MAKING A STINK : As If Smog and Smoke Aren’t Bad Enough, Now We Have the Wretched Smell of Excess

I thought this would be kind of a crank column. I imagined that the reader, upon finishing this particular diatribe, would put down the magazine (only for a moment), shake his or her head, and think: “That guy sure speaks for the average Joe or Josephine most of the time, but this week he’s gone farther out than Bob Hilburn after an Elvis Costello concert.”

Then came a New York story from Marin County. It seems that what I object to purely on grounds of those rarest of qualities, taste and consideration for one’s fellow human, has become a political cause up north. As noted a while back, we are all too eager to define anything we want to do as a right. Some people in Marin have joined a similar trend toward calling whatever bothers them pollution.

The subject is fragrances, the escalating bombardment by aromas someone has deemed so darn irresistible that they just have to be shared with the entire biomass. You can’t open a magazine these days, for example, without getting solidly dosed by some of the hottest scientifically concocted scents. Currently the reek in review is perfume, but now that the technology is in place, auto magazines will start pumping out motor-oil or new-car odors, gourmet books will give off essence of risotto al barolo, and Sports Illustrated, depending on the time of year, will smell like new sneakers or a just-worn swimsuit.

But, even if you shun glossy publications, your nose is under assault.

Department stores have never been my favorite retail environment. Each visit to one recalls being hauled through Ohrbach’s Wilshire on Dollar Day, neither the time nor place to see humanity at its finest. But a walk onto the main floor of any modern department store takes you into a free-fire zone where the target is your nostrils. All of the major celebrity fragrances--Elizabeth Taylor’s Passion, Barry White’s Comforter, Jeane Kirkpatrick’s OpEd--are being spritzed in your path as you search in vain for underwear--or the exit. A woman friend reports noticing, half an hour after leaving a classy women’s specialty store, that she her self was now carrying a scent. The store, it turns out, surreptitiously sprays its customers, like a hyperactive tomcat.

It’s not just marketers who have their eyes on our noses. Real people, just like you and me except for their utter tastelessness, insist on sweeping through restaurants and leaving a train of their perfume or cologne dangling behind them. I’ve always marveled that fine eateries believe their patrons’ enjoyment of the ultimate dining experience requires that their male customers be forced to dress like anchormen. The tuxedoed maitre ‘ds, however, have no concern about the attacks on the nasal passages--the tongue’s close partner in food appreciation--launched by customers who think the appropriate standard of measurement for fragrances is the gallon.

But, as I said, I can’t even enjoy feeling like a crank in bitching about the aromatic din. It seems that some people are allergic to the invented chemicals that make up most manufactured stinks, and the Marin activists, to protect them, are insisting on “fragrance-free zones” in public places. A person, they argue, should feel free to attend City Council meetings without having to worry about a Poison-induced seizure.

Perfume does have a long and distinguished history as the thin misty line between the human nose and the seldom-bathed rest of the body. Baths used to be the same kind of highly occasional treat that visits to the liposuctionist are in our own times. But somehow, as the need for aromas to mask the mass stench has eroded, the inborn drive to apply fragrances in bulk has only grown stronger.

Real orange blossoms or gardenias are, of course, the sweetest smells this side of double-chocolate cake. And a whiff of a subtly applied signature smell can brighten the dutiful nuzzling of a lover’s ear lobe. But strangers and stores and magazines don’t smell like gardenias or orange blossoms, and the harder they try, the more they resemble a high school orchestra playing Beethoven’s Ninth--fine inspiration, lousy execution.

We need another layer of laws regulating a newly defined pollution like we need a rebroadcast of the Clarence Thomas hearings. But that could be the future unless, for once, you listen to the cranks. The people in Marin County are already at work lettering their signs. You have been warned.