August.
This newsletter has changed formatting on account of MailChimp swallowing Tinyletter a la Jonah and the whale. I suppose I could wax poetic about how every beautiful thing dies, walks slowly to the elephant graveyard where we buried Friendster and Geocities, but because I have no plans to spam you with Nordstrom affiliate links this space will pretty much stay exactly the same, except now I can add photos.
There comes a day in late summer where I begin to daydream of pencils. I imagine the row of cardboard apples pinned above the blackboard, all with names printed on them in block lettering. The heavy heat of the mid-Atlantic is here in Washington D.C now, suffocating us with the smell of hot asphalt and marsh water, sticking silk blouses and suit jackets to our low backs, making us question why we live in this government office on a tidal flat that for the last two years is a swamp that refuses to drain, instead overflows with bloodsuckers bringing the joint diseases of fascism and super-capitalism. We dream collectively of September now, of linoleum hallway floors and the crisp promise of a fresh start, a fiscal and school year with no eraser marks, only the first perfect bite of an apple, unblemished and unbruised.
I attended elementary school in southern Maryland, a brackish water flooded spit of land jutting out into the Chesapeake Bay that constantly floods. 60 miles east of Washington, 60 miles south of the Mason Dixon, it lives up to it’s nickname, “The Old Line State,” by retaining it’s identity crisis long after both the American Revolution and Civil War have ended. Geographically southern, Maryland was a slave holding border state in the Civil War, but a slave holding state that that saw two thirds of her 85,000 civilian men join the Northern Union Army. Marylanders consistently vote Democrat alongside Washingtonians and the citizens of New England. But while Baltimore feels decidedly northern, the southern peninsulas would just as soon join Virginia if they could, retreat back to the homestead, to the glittering mirage of nuclear family unity, to the illusion that any of us were ever racially or morally pure.
In my childhood neighborhood you’ll find multimillion dollar homes next to dilapidated trailers with no running water, children from both homes jumping off backyard docks together as if the politics of one family aren’t directly impacting the other. Our elementary school sat directly on the banks of the Potomac River which, looking back, was a horribly irresponsible place to build a school for children unafraid of leaping headfirst into deep water. At the beginning of each school year, when the asphalt sizzled with heat well into late October, we would spent recess in the streams that fed into the salty Potomac, snapping the stems off of honeysuckles, removing the stamen, licking the nectar from the petals, careful to watch for the copperheads that nested beneath the bushes. I wasn’t always careful to look out for snakes, stray kickballs, rocks, or long legged boys with bad aim though, and by the second week of grade three I had ripped out the knees of all but one pair of tights. My mother, exhausted by my inability to come home without having destroyed my pants, threatened punishment if I were to so much as stain the last remaining pair. I relayed the threat to my closest friend, sandy haired Santiago, who understood that the wrath of an Italian mother is very similar to the wrath of a Peruvian one, and promised to look out for me. It is this promise that led him to follow me to the biggest of the honeysuckle bushes, this promise that led him to scream when he saw the fat, coiled copperhead in the shadows near my feet, this promise that caused him to throw the weight of his body onto mine, sending me face first into the asphalt just out of reach of the snake. My right cheekbone was broken and the top layer of skin from my temple to my jaw completely gone, but my tights? Unscathed.
Cuir Venenum is a 2002 scent by Parfumerie Generale’s Pierre Guillaume that takes me back to that waterfront elementary school, to the cool, green tiled nurse’s office I was rushed into with a Kleenex pressed into the open wound on my face. Cuir Venenum smells like a spoonful of purple cough syrup and bandages. It’s the orange blossom—a heavy, grape-y monster of a thing— and honeyed musk that does this. Like Dymetabb it is overwhelming at first, heavy on the tongue, an if-this-is-feeling-good-I’d-rather-be-sick bittersweet. The base notes are listed as myrrh, cedar, and leather, but on me the leather only smells as such at the dry down. At first spritz it is pliable plastic stretched over a cut by a school nurse who is feeling generous today, will grant you an hour long lie down while she files papers at her corner desk and smokes out the small window above it.
The sticky sweetness means I don’t find Cuir Venenum particularly wearable until a few hours in, when the purple grape of the orange blossom rubs down into a whisper of leather and day old smoke. One Fragrantica review called it “a compelling scent I both love and hate” and this feels entirely accurate. I’ve been huffing the stuff from vials for years now, taking a little wiff there, another hit here, and I still don’t know how to classify either the scent or my feelings for it. It is odd in the way childhood memories become odd once you begin viewing them in context of your family history, your community culture. Over time we soften to even the most nauseating of memories, paint rosy or at the very least informative, those events which turned us red hot with shame then, should turn us red hot with shame now.
The afternoon Santiago saved my tights the nurse let him visit me while I waited for my mother to pick me up. He sat beside me on a rollaway cot, the two of us partitioned from the nurse by a paper curtain. On the part of my right cheek not covered in gauze Santiago delivered a small but firm kiss, whispering thank you in his native Spanish and instilling in me (much to the chagrin of future boyfriends) the belief that to love and care for me is a privilege. He pressed a flat stone into my hand and promised that when I was better he’d teach me how to make it skip three times.
When I heard last year that authorities had found his body in the bottom of a lake I immediately recalled that snake in the bushes, that nurse’s office, that kiss. As children no one had asked many questions when a poor neighborhood child disappeared, when whole families left town overnight, when a classmate was found hanging from a tree in his front yard. It was assumed these were ordinary movements, accidents, the terms of the blessing of growing up in America’s green southern daydream. They were unfortunate but immoveable. I knew no one would ask any hard questions now, either. I have yet to be proven wrong.
I probably won’t ever purchase a full bottle of Cuir Venenum. It is difficult for me to justify $125 for 50 milliliters of juice I find almost unwearable. The wooded backlots of the rural MidAtlantic are a place I don’t often ache to revisit. Still, I keep samples of the stuff everywhere. I set myself up to come across the heavy saccharine scent as if it were an accidental daydream. A whiff of orange blossom from my glovebox when I roll the windows down. Cigarettes and jam from the pocket of my leather jacket. The need for the scent of learning how to skip stones in late afternoon, of candy cigarettes, of sneaking when you’re convinced you won’t be found out, washes over me most often when I am downtown, wedged between the grime of 17th Street and the White House lawn. Little glass vials scattered around the hems and margins of my life momentarily remove me from the decline of the American empire, and return me to an anarchic school yard, to being youthfully green in a land that shouts with grass, to before we were asked to vote against one another’s best interests. To before we agreed to.