Crank Shaft (ROUND 3)
scent of the day: Ruade, by Parfum d’Empire
Ruade contends, right up there with The Night and L’Oudh, for best western oud. Instead of the Laotian oud of L’oudh (scorched rubber and medicinal leather) or the Assam oud of the Night (fecal straw and barnyard leather), Ruade uses a Vietnamese oud (fermented cheese and spicy compost)—and it shows: the oud here, as I often find with Vietnamese varieties (although there is no monolith), is like a bitter-incense cross between the fecal hay of assam and the medicinal leather of laotian (albeit with the hints of sharp green we get in Indonesian Papuan or Sri Lankan and the tobacco fruitiness of Cambodian or Thai). The main feel is closest to Assam, though—the sort of plantation assam I get in Dahn al Sham: musty mildewy moldy rope that has been in intimate proximity to barn animals.
This is the ultimate hay and leather realism fragrance. It is better than The Night (in my book). But I might not call it better objectively nor subjectively better than Tauer’s Oud: objectively it is rather simple composition comparatively, smelling largely of the plantation oud we get in Ajmal’s Dahn al Shams (albeit with a more interesting and masterful touch that really does create the barnstable experience); subjectively I find automotive and burn clutch and rubber smells more nostalgic and evocative than horse smells, which is why I go with Tauer and which is why one of my favorite Russian Adam creations is Oud Taiwan.
Narcissus tobacco hay—hay reinforced from so many directions. The Vietnamese oud adds a woody honey—the honey again something we might expect more of Cambodian or even Assam. Corticotto lifts hay to the status of rose or sandalwood, remarkable: manure with camphor glow, a clovey-cola medicinality not too far from history of Indonesia oud. I get a sense of smoke in dry down—all of it very dusty in the Corticotto style we see especially in Madegascar le Baum Vanille, which might be one of my fav Parfum d’Empires.
Ruade has more bassy body, junk in the trunk, than the Tauer but the Tauer is more interesting to me. Especially if you do not try to analyze it, Ruade is largely a straightforward barnstraw oud like Dahn al Shams. The differentiating factor is the great craft behind it and it—better than any other oud (note, not perfume) I have smelled—highlights farm shit smeared on old moldering rope, which is something a lot of perfumes claim to do but they do not do it like this.
The Dahn al Shams connection is not just in smell but in the lack of amberwoody captive molecules. L’Oudh uses ambroxan (a mild amberwood found in real ambergris) and the Night likely sneaks in nastier ones—albeit not to the ruinous degree that Gardoni did in Risk, which would have been a contender for the best Western oud were it not for the fact that he laces a huge does of various real ouds with intense, sharp synthetic amberwood elements that completely dominate not just the drydown but every stage. Ruade, however, as far as I can tell uses none of these nasty super ambers. No, instead Corticiotto uses immortelle and things like that.
Here in first five minutes this is most photorealistic fecal note of all the ouds i smelled and it captures lived in stable better than the others. A bit of cheese, a bit of phenolic bitumen and a little rubber—but the sunned hay, cowpats in there, stays for hours. Stunning but 80 percent close to Dah al Sshams extreme edition. I would not be surprised if Corticiatto used oud from Ajmal or Ajmal-like plantation in this composition, using his master touch of immortelle to raise this into artistic glory. Dhan al shams is a bit more bandaid sterility experience, which I like. Both are musty but this is a lived-in mustiness, which I like even more. Still this does show how high above its price class Dahn al Shams punches.
Ruade captures the horsiness of the shaker Bel Ami I might also say. And while I never smelled Paddock, (1) I am sure Ruade is better and (2) I cannot help but thinkign Paddock—every time I imagine it—smelling like this.
*Let's workshop this piece about the entanglement of voyeuristic desire and moral complicity, and the particular inertia that follows when both dissolve into witnessed tragedy.
*A few tweaks but they are powerful tweaks!
Crank Shaft
I have not gotten up from the curb. The ambulance had taken the body long ago. I just sit here. An officer had been squatting next to me. What more could I add? What need was there? She took my words anyway. I could smell the copper sourdough of her menstruation. That is gone. But I keep sensing her scribbling at my side. Who knows when she left.
Much more day remains. Yet the stillness is of twilight, an alien twilight. Any charge there might have been has dissipated even as the stillness refuses to end. I feel the opposite of out of breath. But I cannot seem to catch myself breathing. Not one sub-woofer rattle, not one weedwhacker—a hush of amber goo has coated the neighborhood. Like children stuck whispering in the wake of a parental spat that had dipped from screams and shattered glass into throttled taunts gushing out from the pretzeled mound of mommy on the floor (“Beat it up, nigga! Beat that asshole up!”) and made all the juicier under the Eden eyes frozen in the hallway (“Keep it open! Let em see the shit”), even the dogs next door have stopped the usual efforts to escape their minds: the chronic digging, the chronic whining and barking, all of us fight to ignore—if only for what it says about us, not just as stewards of nature but as members no less embedded than any other.
Georgie peeks out from the flea bush of the condemned house across the road, a feral flash of dirty orange. He was a runt when I found him two summers back. I had been trimming that same bush. Normally he would come right to me, going low to the ground as he sped across the street. I am the only human whose touch he will permit. He seeks it out most of the time, mewling with needs neglected in forced adulthood through these New York extremes. As if possessing enough wherewithal not only to know it would enter the light of eternal black but to try to secure a chaperon at least in the form of a memory, he seeks my hand with a crying desperation that places him in the spiritual bind between having to make biscuits and having to maintain the sleepless guard only severe infirmity could allow him to drop—this psychic rack, despite all our familiarity and despite the several times I have picked him up (carefully but assertively, as if he were a lobster or a snake), still short-circuiting his frame into a braced sidewinding walk, body cramped like toes in the peak of orgasm, contorted enough, every muscle fiber fighting itself, for me to hear, each time, the haunted-castle organ opening of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565.”
We make eye contact. Georgie looks around. I do not feel my eyebrows raise. And I note that. I note that I do not feel that way in which the world, even in tragedy, still pulls you back into the present of forgetting. He does not come to me. Despite the lack of usual traffic, he still conducts himself as if the world were full of tripwires invisible to creatures less attuned to intuition. What does he know? He slinks back into coverage. The squirrels too have stopped leaping. One on branch over the street, washed out by the high angle of the sun, watches me like a statue. What do any of them know?
Sitting here—what else would I do but sit here? The kid, my neighbor’s little boy—I saw the whole thing. It happened while I was watching the mother’s ass through the blinds. I had watched it since spring. But this was the first time through the blinds. She would wave at me in the garage during my workout. I would bite my lip and shake my head. “Jesus Christ.” That had become our thing. Every afternoon she kept in sight across the street, never wasting one bend to the wrong line of sight. “Bet that shit taste so fuckin good.” The vision of how blown out she must be, especially against how tight she kept what was visible to the public eye—for some reason, stranger still with how white her skin was, pulled hunger grunts from my throat. I had started taking off my shirt and she trimmed down to a hiking bra and dolphin shorts, sleazy numbers right out of a 70s roller rink that for all I know never existed beyond the screen.
Trash blows across the front yards here. Every morning candy wrappers and chip bags, beer cans and blunt wrappers, will appear out of nowhere. And this morning she had been bending all around to pick it up, her boy helmeting up on the sidewalk and her girl in the driveway pedaling the toddler trike. Taking care of myself would be the only thing to save a family. I did not want to waste what I had onto the floor. But I had to. It had gotten to that point. You could feel it. Calling her over would be all I needed to do. She would not need the Hennessy I tucked in the freezer for such a moment.
The boy had some room to grow into the bike. Other than getting on and off, though, he was solid. I had given the bike to him. It had been my son’s. “Oh my God. How can we ever thank you?” the mother said, staring like she had something in mind. “It’s just sitting there. So no biggie,” I said, forced by her glare to direct my eyes at the husband.
The boy had his helmet buckled and stood at the curb. I had just about emptied my fill. But his struggle to get the bike going kept pulling my focus. What I had in store would already wind up a waste. I did not want it doubly wasted. So I eased back, waiting for him to get going, frustrated that he could not get it going. There were only so many more bends warranted.
The boy—he just tipped over. He pressed down really hard. I told him, several times I did. “You gotta stand up. You gotta stand up and put your weight down on the pedal to get going.” If he had gotten going, he would have been good. He could ride. I had given him tips. And I told him to mind the cars. Cars go too fast down this street. I told them all that. They had moved here in the winter. They asked if they could borrow my shovel that first day. And the first thing I told them, seeing that they had kids, was about the cars. “No to sound alarmist but the shit has been my war for over a decade. I put out signs and they gun it like a ‘Fuck you!’”
The boy tipped over, trying to get motion. For some reason I cannot remember his name. He tipped over the wrong way. Two chains of causality—I saw them meet. I saw them meet before they met. But what could I do? Yelling would have done nothing. What time was there for that? Even if I had my pants on, what could I do?
My hand was greased with Vaseline. I saw the tire run over the worst spot. I heard the helmet pop. I wiped down my hands with paper towels. They were still greasy. I had scooped too much in my heat. I prayed at the kitchen sink. I prayed I was mistaken, the water taking forever to heat up enough to lather the dish soap. If I had really thought the prayer would have efficacy, would I still have taken this me time? Would I still have prioritized my vanity? I did not want to touch him like this if I had to touch him. But if marathon runners go on with diarrhea running down their legs—what would that have even mattered? People masturbate.
My ass hurts. My back hurts. The unreleased load has befuddled my loins like Georgie. But I must stay. I have no idea why. The squirrel has moved on. I did not see it move. Thoughts rose and dropped away in a time that feels forever despite what the sun says. I pictured myself slurping the mom, fat maternal petals meaty as tuberose smells, to make her feel good. “Make me feel good. Make me feel good.” I pictured it after the funeral, in the car—to give her some distraction. I pictured whispering “I’m gonna give you another baby” as I unload, hushing her like a baby herself with those words. The shame of such thoughts, just like the thoughts themselves—all of it keeps receding and yet I remain here.
No one has come for me. My ex-wife will not be here until tomorrow afternoon. I picture myself being here—not having eaten anything, not having taken a sip of water—when she pulls up for drop off. I picture myself, haggard looking from her point of view through the windshield, milking this somehow for my advantage—sympathy for me. But that does not suffice to explain why I stay.
I have chosen the pursuit of glory over family. Were that not foolish enough, I have chosen the most foolish glory: to try to stand, on some astral plane, alongside Nietzsche and Emerson, which requires enough truth telling to be hated while alive. I can already feel my body no longer as flexible. I train my hips, lifting the heel to keep good internal rotation. But what does that do at best but slow the inevitable. The crown of my head, ravaged now by sun, has gotten sparse and I have accepted that I must get up at night to pee. I can feel now the day when, the candle dimmed to right before the terminal sputter, my lungs will need to rest merely because of the seated struggle for air.
I have chosen addiction to my art. Who now is left at my side to tolerate my repetitions and back my tall tales? Will there be anyone even to fake like they are interested? What hand will guide me back to before the womb? My son is here. But I cannot stop working.
Thoughts about how this, my sitting here, might be performative in some way (neighbors perhaps looking out their blinds), how this might be a way to thank the universe for it not being my own son or even an offering of sorts to ensure that nothing like this ever happens to my son—those thoughts drop away each time they rise. The choppy internal stream, one busy intrusion to the next, has become more distant—like the legs of those treading water from the perspective of one sinking away from the light.
Now I am mostly empty. The deep gears I have always known to spin have stopped. I lie back. I can feel the planet’s core latched to my bones, its implacable suckle—all draw, no release. I feel one with the tree, one with the buzzing wire. Torpor like this I have never known—an absence of desire, or more like an absence that eats up all desire or thoughts or shame or what-ifs. The sun bothers my face. I have reason to get up. But how can I?
