Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

Have you ever found yourself in a traumatizing situation and your life flashed before your eyes?  This happened to me on Sunday when I inadvertently wandered into what is arguably the most dangerous ever, even more dangerous than Hillary Clinton’s (gulp, shiver, cry) underwear draw! 

AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!

ONLY KIDDING!  Not really.  But, seriously, it’s the perfume department at Macy’s.

“Gee Bill, like the perfume department at Macy’s is the most dangerous location ever invented.  Yeah, right, try listening to and understanding Massachusettes Marble-Mouth Mayor Maneno or Sissy Sluring Senior Senator Barney Frank, now those are treacherous situations, because if you are standing too closel, you could get violently spittled on.  I mean, seriously.  What are you thinking, Bill, you BIG silly, you.”

Look, it’s not the perfume department per se, which I think is a fancy French word meaning “all French perfume smells like Neapolitan’s armpit,” it’s the wacky women working in the perfume department who make it so positively precarious, specifically the sinister spray-happy perfume peddlers who are scurrying all over the place like crazed cockroaches after the lights go on, and whose cologne commission is based solely on how many innocent customers they could waylay and whitewash their wet weapons.

And if you don’t think a man trying to run the fragrance gauntlet and make it out of the perfume department un-perfumed isn’t as treacherous as being a passenger in a senior senators sedan, well, then you either have the IQ of a drunken bureaucrat, or you’re like a guy I know who enjoys pedicures, powdering his nose, and prancing around in drop-seat pajamas with feet in them.

So anyway, I was standing in the woman’s department at Macy’s encouraging my wife to “pick something, already!  You’ve been trying on the same (nasty word) dress since BEFORE the invention of fig leafs!”

That’s when it happened: first I felt it, and then I smelt it: (sniff) perfume, on me, a man?  How the?  What the?  When the?  Where the?  Why the?  Who the?

My initial olfactory response was that some deranged perfume fairy was flying overhead peeing on people, specifically me.  Come to find out, a deranged incontinent perfume fairy would have been a pleasant surprise compared to the actual truth. The actual truth was that I had inadvertently made my way into the outer boundary of the woman’s department, which was just inside the inner perimeter of the perfume department, placing me in dangerous perfume-spray-radius-range.

And one of the spray-happy clerks took full spraying advantage of my unplanned territorial trespass by squirting me on the side of the head several thousand times with what felt to be a fire hose, only with slightly more water pressure, all under the guise of wanting me to get a good stiff whiff of it, and then perhaps, if I wasn’t asphyxiated, purchase some of her perfume product for my wife, or girlfriend, or maybe for the guy referenced above in the ornate nightgown.

As if my scent situation wasn’t bad enough, I soon found myself surrounded—in a sharklike feeding-frenzy—by other spray-happy itchy-fingered atomizer-slinging perfume clerks all in direct competition with each other to soak patrons, and all currently with their spray nozzle crosshairs pointed in my direction.

And every time I covered my head and tried to escape, they would start squirting like crazy, and I would get flooded with fragrance.  It was just like the opening scene from “Indiana Jones And The Raiders Of The Lost Ark” when Harrison Ford, after getting the golden idle and trying to escape, stepped on the rocks and arrows started shooting out from the wall.  The resulting fragrance fog was so thick you needed a portable lighthouse to feel your way from aisle to aisle.  One minute I smelled like a man, and the next, like lily of the valley.

After a few minutes the fragrance females finally finished because their fingers were fatigued.  But they did not go far, and like stealthy cologne commandos armed with semi-automatic atomizers, they hid behind their counters, leaped out, and sprayed everything that walked by: a man, a woman, a refrigerator; if it moved, it got sprayed.

Realizing the severity of my perfuming predicament, I knew that I had to make it back into the safety of the woman’s department, and fast, or I risked being drummed out of my poker club given that the collecting cologne on my clothes would overpower their stinky sulfur smelling cigar smoke, and no self-respecting poker player would stand for that.  However, before I could reach the safety of the woman’s department, I first had to make it past this one remaining perfume princess who was standing smack dab in the middle of the odor obstacle course.

But this cologne clerk was different.  I could tell by the look in her eyes she was determined to make a sale, and if it meant drowning me during her perfume pitch process, so be it.   And lemme tell ya, this woman was packing: she had two industrial-strength spray bottles, one in each hand.  So as I, the sodbuster approached, she drew her six-shooters and began blaring both barrels.

There was a massive mist of musk, but I luckily I made it out alive, dripping wet, and trailing a visible skunky scent al la  Pepe le Pue, but I was alive, I stunk to high heaven but I was alive, nonetheless.

So anyway, join me next time where I will tell you about the time I accidentally wander into the lingerie department at Kohl’s.  But this voyage didn’t turn out as bad, because, well, as every man will admit, lingerie beats perfume any day.  (Wink)

Copyright 2009 Bll Drury.  All Rights Reserved.