Coming To My Senses

There's a reason they don't make patchouli and cum cologne. Even if you're one of those people who enjoy the stench of patchouli (and it is your Evolution given right), the base note of sperm just brings a lot up: no, not memories, lunch; it brings a lot of lunch up. The smell hit me so hard that I almost didn't even notice the guy was cute because I was thinking  "Charles fucken Darwin, I'm gonna puke." But just as I was about to enter the bathroom, the guy noticed that my eyes had rolled back in my head. He made a disapproving grunt.

I restrained myself from saying "I'm sorry my body's instinctive repulsion to your scent offends you, but maybe if you weren't beating off in a coffeeshop bathroom and trying to hide the scent with a hippie hooker bath, I wouldn't be gagging."

And it was a good thing I restrained myself. Underneath that noxious eau-de-I-just-jizzed-in-your-toilette were some seriously sexy pheromones. Plus, as the guy walked away from me, I   noticed he had an amazing ass. But, I thought, no self-respecting gay guy would ever allowhimself to smell that rank unless he was going for a million dollars on "Survivor".

But a bisexual would. And, while I am making a generalization, it's not that I think bisexuals stink, and heteros and homos smell like lavender meringue, I'm just saying that I know a number of bisexuals who like to wear patchouli. Granted, I'd never noticed any of them REEKING of patchouli, but it was entirely possible that this cute-assed, not so-sweet smelling boy had accidentally used too much patchouli when he realized that without the patchouli, he smelled like the last two minutes of a bukakke film.

When I got done using the bathroom (and washing my hands, as the little sign ordered), I noticed that the offensive guy was sitting on a stool at the bar. Not surprisingly, he was alone.

At the time, I was living in Burlington, Vermont, the patchouli capital of the East Coast. My friends and I called it Little Berkeley. This was not a loving nickname.

I was in the middle of a game of chess with Ted The Supposedly Bisexual But Probably Just Ambiguously Straight No Matter What His Cat Says, when smelly barstool boy wafted by me again. This time, he stopped, looked over my shoulder, and proceeded to tell me where I should move my knight. I suggested a more painful location for him. Somehow this led to flirting. Flirting led to drinking. Drinking led to my loss of olfactory sense and memory. And loss of olfactory sense and memory led me to the all too familiar scenario of me in a strange bedroom with my pants around my ankles, trying to remember how many condoms I'd brought with me.

This is when my sense of smell came back.

Now, sperm in a coffeeshop is a terrible terrible smell. Particularly, if you don't like coffee. But sperm in a bedroom is perfectly acceptable. EXCEPT when you factor in the patchouli. No longer was it just the patchouli on this guy's body, but there was a pervading sense of patchouli in the room. Either he REALLY liked the smell, or he'd recently killed a bevy of dreadlocked trustafarians (rastafarian children of  millionaires).

I tried to think of a polite way to tell him that the stench of the room, while decidedly animalistic, and probably very sexy to some, was not just going to kill my erection, but also cause my curried rice to come back for an encore. This is when I noticed that the perfectly shaped, naked assdirectly in front of me, had a GIGANTIC pimple directly in the center of the left cheek. On its own, no big deal, but now I know I'm not going to be able to open my mouth without puking.

"Come on," Patchouli Boy says, "Fuck me." And then he slaps his own ass, bursting the pimple, which spurts out its money shot between his fingers.

Erection? Gone. Curried rice? In my throat. I swallow, trying to calculate the velocity I'll need to achieve in order to yank up my pants, and run out the door before Patchouli Boy can ask me where I'm going.