburger, a movie, a trip to Bolin's toy store and then a trip home again on the child's seat, in the long new Cadillac, bought just for me to ride on. And then a good bye as he drove off with the movie starlet and me screaming at the top of my lungs to take me with him. And so now, the new leather smell does not remind me of good things, like for instance the smell of Jungle Gardenia. . . because even though he told me everything wonderful that night, he didn't tell me that he would take me with him to where ever he was going when he left. I'm not so sure that I really wanted to go where he was going, I just wanted to know that he wanted to be with me. I used to be under the impression that if you loved someone that you wanted them to be with you. And though I'm sure he must have told me that he loved me that night, that memory is totally gone from my mind because if he had loved me he would have wanted to take me with him and us live together forever like families were supposed to do. Something - even at five - told me that I would have been more loveable for him than Zsa Zsa. At least that's what I thought at the time. I must have been wrong.
Today though, is different than that night almost fifty years ago. It's not the smell of new leather coming through my flared out nostrils. And it's not the smell of manure and the memory of being left alone in the barn, or anywhere else. I have paused for a long, long time at the exit to the gateway and I stand here just staring at all the hundreds of other passengers in the terminal and I find peace in the knowledge that some things never change.
It was worth waiting seven hours for, to step off and smell this. It was worth seven hours of flying, to be reminded of the things in life I can count on. No one is trying to get away from me here. No one is thinking of leaving me behind. Or telling me to go away. We're all just here assembled in this great terminal area being swirled and stirred together in one big pot. It's sort of a human globogumbo. Today both those cousins are bums and losers and they are not part of the ingredients. I am the one on a holiday heading for the Black Sea and now it's my turn to hide from them. I am in Vienna.
