Crank Shaft (ROUND 4)
scent of the day: Chypre-Siam, by Rogue
Flower-grass leather chypre. The grass has a sweetness to it, like in Vetiver Nocturne—Nocturne, one of my all-time favorites, goes more tart, though. There is vegetal green in Chypre Siam too. But the sweetness balances out the seriousness of it.
Chypre Siam is male Mitsouko (among others like some Prins), but I do the female style more like we get in the lovely Antiquity and, to some degree, in Ambre de Cocoa. Chypre Siam is a Southeast Asian take on the chypre family. The Thai elements bring a modern feel to Western noses, who might associate such artisanal foodiness with hipsters. Instead of bergamot or lemon on top, it uses kaffir lime. Instead of centering rose and jasmine in the heart, it uses ylang-ylang. Instead of fake oakmoss or dialed-down oakmoss, this uses a big slug of the soapy-leathery real deal (at least my vintage version does). It falls second to Mousse Illuminee, in my book, both in amount of moss and personal appeal. Mousse is simpler, but it really gives that thick Irish Spring shaving foam. Plus, that is the fragrance I chose for my Dad’s funeral. My favorite among the mossy heavy hitters, though, might now be Tabac Vert—a crazy ’80s throwback that nails the ’80s better than the ’80s did.
Manny Cross is a chef and supposedly came across this idea after going into the garden to pick a lime for a curry dish. The smell of lime and jasmine reminded him of his experience smelling Coty’s original Chypre fragrance (the classic reference for a chypre), and so he wanted to recreate not so much the exact smell but the aroma that he associated with that smell, and he did so by using the Southeast Asian approach. Siam, just like Mousse Illuminee, highlights the stark difference between real oakmoss and synthetic oakmoss or just some synthetic earthy accord: the real is deeper and more realistic, and it evolves. The stark evolution is something you can see especially if you wear a synthetic on one arm and a real one on the other. In these real oakmoss hits, you see how oakmoss can have a real off-putting charm: inbuilt attraction-repulsion. What makes classic chypre so alluring is that you have that tension built in with oakmoss and then repeated in the tension between oakmoss and citrus, especially bergamot. One knock: perhaps a mild ambroxan in the base (very mild, but a foreshadow of what we get amped up in his now-mainstream releases).
Chypre Siam is suggestive of Tom Yum soup in a way, perhaps better because of its use of both basil and lemongrass than we get in Tom Yum by Prin Lomros. There’s actually Thai basil in here, too, so it’s like that po tak that I make with the lemongrass, basil, and lime. Before I blind bought this, I just knew that it was a chypre done without restriction by IFRA. I did not know completely how much of that Southeast Asian feel there would be, which I love. He did the Southeast Asian approach because otherwise his composition would be derivative. He could have used the real amount of oakmoss to recreate the Coty—that would have been good enough given the regulations today—but he still felt that it would be derivative. That’s why he added that Southeast Asian Eddie spin on paper. This is an A scent.
The basil is kind of like the oregano in Interlude Man, which otherwise, because of the myrrh, would be sweet and feminine, and it steers Siam in a more masculine direction. It also makes the scent more masculine than it would be. Otherwise, it would be more like what we see in Femme or Mitsouko. This is more like a Green Giant man: Jolly Green Giant.
Siam is the former name of Thailand, so it’s saying, in effect, Thai chypre in the title. The opening of Chypre Siam is very bright and zesty, with the lime, and the basil from the mid comes out as well after a half hour or so in the drydown to an hour. Definitely, the oakmoss pops through, and it gets more resinous. It’s almost like there is an amber resin in there of some sort in the base (labdanum is typical for chypre—labdanum plus perhaps civet?). It’s almost like a classical amber construction because you get a vanilla with the labdanum, with benzoin contributing to the vanilla. It comes off kind of gourmand—sweet grassy gourmand.
Nitro Musk and the leathery oakmoss-civet give the quintessential 1980s-style clean-dirty tension. Siam definitely shows how Manny’s chef skills transferred to perfumery. Chypre Siam is a good scent, I can say after several wearings, but two things should be said first. It’s overall not as impactful, pungent, and punchy as I thought it would be. Second, the oakmoss in particular is thinner than I thought it would be. I think it has a lot of unique character, perhaps more than the very clean character of Mousse Illuminee, but I might prefer Mousse Illuminee more. Siam has Rochas Femme drydown, but more of a soapy moss than what I experience in the ravaged reformulation of Femme.
*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.
*Added some paragraphs and some 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. And yet I keep sensing that scribbling at my side. Who knows when she left.
Much more day remains. Yet the stillness is of twilight, an alien twilight with the weight of an eclipse. 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 blown sub-woofer rattling out blunt smoke, not one burst of shirtless beef (“Come get it den, nigga!”)—a resinous hush, slow-burning, has coated the block. Like children stuck whispering in the wake of a mom-boyfriend 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 on my side 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.
Oak branches scratch my gutters, another job put off. The screen door across from me, off-kilter enough years to welcome as a wind chime, creaks open and claps against the frame. The mother did not shut the main door behind it. She screeched away behind the dopplering sirens. My hands were out—down and out, open as my mouth—in my driveway, helpless. She did not look at me. She screamed carotid fury, pummeling the steering wheel. And then the house stood there, porch sagged like the blow-up pool, as if in an apneic slumber marked by the occasional stuttering gasp.
Georgie peeks out from the flea bush of the condemned house on the other side of their driveway, a feral flash of dirty orange. He was a runt when I found him two summers back. I had been trimming that same bush. My honest attempts to control the strays—trapping them and surrendering them, well over ten—having proven ineffective at stopping the twice-a-year flush, trimming that property—still abandoned after IBM, creampieing the aquifer with forever toxins, dipped like a deadbeat dad—was my small part in reining in the profligate chaos of a growth as obdurate as a drunk with his car keys.
Normally Georgie 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 always 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), 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 a 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 spent 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. “Not 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. The road had just been resurfaced. You could smell the bitumen even in the house. A trackless black still, pickable into little phenolic balls at the curb edge; no grass yet scattered upon it by mowers and whackers—speed was an urge I could understand. 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. The toy bucket and the pink beach shovels, radiating the haunted kinetics of a cursor left blinking mid-sentence—I shake my head at them, at where I have wound up. They seem so incongruous to where we are, a ground of dandelion grass and concrete. But what do I remember of a child’s imagination?
Thoughts have risen and have 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?
