Every night before I go to bed, I take the dogs out back for a quick pee. This is an easy enough thing to do. It’s not like a full scale walk, in which I need to have them harnessed and have my pockets filled with plastic bags. All I basically do is leash the beagle because he can’t be trusted, walk out the door, have them urinate, and then bring them all back inside.
Last night there was a small deviation to the plan. As I opened the back door, the beagle went bonkers, flipping out over what I thought must be a cat somewhere. Because I was so busy trying to restrain him and make him shut up, I was unable to prevent my Jack Russell Terrier from pursuing the cat, which in fact turned out to be a skunk. What followed were a series of events that have since been played back in a terrible slow motion in my mind a million times since. The terrier trotted off after the skunk, who was now on the other side of the fence. A psst sound was heard. The terrier immediately showed up again and ran directly into the house, as I had also been too busy to close the door earlier. It was then that I began to smell that awful smell.
So now the whole house smells like skunk. I bathed the dog outside four different times with four variations of internet remedies, and still my wife had to drag him to the dog salon this morning, which he left still smelling awful. On the plus side, since he was forbidden to sleep in the house last night, I camped out under the stars with him (i.e. on the porch), myself not smelling so hot either by that point.
At some point in the early morning, I was barely conscious enough to register anything more than “something is happening on the porch below”, a giant white van was running on the sidewalk below, and my downstairs neighbor was discussing something with somebody. I made a mental note that the truck said “National Grid” on it in case they were robbing us and the police needed details in the morning and went back to sleep with my disgusting mutt by my side.
It turns out that my neighbor was extremely alarmed, although not at all familiar with, the pervasive smell that invaded our house. Thinking it was a gas leak, he called the gas company and they raced over to tell him that he was in fact smelling a skunk.
The nerve of some people waking me up like that.
One thing that struck me about this whole incident, is that my wife, although suffering from the smell as much as anybody, still radiated her normal everyday drop dead gorgeousness as though I had brought flowers into the house instead. That there might exist, in the midst (or mist even) of something so foul, true beauty, gives me an almost metaphysical hope nearly religious in scope, but let’s not get carried away here. But back to the smell, I guess I should feel more guilty about all this, but I do think that most of the fault lies not with me but with the fucking skunk.
The guy made no real attempt to run away. When the dogs spotted him, and believe me, they made every indication they could to let him know he was spotted, he didn’t sprint away, he simply ambled over to the other yard. In other words, while I don’t know for sure what he was thinking, he was probably baiting the dogs, and unfortunately one of them took the bait.
So now every thing stinks. Thanks, idiot.
As bad as things do smell, for me personally the smell evokes memories of a vacation weekend I spent on the Jersey shore as a kid with a sociopath classmate of mine whose name I will neglect to mention in the interest of not being murdered. As nostalgic as I am, in an odd way I welcome my home being flooded with memories of X’s families trailer for a weekend back in 1985. A skunk had sprayed the cabin the first night we slept there and that smell envelops pretty much all of my memories of that weekend away from home. Most prominent among them, and conveniently the only one fit to write about, was the arrival of his parent’s friends for pizza on Saturday night.
X told me before they arrived, whatever you do, do not mention “worms” around them. Why not? Just don’t do it.
Well, the friends, a married couple, showed up, and they were very nice, gregarious people. Very easy to talk to, and everybody was having a good time. I felt so at ease with them that I just had to ask, and then, silence and uneasy stares all around.
Why’d you do that? my psychopathic friend furiously asked later. I didn’t know and I regretted it. I did however get the story out of it, something about the wife asking her husband never to use the word around her, and one time when they were over playing bridge at X’s parent’s house, the husband called her worms and she subsequently knocked him out with a right hook. It was an odd story and made little to no sense to me, but at least I knew, right?
