Synesthesia

A Fun Story of the Smelliest Thing that Has Ever Happened to Me

If you’ve ever spied a crazy person wandering the street and wondered, “What were they like as a child?” I know the answer because I went to grade school with a lot of them. Aberdeen, Washington where it rains over an hundred inches a year, attracts crazy people in something like the same way it funnels water into the rivers and back to the ocean. Likewise, in the same way that Aberdeen retains some of that water and transforms it into some of the biggest and most beautiful trees on Earth, it does the same thing with our nation’s schizophrenic population. Then, sometimes those crazy people have kids who are often also crazy.

When I was a child, if you asked me what percentage of people suffered from severe mental illness, I would have said probably about one-in-three but definitely not lower than one-in-four. If you grew up in Aberdeen, you would have thought the same.

This is a terrible tragedy, but the tragedy was lost on me as a child. A boy I went to school with named Nathan used to wear a monochromatic sweatsuit to school everyday. On several occasions, he had a piece of pepperoni stuck to his clothes that would remain in the same spot for several days in a row, even after its presence was noted by other students. At recess, he would wander the playground and attempt to communicate telepathically with seagulls. Sometimes, he would do his best to speak seagull. And yet another time, he attempted to play tetherball with a flock of seagulls, but then laughed uproariously that we thought he was being serious when we asked what he was doing. A girl in my grade couldn’t seem to understand that when she went to the bathroom, she was supposed to go to the girl’s bathroom and use the toilet, instead of going number two in the boy’s urinal. Which she did twice. Rumor was that when the principal went to talk to her parents about it at her house —of course, her parents couldn’t get it together enough to come to the school for an appointment— her dad answered the door naked and holding a knife then started ranting about how his cousin was Bill Clinton, so the whole town better watch out. In seventh grade, a boy named Cory —who looked like a serial killer from the 1970’s except he was thirteen and this was the late 1990’s— announced that he was a robot sent back in time from the future. For a month, he kept talking in a robot voice until he flipped out on the bus and started grabbing the breasts of a girl named Letty and had to be restrained. Some number of weeks after that he ran for class president, got up to make his speech, and spoke in robot sounds for two or three minutes at a school assembly.

There are still a lot of hard-luck cases like this in Aberdeen. I would bet that it’s even worse today since the mill shutdown. People used to say that it was common practice for the state asylums give a bus ticket marked “Aberdeen” to every patient it discharged, some relic of the time when a crazy person could easily get a job in the timber industry. Whatever the truth of those rumors, social workers tend not to last very long and I know that turnover is extremely high. A friend of mine from high school worked for child protection services for a while and it didn’t take long before she developed something like a thousand yard stare. There are problems everywhere.

All of this preamble was necessary to explain how it came to be that a kid could stink as bad as Barry Lott and not be immediately taken to the hospital. Dear Reader, were you to meet such a child today, you would assault him with a pressure washer without hesitation, wrap him up in several beach towels before he could recover, then throw him in the bed of a truck and drive him to the nearest stench hospital. You would find the idea that anyone could encounter such a smelly child and simply do nothing to be unthinkable.

To understand Barry’s stench, we must begin with an understanding of synesthesia. As defined by the dictionary, synesthesia occurs when:

“a sensation produced in one modality is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.”

Suffice it to say that Barry Lott did not smell. To reduce his… aura to such a common sense perception would be to say that atomic weapons “burn things” or that quasars are “pretty big.” Barry had a stench you could taste and cut with a knife. If he were a video game character, he would have something like a “stench buff” that would inflict horrendous damage on everything in sight. By looking at Barry in an outdoor crowd, you could deduce two things. You could tell which way the wind was blowing by the relative orientation of everyone else to Barry, and you could tell who was more compassionate than whom by how close an individual was willing to get.

His smell was not experienced with merely a nose. It was like a mist that covered your whole body. His smell was a flavor, a haze, an essence. To be near him was to partake in the Platonic Ideal of wet garbage, half-wiped asshole, sweaty feet, and a marathon runner’s end-of-race nutsack.

Naturally, in my sophomore year of high school gym, Barry Lott was my weight-lifting partner. I gave myself a big pat on the back for this act of supreme compassion but it helped a lot that I wasn’t at school the day everyone picked weight-lifting partners and was paired with Barry by default.

The other thing that you have to understand about Barry is that while his parents had some loose screws, he personally had the heart of a lion. God gave him a spirit as big as his stench. He had accepted his misfortune in life and still went out to make the best of things. This was a kid who tried out for the football team every year, even though he never got to step foot on the green and nobody wanted to sit beside him on the bench. Every year, he asked the girl he liked to prom no matter how many times she humiliatingly shot him down. Every time we lifted weights, Barry demanded to lift the same amount as me. And every time, the bar would fall on Barry’s chest the second he un-racked and I had to drag it off before it crushed his lungs.

Barry had the kind of “Little Engine that Could” attitude that made me and everyone else want to forgive him for his odor. If you think his smell was a result of not showering, you are wrong. We’d all seen him go to the gym early in the morning trying to scrub away whatever it was that caused his stench but to no avail. It was just part of him, all the time. His fighting spirit won him some surprisingly widespread feelings of compassion. It wasn’t his fault that he stunk. He couldn’t make it go away. We all tried to be kind about it. Except in one case where I don’t know that Christ himself could have mustered the compassion.

I could forgive Barry for his smell in any circumstance except when he spotted me for one rep max lifts. Laying on the bench, my nose a scant few inches away from Barry’s testicles, I think I pretty much hated Barry more than anyone else on Earth.

During other lifts, I could simply ask Barry to stand back. On max lifts, Barry rightly exclaimed it was a safety issue and drew close. On that day, Barry’s sweaty gym shorts were only a breeze away from flapping against my ears.

I dared not breathe. If I breathed, I knew that death would follow. I did not dare to attempt a lift.

“Come on man, just lift.” Barry urged, shaking the bar.

I stood up immediately, and gasped for fresh air after I walked a few paces away.

“God damn it, Barry! I just wiped that down!” I shouted.

Barry also had some kind of fungal growth along the length of his middle finger that looked like cheese-whizz except that it was pink and part of his skin. I’ve googled it before and I’ve still never seen a picture that came close. I insisted on carrying two towels with me everywhere. One for wiping down the benches after Barry was finished and one to wipe down the bar. I had a whole spray bottle of disinfectant to myself, whereas coach asked everyone else to share. I gave Barry a dose of the evil eye as I scraped the bar clean again.

“Step back, Barry. I mean it. I don’t need you standing that close.”

Barry huffed in annoyance, and I had to turn away from his dragon breath. Barry was on my last nerve, as I had recently lent him my copy of Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher and he had returned it covered in what looked like orange rust, which I later realized was some kind of discharge from his cheese-whizz finger. For the first time in my life, I’d been forced to throw away a book. Compassion is all well and good, but Barry’s odor had a certain reality that threw up too many practical issues to completely ignore.

“Just lift the bar, man!” Barry shouted, covered in sweat. His scent, like his temper, was worse when he sweat.

“Okay! But you step back! You hear me?”

Barry threw his arms to the side and took an exaggerated step backward despite having the very adult understanding my safety was more important than my revulsion. Still, he acquiesced. When I was assured he would not step forward again, I took my place under the bar. It was the first time I had ever attempted to bench two-hundred pounds, and I anticipated a struggle. I shot Barry one last look in hopes that my gaze would glue him to the ground.

I un-racked the bar and brought it down smoothly, not wanting to cheat by bouncing it off my chest. I brought it half way up… and stuck.

Not even breathing, I flexed everything I had and kept pushing upward. My elbows extended another quarter of the way up, then my arms began to tremble. It seemed the slightest breeze either way would spell success or failure.

Barry came back to stand over me, anticipating my drop. Coach Moore also rushed to stand by my side, upwind of Barry, urging me on, clipboard in his hand ready to record if I succeeded.

As I quivered there on the bench, I knew that what I needed most was one deep, powerful breath to give my lungs the fuel they needed to strengthen my arms. What I also knew was that Barry’s sweaty nuts were right over my face. I was trapped with nowhere to go and I was running out of air.

Steeling myself against the scent, I opened my mouth and inhaled… just as I saw a drop of sweat right as it fell from the tip of Barry’s nose.

The sweat drop hit me directly in the back of the throat and splashed across my tongue. All at once, I was no longer in the room. It was as if I had taken some kind of acid trip to a land where the only sound was the rumbling of Gargoyle farts, and the only sight was a noxious green fuzz that blurred all of eternity. I lived in the land of Barry’s sweaty essence… experiencing every flavor of wet garbage, un-wiped asshole, sweaty feet, and a marathon runner’s end-of-race nutsack that could be experienced by a human palate.

When I could see again, Coach Moore’s expression had turned from an enthusiastic encouragement to one of horror. He must have seen me choke on Barry’s sweat. To smell Barry was bad enough… but to have his sweat inside your mouth? To taste him? Unthinkable.

The opposite of halal. The opposite of kosher. The opposite of good.

Haram. Asur. Forbidden.

With the same strength mothers use to lift cars off their children, I threw the weight up in the air and racked it. I could have thrown it across the room in that moment. I possessed a wild strength such that I could have held my own against Captain America or the Black Panther. I stood up with only a hazy memory of how I had freed myself, too overcome by the horrible sensations within me. For I was no longer a man, I was some kind of living instrument that existed only to perceive the full horror of Barry’s sweat.

I had not realized until that moment that one of my primary psychological defenses against Barry’s odor was the thought “At least I’m not tasting it” until that beautiful ignorance was replaced by terrible knowledge.

With the confused suicidal pain of a man who has been burned half-alive by a flamethrower in wartime, I turned to Coach Moore for help no human had the power to give. He gave me the only look one man can appropriately give another in such a crisis. A look that said “Dude… just do whatever the f—k you need to do.”

So I ran.

I ran to the garbage can outside the gym and threw up until I had nothing left to throw up. Then I tried to throw up again. Vomiting left me with the mouth-feel that I had downed a shot-glass of bile and taken a suck on Barry’s nuts.

So I ran again.

I ran home.

I lived less than two blocks from the high school, over on Fourth street.

I ran past Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. I ran across Broadway. I sprinted past McDermoth Elementary school.

When I kicked open the door to my home and ran into the bathroom, I downed a three caps of Listerine and threw up in the toilet. Only then did something else rival the taste of Barry in my mouth and yet it was already too late. Barry was as part of me as much as any glass of water I have ever sipped.

Seven years, I thought, seven years is how long it takes for every cell in your body to replace itself. It has been over twenty years now and I can still taste it. The memory has outlasted the cells.

I write this story because it is something like the funniest consequence of my failing to set a boundary. I’m sure Coach Moore would have made an exception if I’d asked for someone else to spot me during one rep max lifts. Coach Moore once bought Barry a bunch of toiletries to try to help him fight the stink. I’m sure Barry would have understood. He, above all, was aware of his stench.

I take this experience as a reminder that even though some people can’t help what afflicts them, and you should still be in those people’s lives trying to help them, you don’t have to literally let the smelliest kid you have ever encountered on this planet drip his sweat into your open mouth in your most vulnerable moment. That’s both unthinking and unhelpful. When I saw Barry the next day, he was uncharacteristically embarrassed. As if I was a girl he liked and tried to kiss only to be rebuffed. I didn’t know what to say to him, either. I felt as if I had been poisoned.

I think of all these kids a lot, especially when people tell me I was unlucky or that they feel sorry for me. You shouldn’t. For all that happened, I don’t have a stench that won’t go away. I don’t have a pink cheese-whizz finger that has no medical precedent. I don’t think seagulls can talk to me. I know how to use a urinal and have no relation to Bill Clinton real or imagined. I’m not even a breast-groping robot from the future.

The thing I was most unprepared for when I left that town was that nobody would look at me and think something was wrong. The hardest thing to handle, by far, was my assumed normality. I’m a tall man who parts his hair to the side. Do you know how many businesses dinners I’ve gone to, with how many senior leaders, where the server gave me the check? Nobody looks at me and knows right off that my mom and step-dad were crazy. Nobody knows that I sometimes have panic attacks. I had the great fortune to sustain only invisible damage. And I do mean that it was fortunate because I’ve seen the alternatives.

We all have a duty to make to make the world better. To remember those who are less fortunate and help them along. To set aside our anger and our vengeance, our bloodlust and our retribution, our sense of superiority and annoyance, and remember everyone was someone’s baby once. All I’m saying is, you can do that without setting yourself on a bench, putting weights on yourself, and letting someone drip their dysfunction into your mouth.