Today's Smell

 

Smell memories are powerful memories. A burning scented punk has sent me down the rabbit hole.

 

Someone a bit of time ago gave us some incense. Today a slowly burning stick sits in a glass bottle in near our oven.  Don’t know why on this snowy day I felt like lighting incense but I did. Scented smoke has filled my kitchen with memories. Inhaling the fragrant scent, I am transported to another town and another time, a half century gone.  With the smoke gently rising I find myself on the boardwalk of a Jersey seaside town.  

 

On an afternoon in one particular summer in the mid-1970s half afraid of what might happen if I am accidently spied going inside (by my parents or their friends), I dart through door of the Birdcage head shop. An outpost of the counterculture it sits in the 700 block of the boardwalk in Ocean City. Blacklights line the room. Day-Glo pictures of Hendrix and Joplin each bending back in a sonic primal scream of guitar and voice shine otherworldly. 

 

Music blares out. Huge speakers hung in the corners of store boom with the sounds of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Muddy Waters, King Crimson and the Rolling Stones.  Music is all to us good middle-class revolutionaries. 

 

On one wall are displayed the bootleg records with their exorbitant prices clearly marked. The first really important bootleg, The Great White Wonder showing off what Dylan and the Band had accomplished in that basement in West Saugerties, New York, is front and center. You Can Trust Your Car to the Man Who Wears the Star the first great Springsteen bootleg sits next to it. The sonic quality of both are terrible but the words and music are canon.

 

Next to the bootlegs are the books and pamphlets.  Organic Highs sold for a quarter.  The forty-page stapled together tract advises that soaking morning-glory seeds will render a liquid producing hallucinations. Ground fresh nutmeg is also touted for an LSD like high when stuffed into gelatin capsules and swallowed. Monday Night Class by Stephen Gaskin is there talking about mind expansion.  Classics like the Anarchist’s Cookbook and The Doors of Perception are carefully wedged in too. Some odd used Avon paperback copies of Mother Night and God Bless You Mr. Rosewater rest against the bottom of the rack. And Rolling Stone issue 98 is for sale.

 

Nearby a glass case contains jewelry made up of leather thongs running through holes drilled in colored stones. As I look into that case, I can hear that line from Joni Mitchell’s song Cactus Tree. She knows of the jewelry of which I speak. The lyric goes,

 

There's a man who's been out sailing

In a decade full of dreams

And he takes her to a schooner

And he treats her like a queen

Bearing beads from California

With their amber stones and green.

 

Behind this case hang leather goods. Belts and purses with swirly patterns are on display; I can afford exactly none of them. (Summer boardwalk work doesn’t pay much and my money goes into buying used paperbacks to read on the beach.) Most belts bear geometric designs that are pale copies of the patterns used in Islamic art.  Some are coyly anarchic, their

borders marked with a repeating pattern of marijuana leaves. Headbands hang there as do risqué (for the day) t-shirts. The infamous Coca Cola rip off tee with Cocaine spelled in that iconic cola font stands out. Nobody in their right mind would wear that t-shirt for it just screams, “Give me a cavity search please.”

 

But I have digressed into visual memories and I have not even really clarified what took me mentally to this place.  How you knew you were in a head shop was the smell when you walked in.  Always, and I mean always, there was incense burning in small statue of Buddha right by the door just like the stick burning in my kitchen.  The scent of the Birdcage is very specific.  In my mind the best description I can come up with is that it smelled liked the purest of pure spring water. And yes, the snaking smoke off the burning stick blended with the smell of patchouli and weed coming off the other patrons creating a mélange of scent that was very specific to that time and that place. The scent of the incense burning here today is close enough to that constantly burning stick in the Birdcage’s Buddha to unlock such strong memories of one particular place in time.

 

Scent memories are powerful and can transport us anywhere. I close with these three quotes on the power of the olfactory.

 

“Odors have a power of persuasion stronger than that of words, appearances, emotions, or will. The persuasive power of an odor cannot be fended off, it enters into us like breath into our lungs, it fills us up, imbues us totally. There is no remedy for it.” ― Patrick Süskind

 

“Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air--moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh--felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time.” -Tom Robbins

 

“The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.” ― Jean Cocteau