The Scents of a Woman

Sanctum Dust (a perfume ode)

It was only in my adult years that I started to recognize that my heightened senses were gifts. As a child and teen, I had a rich inner world filled with “daydreaming”, isolation, and imagination. I was born into “Spirituality” (the new age kind). My father was a retired aeronautical engineer turned metaphysical minister, spiritual teacher, and exorcist. 

My mother, (37 years younger than my dad), was a recently disgruntled divorce’ in a spiritual life crisis who found shelter and purpose in my dad’s church. Always having a penchant for spiritual things (and maybe a few daddy issues), she was a seeker, who with my dad, became a “healer”. She performed miraculous healings, channeled the “angel Gabriel”, and was said to “bi-locate” delivering prophetic words to those who needed it.

This was the 70’s, and my early life upbringing didn’t fall short of the stereotypes. There were sweaty nudist retreats, vegetarian food that smelled of coriander soap and gassy lentils, Nag Champa scented Yogi’s in white turbans, and long haired patchouli hippie types, all around. 

My dad led a “church” in our home. An old broken down Tutor Home, termite infested, water damaged, yet seeping of raw historical beauty with its steeply pitched roofs, half timbering, bay windows, and secret passageways. I could go on for days thinking about the glorious smells….the smell of the attic alone was a genius only God could create. 

The entire downstairs was converted into a church meeting hall. Walls and precious antique French doors, torn down and thrown aside to feature a large assembly hall.  Lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves, the star of this room was an archetype of its era. A cushy, dusty, crusty, 1970’s mustard yellow carpet. 

I remember that carpet sooo well. It’s soft under pad cradling my head as I did headstands trying to emulate my dad. My dad was the headstand champion. He would break out into headstands in the middle of the park right on the sidewalk! He was a rock. An Idol. Unmovable. Incredible. And he continued to do headstands well into his 80’s. 

My dad had a vitality within him I didn't quite understand but I just knew I wanted to be like him. I had supposed he’d learned it from the Kundalini Yogis who rented the church space for their classes. So at five years old I’d lurk around and spy, sitting on the steps peering into the room with binocular vision. Listening to the hymns and chants, and wafting in the smoke that filled the hallway from the incense they’d burn. They had something. And I wanted it. 

One day, they invited me in to practice with them. Half stunned, I ritualistically took off my shoes and socks, stuffed my socks in the mouth of my sneakers,  and set them neatly outside the entrance to the room. Surely I had been in that room barefoot before, but the awe of the invitation made me acutely aware of every sensation on my exposed feet. 

I remember the texture of the sun damaged decomposing carpet beneath me, crunching and falling apart as the imprint of my tiny feet compressed the yellow fabric. It’s powdered remanence sticking in between my sweaty toes. 

Everyone was arranging their blankets to form a circle when a beautiful glowing lady, whose name I don’t remember or was too outrageous for a five year old to comprehend, introduced herself by putting both hands over her heart. 

“I’m Devi Gurumukhishkanastava” or something like that. She then motioned me to come sit next to her by softly patting the blanket beside hers.

So I tiptoed gently as if the crunching carpet would bellow over the delicate chant music. Then, forgetting my caution in the excitement, I plopped down clumsily on the blanket next to hers. “Criss cross applesauce”

Oooooh how the puff of air that was displaced by the gravity when I sat, punched me in the nose. 

The smell!!! 

Incense, essential oils, burnt resin. Mixed with the scent of freshly washed cotton, the carrot juice on the glowing lady’s breath, the arm pit of the skinny sickly man across from me, the smell of butter, cheese, sour yogurt and mushrooms, wafting from someone’s feet…., The chant music started to sound cacophonous, itchy and irritating like prickly five o’clock shadow beard torture against my skin. 

It was too much!!!!! 

A good thing suddenly felt overwhelming and my eyes started to well up as the corners of my lips started to pulse downwards. 

Sensory overload. 

I ran out of there and hid in my dark secret spot before anyone would notice a tear. I heard them laughing in the distance, remarking about how cute I was, and someone clamoring “ and did you see her little feet!? Adorable!” I looked down at my feet as my eyes adjusted to the darkness only to remember my shoes were still missing from them. Ugh. “What if I step on a spider, or worse what if a COCKROACH crawls up my leg”! Suddenly my secret place didn’t feel so safe anymore so I slowly turned the glass knob on the door, opening it so that it didn’t creek, then ran stealth mode through the church kitchen and out the back door. 

My secret place was the coolest thing ever. It was a secret closet stairwell that was originally used in the early 1900’s as a servants passageway between the kitchen and upstairs living quarters. This would assure that the lower servants in the hierarchy would remain unseen during dinner parties or when company was over.

Since we were far from having servants, or dinner parties, my dad had hung a closet rod inside and used it to hang his outdoor jackets. There was a shelf above with a plethora of camping equipment, old tools and cardboard boxes with church pamphlets and brochures of his spiritual counseling services and courses. 

My secret place smelled of old weathered jackets stuffed with goose down, waterlogged cardboard, clammy metal, Sanka coffee in styrofoam cups, copy machine toner, and cockroaches. Yes. Cockroaches have a smell. 

But, aside from the cockroaches, for a time, my secret place was my favorite thing in that whole house. 

Ok ok before I move on, I’m sure you’re wondering….what do cockroaches smell like? 

Cockroaches have a smell that’s hard to describe. It’s slightly sulfuric and it bites the back of your throat as you breathe it in. 

It smells of hardened yellow pus and neglected bed sore bedding from a senior living facility. It also smells of stale water from a guppy pond. But mostly, they smell heavily of pepper. Black pepper. Musty and sharp. 

I hated cockroaches. They terrified me. The tears I would shed over that fear. That is, until a little later in my childhood, when my half brother from my mom’s prior marriage, wisely and cruelly forced me into a form of exposure therapy. 

It was a regular night ritual to go after dinner swimming in our pool at the next home we lived in. The only problem was, as soon as the sun went down, our pool patio became an oasis for gigantic peppered, swampy, bed sore scented cockroaches. 

Dodging those suckers on the steps down to the pool was like playing a game of frogger. And because of my extra sensitivity to crawly things around my feet due to the yellow carpet yogi incident, I’d hitchhike a ride on my oldest brother. Clinging to his arms and using his feet as stilts. 

As soon as the last plate was cleared, my brothers would say “last one in, is a rotten egg”! And all three of them would race to the pool and fling themselves in yelling “caaaannnonnn ball!!!’

One evening, my oldest brother picked me up and swung me on his back “piggyback style letting my other brothers run ahead. “You know”, he said, “you know you’re bigger than them right?. You know you could just step on them.  Like this …  “Stomp splat squish squirt”. He ogre-ly rocked back and forth, stepping on the DOLLAR sized cockroaches BAREFOOT!, as if he was making wine from them. Maniacally, he laughed at my screams and squirms and even threatened to put me down so that I could have a squish. But seeing my true discomfort, he quieted his performance and endearingly said “ok, ok”, and gently set me on the shallow steps of the pool. 

I don’t know if it was the fact that I realized I WAS bigger than the cockroaches, or if it was the way I felt the tenderness of my brother's protection, but, somehow, I was healed from my phobia from that day forward.

But…. that hadn’t happened yet. 

So, until that day I would smell them. And they would haunt me. Hiding in the walls and underneath the crooked Tudor floorboards. Ghostly, dark shadows that relished in the downward flip of a light switch. They tormented me! Like an evil oppression from some sleep paralysis demon or an insidious monitoring spirit. 

Ahhh the spirits. We had those in my house too. You can only imagine with the aforementioned description of my home and what took place in it, how easily it was nicknamed “the house on haunted hill” by my grade school friends. And aptly so. My dad was even the spitting image of Vincent Price as if the house itself weren’t enough.

Some time had gone by, and my mom and dad had split up. So the house started to feel less like a home and more like an abandoned daycare center for orphan ghosts. It wasn’t my house anymore, it was my dads. And in our absence, the house grew cold and ornery. 

There were places in the house that were more concentrated in spiritual energy than others. Some areas didn’t feel real. Illusory even. They were portals to another time, another memory or another world. Some areas felt cold no matter what the weather. Like the very back of the yellow carpeted church hall, and the old maids quarters that sat behind the kitchen at the very back of the house. I always made sure to run, not walk, through those spaces, else the goosebumps would stab my skin like knives.

It wasn’t ALL scary though.

Some rooms were more disturbing than scary. They felt noisy and chaotic, even when no one was in them. Like my dad’s office. It was as if the walls of that room had absorbed the shouts of a jealous couple. I could almost hear plates being thrown and shattered against the floors. Tears, staining the walls and peeling up the wall paper. Like the water-damaged paper itself was strained, exhausted from gripping the walls with its fear of abandonment. The office smelled of wormwood, vapor rub and burnt toast. Bitter and piercing, yeasty, camphorous, medicinal. 

Some rooms, especially the garage, were the opposite. Its walls lured me in, and I could feel them anticipating my arrival. Walking into the garage felt heavy and dense, but peaceful as though wrapped in a weighted blanket. It felt like moonwalking on the bottom floor of a ten foot deep pool. There was a dust in the air there that grabbed the moisture from your mouth as though they were secrets being collected for espionage. Whatever was in that room wanted you to keep your mouth shut. You could even hear a dull “shhhhhush” from the branches of the tree overhead, as it brushed against the roof and dropped its leaves like children it no longer wanted. 

The garage smelled of musty decay and leaky roof, soaked heavily with last year's decomposing leaves. Skunky concrete floors from oil spills and insecticide. Fresh saw dust sprinkled on old rusty tools,…. and the crowning jewel : my dad’s blue 1972 VW camper bus perfumed with vinyl and stale gas.  

The van was my sanctum Sanctorum . The holiest of holies. It became my new secret place when the old closet in the passageway stairwell overgrew with cobwebs and boxes. It was the place that filled my loneliness when I was restless in my skin and my idle hands needed something to hold them. It was the place I went to hide when the spirits of the house would talk over my thoughts. And it was the place where I found safety from something even scarier than cockroaches and interrupting spirits. People. 

Spirituality, especially the new age kind, has this supernatural ability to attract those to it that are lost. The misfits, the outcasts, the “strange and unusual”. Those who are desperate enough to try non traditional practices and those who’ve been chastised for breaking the structures of society. The thing with those types of people is that they are either genius, pioneers ahead of their time breaching outdated structures to forge new and better paths. Or, they are mentally ill, and sometimes even sociopathic viruses who don’t fit in a symbiotic system. It’s a toss up. 

There was a revolving door of “lost ones” coming in and out of that house seeking spiritual counseling services from my dad. In his counseling sessions, he’d contact “Ascended Master spirits” in a type of spirit board session (like the Ouija board) called “table tipping” where the client could ask the spirit yes or no questions about the things that plagued them. 

Some would come in with pictures and memorabilia from a loved one that had passed hoping for my father to connect them. Some just needed healing.

There was this weird one, whom we’ll call El kookooee (Spanish slang for the boogie man) who stumbled out of my dads  yeasty, bitter smelling office one day. Something about him was just off, but my dad seemed to have a real interest and fascination in him.

He stunk of cherry cough medicine, chlorine, plastic trash bags and dirty scalp.  His dishwater blond hair was tangled and cut into a Dutch boy, bowl haircut. A juxtaposed innocence to his large and overbearing stature. He was tall, burly, and big boned with pallid see-through skin and transparent teeth that overlapped each other. His speech was slow and drawn out with a slight Texas twang and his eyeballs would vibrate like pin balls when he searched for the right word to say. It was as if the pupils of his black beady eyes had leaked into his irises, like fountain pen ink on wet paper. He had this blank, predatory stare that chilled me to the core. Real cereal killer vibes. 

His presence made me queasy. His scent made me nauseous and my senses felt overloaded and on edge.  

One Sunday, while I was sitting on the stairs sloppily painting my toes with tinkerbell peel off nail polish. I heard a knocking at the door and I instantly knew that he had returned. 

He knocked on the large solid oak wood door with a force that reverberated and ricocheted off the old bay windows. It vibrated the teeth inside my mouth and flooded it with saliva that tasted of copper pennies. I could taste he was on the other side of that door. “DAAAD!” Someone’s here”, I shouted nervously.

“I’ll get it honey”, he said softly as he patted my head and walked past me confidently. 

I stood there frozen as the door opened to reveal El kookooee hovering like Frankenstein's monster, dressed in overalls and camel colored work boots. His face was clammy and sweaty from carrying a large green canvas military bag stuffed to the brim with something so heavy in it, it stretched the seams that joined the bag’s bodice with its handles. 

Without even acknowledging my dad’s greeting, he immediately locked eyes with me, caught his panting breath, and said “oh whatcha got there?”, as his large swollen fingers pointed to my nail polish bottle. 

I looked down at my bottle blankly, shaking with discomfort as if there were cockroaches crawling under my skin, unable to utter an answer. I looked back up at his bouncing beady eyes. “Whatsa matter? Cat got your tongue?” He said in a long nasally drawl. He then reached into his pocket pulling out a pack of Wrigley's doublemint gum. With shaking hands, he shimmied out a silver foil covered stick of gum and leaned into me at eye level, offering me a piece. 

“Nnnnno  no n’no thank you”, I stammered, hiding behind my dad. 

Sensing my discomfort, my dad grabbed onto his shoulder and started walking him to his office, casually conversing about B52 bombers as their voices faded in the distance.

When the coast was clear, I hightailed it out of there with heart racing, echoing in my ears and drumming in my stomach. I felt out of my body. My bare feet slapping against the hardwood floors without sensory connection to them. I couldn’t feel my feet physically, but I sensed them visually like the static on an analog tv screen looking for reception. In a sort of deja vous stupor, I ran through the kitchen and out the back door to the detached garage at the end of the property that housed my secret place. The van. 

There, I’d find sanctuary in the seats that folded out into a flatbed, making a fort with the vinyl seat covers and leftover pieces of yellow carpet from the church hall. Safe at last. 

The aromatics in my fort soothed my limbic system and slowed my heartbeat down. I’d focus on the scents of the garage to get my mind off the creepiness of El Kookooee. The aromas would tease me into inhaling deeper and slower so that I could fully distinguish all the notes I was smelling. 

Woody, earthy, dusty, chalky, animalic, sulphuric, raw, pungent, softly sweet. Though I might not have had the vocabulary to describe them then, I was learning the character of scents as they pacified me. Training and transforming my heightened senses and fine tuning my comprehension of its mysterious language. 

Though it wasn’t the last we’d see of El kookooee, for a while, there was no sign of him nor the other “lost ones” who would frequent the house. My dad and I finally seemed to adjust to the new weekends-only schedule since my mom and dads split, so I got more and more attention during my visits with him. 

Even the VW bus got more attention. In it, my dad would take me swimming at the public pool, to the beach, to get ice cream or Eskimo pies at the shop down the street, or to the Merry Go-Round at the park next to the zoo. We’d go to Miramar Station to watch the Blue Angels air shows where he’d reminisce about the “old days” as a navy pilot. We’d open up the back trunk and lay on the flat bed with our faces turned to the sky. Each of us, dreaming of another place and another time. Transported by that magical Time Machine of vinyl and stale gas, the VW bus was still my favorite place, but now, for entirely different reasons. 

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Dad’s Dust

Perfume Ode

Classification: Sweet-Woody, Earthy, Animalic

Smells Like: fresh saw dust, sweet musty decay, damp vinyl, old concrete stained with stale gas and oil from a 1970’s VW bus

Ingredients: Moroccan Cedarwood, Texas Cedarwood, Gaicwood, Frankincense, Vanilla, Black Pepper, Gas Accord (Civit, Vetiver, Lemon, Star Anis)

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