B.O. and the problem of coming home.
A little over a year ago, right after getting to Tanzania, I got on board a cramped
daladala for the first time, and was overwhelmed by the stench.
It was body odor. But not just your standard, run of the mill B.O. It was B.O. my God, I can even taste the foulness when I try to breathe through my mouth level body odor. To be smothered by Molly Shannon's arm pit would not compare. This was even worse than Italy the previous summer, when Laura, Micah and I had taken the slow train from Florence to Pisa, sweating bullets in the rickety car that lacked air conditioning, but which was filled to the brim with standing, begging gypsies and seated, glistening passengers, none of whom were wearing deodorant. No one wears deodorant in Europe. I wrote in my journal back then that the Italians needed to make a choice: either you don't have A/C but
do wear SpeedStick, or you forgo the SpeedStick and install A/C. But if you're in Western Europe, where you can afford it, you've got to pick one.
Those were my thoughts in the summer of 2006, when I was still very much in American mode. Americans find the smell of B.O. to be repulsive. All Americans wear deodorant.
In Africa, there is no A/C, no SpeedStick, and people don't bathe all that often. So that first
daladala was especially repulsive. It made Italy seem like a huge, boot-shaped bed of roses. It's all relative, these declarations of what smells good and what smells bad.
The days passed. Weeks passed, then months. Then a year. All the while, I was getting on
daladala's, I was cramming myself into a space not meant for a 6 ft., 170 lb. man, I was inhaling the aroma.
L'eau d'Afrique. It is the smell of original humanity, before Clorox and breath mint strips sterilized the scene. It's all relative. Everything, not just B.O. If you spent a year in Tanzania, the same thing would start to happen to you. You would begin to forget that this isn't the way everyone smells. You might even start to .... like it.
"Oh God," Miguel said. Those were the first two words he had for his high school best friend, whom he hadn't seen since New Years. Not,
"Welcome back," or,
"How was...," or even
"What's up?" It was the smell. Of my body. And the invocation of the Lord's name -- does that count as taking it in vain?
"Oh God, you freaking smell." I think he chose freaking because my parents were standing right there.
But Miguel was right. In this context -- my family's kitchen in an affluent neighborhood in 713 Houston -- I did smell.
"I know man," I said,
"I had to wake up really early this morning and rush to the airport to make my flight on time, and didn't have a chance to get in the shower." Which was true. What was also true was that I hadn't showered for two days before that, either. And that I no longer wear deodorant. No one in Africa wears deodorant. And I kind of look Italian.
Andrew, another one of my boys from Strake, went in for the real thing nonetheless, and he didn't complain about the B.O. His mother is Italian, though.
"I felt really bad for the people sitting next to me on my flights today, too," I told them. Ben was there, too. I lifted up my shirt, an electric looking textile of red, green and gold, with a Rasta zebra on front and back, to stick my nose down in there and give it a sniff. All I smelled was ... how human bodies smell. That's me still in African mode. I just shrugged my shoulders. Seemed all right to me; I needed to consciously remind myself that, at age 22, I would have vehemently disagreed.
"Oh, so you were THAT guy," Miguel threw back. He looked annoyed, almost as if it had been
him who had had to endure a leg of sitting next to I-just-got-back-from-Africa,-can-you-tell-by-my-shirt guy, either the quick hop from JFK to Cincinnati, or the longer push from Cincinnati to IAH (I don't know the airport mnemonic for Cincinnati, nor would I know how to spell Cincinatti without spell check).
"Yup, I was that guy."
And that is something I'm going to have to work on, now that I'm home for the indefinite future: not being
that guy. The
"This one time at band camp" guy.
Because people don't give a shit about that.
"This one time, in the Balkans..."
What are the Balkans?
"This one time, in Tanzania..."Like the Tanzanian Devil?
The reason culture shock is harder coming back isn't just because the pace of life goes from Sid Bream to Usain Bolt. It's because you feel like everything you just saw, everything you heard, everything you tasted and felt and hurt and loved and cried and laughed and read and shat and
lived ... none of it is real. Not anymore. Everything became a memory, a ghost experience, the second you left that realm.
Like it never happened. And you can see it in the eyes of the ones who don't understand why you don't understand that you freaking smell when you get off the plane. You're trying to
make them feel what you felt with your voice, with your eyes, with your facial expressions and hand movements and enthusiasm, and they just can't. They look back at you, feign interest, and take a puff of their cigarette, or a sip of their beer. And then they ask if you saw the Astros game that night. (Which I did, and which I was very happy about, since Berkman had his first career walkoff, but which has nothing to do with the story I was just trying to tell).
You change, the others stay the same, and you have no right to judge them for that. I am a very different man today from the boy who got on that plane to London on June 6, 2006, headed for the World Cup.
For example, I look like a movie star now (or at least that's what Anna K. says).And I can't expect people to give me props for that, or bow down and beg me to tell them stories. For looking like Shia, or for being a world traveler. All I can do is try to readjust without forgetting. Assimilate back into what used to be the only culture I knew, without losing the lessons I've learned over the past two years from cultures I'd barely even heard of until I arrived.
And maybe put on some deodorant every now and then, just for others' sake.
What is that first word, a type of reindeer as would be written by the band Korn?
