Writer Ian Stansel makes peace with the profoundly terrible stench of his grandfather.
—
One of the most common refrains heard in any writing class I lead is “Use all your senses.” Student writers, understandably, tend to focus most of their energy describing the visual: the light cutting through trees, the particular color of a child’s bedroom. And often they do this very well. But they too frequently forget that the world is made up of sounds and tastes and smells and textures as well. When I challenge them with an exercise that insists upon greater attention to these details, and they read these short, off-the-cuff passages aloud, eyes widen at the way the world of their prose suddenly appears in fuller relief.
When discussing the effect of smell—arguably the most powerful memory trigger—I often encourage students to push beyond the relatively simply equation of pleasant smell to pleasant experience (or unpleasant to unpleasant). So much energy in writing is created through contradiction and friction. Take, for example, the odor of white vinegar; it is a smell I personally find dreadful, and yet when I encounter it I cannot help but be transported to moments of coloring Easter eggs as a child. The scent of horse manure brings me back to weekends and evenings spent perched on arena-side bleachers watching my sister astride a kindly quarter horse named Andy. More pungent cow excrement takes me to college life in a small Midwestern town when the area farmers would feed their soil in the early days of autumn. That repellent smell carried on the wind and interrupted conversations and study, yet it is now inextricably wrapped up in those happy times.
I know of nothing else that can so quickly and completely remove me from my present and convey me to some other place, whether in memory or imagination. And I have no better example of this phenomenon than the definitive smell of my grandfather.
He came to live with my mother, brother, sister, and I after the four of us moved from northern California (a place forever associated with the aroma of eucalyptus—some pleasant thoughts do have equally pleasant correlative smells) to the near-north suburbs of Chicago. Robert Emmett O’Connell came from a brood of charming, handsome, and vain Chicago Irish. Through his life, most of his particular brand of vanity directed itself on his hair, which, as he moved through his fifties and then sixties, became thinner and thinner—not for lack of efforts to keep it on his part.
Laying in bed or trying to complete homework assignments in the room I shared with my brother, I would hear from the other side of the wall the insistent buzzing of my grandfathers scalp massagers, two grenade-shaped electrical engines that strapped to the back of his hands. They originated sometime in the middle of the twentieth century, at least three decades before we all lived under the same roof. Nightly he mounted them to his hands and kneaded his cranium, would-be defibrillators for his ill-fated follicles.
If his efforts were limited to the massagers, there would have been no problem, and honestly, I might not even think of the man’s hair when he comes to mind. But this was the most passive he would be when it came to retaining his slight mane.
“Goop” was our name for the concoction my grandfather mixed and applied to his scalp. The particulars of his recipe evolved over the decades, but the mixture’s base was always Glover’s Mange Medicine (later renamed Glover’s Dandruff Control Medicine, for obvious reasons). In its ultimate recipe, the goop contained, among other things, Glover’s, vitamin E, and sheep placenta extract.
One of the difficulties in exploring the non-visual senses is that these stimuli become more challenging to describe. How might I make the goop come to life within my reader’s nose? It was a chemical kind of stench, yet also not totally inorganic. There was something of industrial strength adhesive to it, but also rotting tropical plant life and perhaps a bit of wet dog. I fear I must, as my students so often do, fall back on the relative ease of vague, subjective adjectives: the goop smelled profoundly horrible.
One of the most popular stories in my family was of the time when, back in the mid-1960s when my grandfather was both a single dad and a traveling salesman, he brought his son and three daughters on the road with him and, somewhere outside Kansas City, Missouri, cleared the outdoor lounge area of the motel where they were staying. In a rare moment of respite from visiting would-be customers, he’d applied the goop and then visited the pool. It was the talk of the motel. In the lobby, guests would ask each other if one another had smelled that. In my mother’s telling, the management somehow could not pinpoint the old man as the source, but had the pool drained and scrubbed as a safety measure against whatever toxic materials had infiltrated the leisure zone.
By the time we all lived on an expansive stretch of rundown townhouses in Illinois, my grandfather had taken to simmering the goop on the stovetop before applying to his head. The stench would linger in the house for a week. During the warmer months, he would drag his folding lounger out to our tiny, desiccated front lawn and tan himself, the fumes from the goop nearly visible as waving, cartoon wisps emanating from his head. And without fail, this would be where my friends and I, coming home from school, would find him, shirtless and in blue terrycloth shorts, polluting the air of the neighborhood.
These are not my only memories of my grandfather, of course. After the dissolution of my parents’ marriage, he was the man I sat next to on the couch while watching the Cubs on TV, who walked with me to the library to check out books and VHS tapes, who took me on the bus to the half-empty mall where he bought his favorite caraway rye bread. His mood turned sometimes, and he would occasionally threaten me with a belt hanging menacingly from his hand. My mother would dance to and fro between us, protecting me and trying to calm him. These were some of the most frightening moments of my life, not because of the pain he might inflict on me, but rather because of the look of desperate rage on his face. Mostly I remember him as a thoroughly sad man, old before his time, with a past full of secrets, always seeming to be trying and failing to hold on to something fleeting.
My sister and I pleaded with our mother to convince him to stop using the goop, to save us from the social ostracism that was, in our minds, inevitable if the habit continued, but any appeals to our grandfather would be met with the same curt, gravel-voiced defense: “It’s a clean smell.” This phrase, so often uttered, became ingrained in our familial vernacular to such an extent that even now, should we be together and encounter some offending odor—say the reek of a recently squashed skunk or festering trash heap—one of us is likely to say these words: it’s a clean smell.
And yet, as revolting as the stench was, I am now glad for it. Perhaps once every year or two I’ll find myself walking down and the street or working near an open window and I’ll catch a whiff of something unmistakably goop-like. A ghost pungency wafting invisibly on the air. My head snaps up and my nostrils widen. But as soon as I register it, the odor disappears. Was it something from a passing car? From the back of some sketchy-looking restaurant? Could it be—just maybe—that someone else has concocted a vat of Glover’s Mange Medicine, vitamin E, and extract of sheep placenta?
I’ve never been able to identify a source. Instead I simply remain there holding the stench in my nose for as long as I can. I close my eyes. And for a moment, a few seconds at most, I have my grandfather there with me again, goop and all.
♦◊♦
Credit: Image—Dualdflipflop/Flickr