The Attack of the Killer Bus Stench

I began to smell it at Broadway. By then there were too many people on the bus to know who it came from—or even if it came from one person at all.

It began as a memory, like most subtle scents do. I was reminded of a neighborhood friend I had when I was a small boy. Or, more particularly, I was reminded of his house.

I was inhaling poverty. American poverty, not the abject kind. The kind that has electricity and a microwave to plug into it. But calling it poverty is to explain this smell away socially, rather than simply experience it physically.

So let me try to be more specific. As the odor snuck further into my skull, I tried to divvy it up into categories and causes. I concentrated on the air of the bus like a wine snob whose nose is fogging up the interior of his glass as he seeks out bouquets to mention and impress people with.

So here I go. Be impressed:

It wasn’t any kind of rot or mold. It wasn’t BO in the typical sense. It seemed somewhat food-based, but not like it emanated from a particular meal. More like it was the result of years’ worth of culinary apathy. Culinary apathy combined with apathy in general. If apathy can stink.

Then I realized: It was grease. All kinds of grease oozing like so many motley demons into one bodiless attack on my precious olfactories.

As soon as I named it, what had been simply unpleasant became nearly unbearable. What had been an odor became a stench.

Like an ear can pick out various instruments from the barrage of an orchestral wall of sound, my nose began listing its individual assailants:

Hair grease; hamburger grease; the grease that gathers at the edges of noses then spreads, making unwashed faces glisten; greasy spoons; shoe leather grease; greasy, undrained dishwater;

pans of uneaten bacon left on the stovetop from yesterday’s breakfast; daycare windows and iPhone screens; Vaseline and other various petroleum byproducts; cheese after it’s warmed up to room temperature; even sex, I’m afraid, greasy as it can be…

…and so on. I trust you get the idea.

As we crossed from North Minneapolis into Downtown, the unbearability of the stench began to steadily move from hyperbole to actuality.

I tried to read my book, but with every breath, ghosts of grease surged into my nostrils, then up whatever cranial passageway opened to them first. Surging up into me ear canals and eye sockets, where they corroded my ear drums and optic nerves, then flowing back down into my throat and dividing up between my stomach and lungs as I helplessly swallowed and inhaled.

Soon I could’ve sworn I was ingesting the whole busload’s grease. Every man, woman, and child’s greasy history. A combined millennium of human grease.

Have I mentioned grease?

Grease.

I was getting more desperate to get off that bus than you are to quit reading this disgusting little essay.

The bus snuck in the backside of downtown as if the vehicle itself knew it would be quarantined (if not permanently retired) when the Department of Health and Human Services got a whiff of it. It slunk, guilty and afraid, down 10th and turned left into the dark promised land of the 7th Street Transit Station.

With very purposeful composure, I stepped normally out into the garage—tripping, staggering, and gagging in my mind. I stood inhaling deeply the fresh exhaust of idling buses accented by the occasional hint of oil and gasoline stains wafting from the asphalt.

Then, as if by a miracle, my poor eardrums reconstituted and returned to their place at the sides of my head. My eyes remarkably recovered their former connection to my brain with just a blink or two. And my larynx relaxed, enlightening me to the fact that it had been tense at all. (If that was indeed my larynx, which I doubt.)

Two or three minutes later I boarded the #9. And, as is often the case with absent smells, it was as if none of this ever happened.