This is about my experience at a perfume counter a couple years ago. I was just learning about perfume; I had spent many years of my life simply smelling like layers of cultivated artist-scum mingled with the smoky residue which comes from compulsive incense-burning. I am no longer a street urchin. In this decade of my life, I pretend to have class. I would never in a million years call myself poor, but I would say that I live in the sort of emotional frenzy of a person who is not used to having money every day. In fact, I have never gotten used to the sensation of having savings, or having a lot of money at once, and thus I do foolish things at the moments I do have money. I do the sort of things that gamblers, rappers, and the American poor do; because the sensation of suddenly having money is something you are not used to, you get drunk on it and spend the majority of your bank account in 24 hours, leaving yourself only twenty or thirty dollars to stretch out for a week, wondering how many ways you can inventively fry potatoes, and on the rare adventurous occasion, an unripened banana with curry powder. It was in such a state, a-flush with a weekend of Ebay sales, that I prowled to the Nordstrom perfume counter, eager to test out samples; especially one of a mens cologne heavy on citrus and sandalwood with a touch of cocoa added to the mix. Like a true plebe, I sniffed a magazine ad with one of those scented strips and fell in love with this fragrance. I wanted to simultaneously devour the strip of paper (featuring a shirtless man on a Mediterranean beach) and roll in high-thread-count cotton sheets saturated in the stuff. I was used to trolling the perfume counters and having witty conversations with aging goths, drag queens, and women who in an icy, somewhat taxidermied way were indistinguishable from drag queens. These were my people; these were lizards hoping to apply their flesh in an effective way as to appear as human. I totally GOT them. So imagine my sinking sensation when the severe Russain-looking she-male who was about to serve me was called away to serve another, and this tiny Spanish bulldog of a woman who looked like a prison warden wearing NOT A STITCH of makeup harpied in on me and barked immediately: How may I help you? What would you like to purchase today? She was really cutting to the chase. There was a balled fist of masculine energy in this little creature and I instinctively felt that I should just tell her I was browsing and wait for the she-male I preferred. But NO! I caved in. I mentioned the mens cologne I was interested in, and she marched me over to the mens cologne area, not unlike a Napoleon summoning his troops. I tell you, this woman was so tough, she reminded me of the nuns who bullied me in grade school. She rushed into the mens section with such a violence that the fey flimsy fellows behind that fragrance counter literally JERKED at her presence. They were as confounded by her as I was! She marched back and forth in what seemed like drill sergeant pajamas and forced these guys to hunt with her for the cologne. I didnt even know if I wanted it yet! I hadnt smelled anything other than the flap of paper in a magazine. I told her Id just like a sample first, and the hurricane force in this woman as she started grabbing boxes and ordering the gay guys to open a new one to use as a tester...it was stirring and horrifying. What bills did she have to pay? What commission did she need? Did she HATE her customers, so that this was a form of sadism to pressure us to buy things without thinking? Once she pressed the sample into my hand she sternly looked at me without a smile and barked, What NEXT? I felt powerless in the hurricane gale of this womans command. I racked my mind to think of any other perfumes I might like to sample, but I knew what she deep down wanted was for me to buy something immediately. Being new to perfume, but having already sampled a few I liked, I caved in for a moment and decided to impress her by rattling off the name of an amber-neroli-based scent that was out of my price range—out of most peoples price ranges. It started at 150 dollars a bottle, a very stark and sculptural bottle I might add, like a vintage Givenchy pendant or a Brancusi silhouette, and the larger sizes just blew up in price. I went for the 150-dollar one. I had enough money to survive after that. The bulldog nodded and raced through her motions in a glass case, and placed a box in an area behind the cash register. Okay. What NEXT? She was serious. She was commanding me. It was kind of like meeting a creature out of a horror movie. There was not a trace of warmth in this persons voice. She was ordering me to select my next item. Being under the drug of temporarily having money makes one feel HIGH, high as a kite. I COULD select another perfume! It was a rare sensation. Just imagine! I sprayed the sample of the mens cologne on my wrist, the one I originally wanted to test, and under this womans beady eyes, I said, Okay. Ill get this one, too. She marched right back to the mens cologne section, nearly knocking those fellas to their feet, and whipped right back to me bearing a box of Mediterranean shirtless man for my personal consumption. What NEXT? she barked. I was now at a balance of 250 dollars. I knew I could safely spend another hundred and then just starve for the week. I went through my mind to all the samples I had sniffed, and reapplied, one after another, bottle after bottle to various parts of my arms and tiny slips of blotter paper. My nose was working overtime to try to figure out what to select under this womans watchful eyes. She started spraying things in the air with me, and it was a strange ceremony, to say the least. She held a small shot glass of coffee beans to my nose and told me this would neutralize my palette and aid me in smelling each scent as a unique scent from its predecessors. She did not use such language, though. I got the strange impression that this woman didnt really work at a fragrance counter; that she was some sort of sadistic prankster who had swooped, inconspicuously into a department stores cosmetic section solely with the aim to enslave people like me; people who ultimately had never been comfortable being near large sums of money. Perhaps the truth is that I and all of the other people like this, we in some deep part of our psyches dont feel we deserve large sums of money. We throw what we do get at sensual experiences, hoping to be drugged and pleased by each one, even if deep down, we are weak, and passive, and know not what is good for us, and dwell in private vales of neglect that slowly fester into shame. I ended up selecting a perfume we BOTH agreed we liked; as if it mattered that I please this creature! As I walked away from the counter, 350 dollars lighter (truly the most expensive perfume purchase I have ever made) I felt how I had ceased to be myself; to have will; I had ceased to be able to have will in this powder-white environment with this small, rumpled, alien beast. She was the ultimate perfume sadist and I was was her slave. When I came home, still feeling perverse sensations of guilt and incomprehension, I tried to look forward to the intoxicating scents in my bag. I tore open the boxes, and realized that the one perfume I had actually come to the store to purchase wasnt even IN the bag. She had given me the wrong cologne. Truly, neither the bulldog or myself knew what we were doing.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 01:12:06 +0000
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