The Message in a Bottle of Vodka? It’s Blank

I was sitting at my desk facing four bottles of vodka when my wife walked in and said, “Oh, my God!”

Funny how three words can express so much emotion. It was also her expression that said a lot, the same kind of surprise and horror that sweeps across the face of virgins when Dracula floats into their room.

Cinelli stared at the vodka bottles for what seemed like a lifetime, momentarily in a state beyond speech after her initial outburst.

Then she said, “What in God’s name are you doing?”

I knew her concern was serious because it was the second time she had invoked the name of a deity. But I was prepared with an answer. I have been a husband too long not to know how to deal with these kinds of situations.

“Research,” I said. “Here ... “ I opened each of the four bottles and said, “Smell these.”

“No thank you,” she said. “I’ll just smell you after you’re done with whatever you call ‘research.’” The word sizzled with unsaid accusations.

I explained that I wasn’t drinking the vodka, I was sniffing it, quickly adding that this was not a new high I had discovered but part of a scientific experiment.

“Like the time you tried smoking banana peels?”

“No, that didn’t work. What I’m trying to determine is if simply smelling vodka is enough to sicken six people and empty a factory.”

My reference was to an incident that occurred a week ago at the Fluor Daniel company in Aliso Viejo. Someone mailed a bottle of vodka to an employee of the firm. It broke, either in the shipping or handling, and the fumes of the liquor sent six mail-room workers to the hospital complaining of nausea and wooziness.

The plant’s 400 employees were evacuated, and a hazardous material team called to the complex. They discovered that the mysterious substance was an 80-proof Russian vodka and not some kind of toxic liquid from Iraq or Syria.

In fact, according to a company representative, it was shipped out of Greenville, S.C., which is not included as part of George W. Bush’s axis of evil countries. One Fluor Daniel employee sent it to another Fluor Daniel employee which, while no doubt intended as a friendly gesture, is not likely to happen again.

The company’s public relations director, Lisa Boyette, said the vodka did have a strong smell, which surprises me. I had always been told that vodka had no odor, which is one of the reasons I switched from gin. Supposedly only certain sophisticated electronic monitors and suspicious wives with over-developed olfactory organs are able to detect the presence of vodka in a male human.

Boyette couldn’t tell me what kind of vodka it was and had no idea why its smell made people sick. A fire department investigator suggested that maybe one person really became ill and the others joined him in empathetic wooziness. A kind of vodka hysteria, maybe. There was only one way to find out.

I brought out the four bottles of vodka I had and spilled a little from each one on a thick towel. Then I sat around sniffing the samples. Nothing happened. During the course of experimentation, the dog Barkley sauntered into the room, sniffed the towel before I could stop him, and curled up on it. Barkley assumes that anything soft is meant for sleeping on, regardless of the smell.

I add quickly, before animal activists begin hunting me down, that the dog suffered no ill effects from sniffing and sleeping on the vodka, and, in fact, seemed more pleasant after the experience. Good boy.

I swear to you, I felt no nausea, wooziness, giddiness, burning or even dry mouth after sniffing the towel, and if anything, I certainly would have suffered from dry mouth. Everything that doesn’t cause death at least causes dry mouth. Trust me. This is my second sniffing column in a row, and I’ve become something of an expert.

After several sniffs, I brought the bottles into my office and set them on my desk. The vodka consisted of Ketel One, Grey Goose, Absolut and Finlandia. I keep several bottles on hand only to revive runners in the 10K Topanga Marathon who collapse near our house, and to treat hikers who are attacked by predatory raccoons.

When towel sniffing did nothing, the dog and I retreated to my office, where I placed the four bottles on my desk and began sniffing them in earnest. I was also simultaneously searching the Internet to determine if I could find anything that would explain the woozy-wazzles at the Fluor Daniel plant.

I came up empty-handed in my search for vodka-fume poisoning. But I did learn that the term vodka stems from the Russian word “voda,” meaning water. The Poles say “woda.” Both the Russians and the Poles claim to have created the drink sometime in the 8th or 9th century, depending on who you believe. I discovered it several hundred years later with my research assistant Jerry Belcher.

I was still sniffing and researching when my wife walked in and then out again, thinking the worst. I figured I was in trouble already, so what the heck.

I won’t lie to you, I did have a little sip from each bottle, orally, not nasally, the results of which I intend to write up for the New England Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The dog watched me and licked his lips, but I didn’t give him any. He’d had enough.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.