Eau de Commode
by Doug Dawson
II was working
as an engineer. We’re all defense
contractors here, with security clearances to
prove it and we write software systems for the
Defense Department, though I can’t tell you
too much about the details, as you might expect.
Contractors can be a funny lot, especially
software types and I don’t what it is,
exactly, but the wildness, the silliness, the
idiocy that’s there is somewhere buried
– not too deep, mind you – in those
very smart brains, just waiting for a chance to
get out. Give you an example. This business
naturally attracts a lot of ex-military types -
they’re all over the place, coming out of
the woodwork, you might say – and thought I’m
not ex-military – I deal with them all day
long. On a long corridor heading toward the back
of our building there is an office where an ex-Marine
colonel named Sam worked. Not being a software
guy or an electrical engineer himself, he handled
mostly administrative duties and he’s a good
guy, with a sense of humor. On the way past his
office, I would typically stop at his doorway,
salute smartly and offer up a “Good Morning,
Colonel, sir!” and Sam would never
disappoint: he’d say, with a smile “You
don’t have to salute me – I’m not
in the military anymore and you - you’ve
never been in the military.” To that I would
reply “Just trying to show a little respect
here,” to which Sam would replay “Alright,
son, you’ve done your duty and now get back
there and get to work.” We’d both smile
and get back to our assigned tasks.
We also had a
general manager in this place. His name was Ed
and he would call regular meetings to let us know
what was going on with new contracts and the like.
The one thing he would always say at the start of
said meetings was “All ears, everybody
– all ears now.” I guess that was his
way of saying “can I have your attention?”
At any rate, his words became something we
listened for, so to speak, something we all
looked forward to with each meeting. Not to
change the subject, but just to give necessary
background here, there used to be a television
show called “The Mickey Mouse Club” on
TV the 1950’s and it featured all these kids
- the Mouseketeers, they called them, singing and
dancing and whatnot and they all wore these funny
little caps with big ears on them, making the
kids look a bit like over-sized mice. One of the
female employees in this company I worked for
actually had a whole box of these “mouse
hats,” I called them, so she brought them
all to work on the day of our next big meeting
with Ed. So, she has us come into the conference
room early, she distributed the hats around the
room and by the time Ed walked in we were all
sitting there, looking for all the world like
over-aged Mouseketeers. “WE’RE ALL EARS,
ED!” came the cry from the crowd in their
seats. Ed looked nonplussed for a few seconds, as
if it was all too much and so unexpected, he didn’t
know what to do, then he cracked up as expected
and the meeting went on as planned.
So that was
just one anecdote and by now I know you are
thinking “silly minds, silly people”
and you would be correct, only you haven’t
heard the best part. This company, like most had
a whole staff of female support people –
administrative assistants, documentarians and
such. One was named Dolly and she had her office
in front, right around the corner from the front
lobby and everybody walked by her office to get
to the kitchen, the front bathroom and cafeteria.
Everybody in the building got to see her often
and it wasn’t that she was so popular (even
thought she was popular) - it’s
just that she was … there, right in
the middle of things, as it were, that got her
all the attention that she garnered. Well, Dolly
was our local fashionista: she tastefully wore a
lot of makeup, the latest fashions, not to
mention the perfumes: there was Tabu for awhile
and after that it was Chanel No. 5, followed by
Shalimar, followed by Obsession, and that’s
just for starters. We all figured Dolly’s
husband made good money, because it seemed that
Dolly was buying more eau de colognes all the
time and they weren’t cheap, not to mention
the Dior accessories, a Versace dress, the Calvin
Klein jeans and with the arrival of grunge in the
early 1990’s, Dolly’s own
interpretation of that trend, with baggy pants
and loose grey sweatshirts for Casual Fridays and
no doubt a stack of Pearl Jam CDs at home.
Meanwhile, the local yokels who inhabited the
engineering world - and our building in
particular - were still in 1980’s fashion-land
and still doting on Dolly’s older things,
loke her Christian Dior fashions. I even heard
one of the girls in the office say “yeah,
she’s very demure – maybe it has
something to do with her wearing that Christian
Demure stuff.” I love people like these. Why?
Because they’re humor is so … so …
inadvertent.
We couldn’t
get it out of her, whether the local Macy’s
attended to Dolly’s fashion needs, whether
Washington’s trendy Western Avenue stores (Saks
Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, etc.) did the honors
or whether an occasional trip to the Big Apple
and Bloomingdale’s 53rd Street store were to
blame for the largesse of Dior, Klein and Tommy
Hilfiger styles that over time graced her person
and our premises. Whatever the fashions she wore,
there was always a local version of Mrs. Malaprop
to oblige with a gaffe, as when one woman,
admiringly said “see that? That’s a
Tommy Hilfinger dress, if ever I saw one.” Hilfinger,
as in your index finger? I just nodded
enthusiastically when I heard that blunder and
you can’t pay any amount of money to get
humor like that. Getting back to Dolly, wherever
her clothes and perfumes came from, I heard the
expression “haute couture” coming from
the more sophisticated of our coterie and always
used in reference to Dolly and the perfumery she
was pleased to call her office, as they
represented the height of fashion, at least in
the government contracting arena.
My company had
just been awarded a new contract, so you are
thinking the stars were in perfect alignment and
no doubt the universe was unfolding as it should,
in terms of both our firm’s and Dolly’s
fortunes, but any time it seems things are going
too well one Murphy’s Law seems to intervene.
No one noticed a thing wrong until a Friday
afternoon and with the weekend staring us in the
face it was GIGIF day and GIGIF stands for “God
I’m glad it’s Friday” and that’s
a University of Maryland (at College Park) term I
picked up there in the 1960’s, when such
terms were popular. It was the day the
unthinkable happened: the day when the stars fell
out of the sky, when the moon “swang”
out of its orbit and something seemed to be
happening that was even worse than God no longer
being in Heaven. As far as I knew Dolly was
working on spreadsheets and an end-of-month
report required by management and as a result had
kept to herself most of the day with her office
door closed, when all at once I heard loud
tittering coming from her office. It was the kind
of laughter that could have only been caused by
something riotous and when I came out of my
office and looked around the corner, I saw Dolly’s
office door wide open, with four girls bursting
out of there practically in tears, they were
laughing so hard. What could it possibly be, I
thought - a social blunder, a faux pas in word,
deed or action or perhaps something even more
egregious, like an embarrassing pratfall, with
the victim having fallen head-first into the
waste basket or perhaps her lying face-down on
the floor, unable to get up? If a man inhabited
that office, I reasoned, it could have been
several other things, like him bending over to
pick something up, accompanied by the loud
ripping of the seat of his trousers or maybe a
phone call coming in from an illicit lover that
no one was supposed to know about. Then another
thought occurred to me, that maybe the peals of
laughter were tears of happiness, of joy that one
of them had just a lottery, or maybe that all
five of them (including Dolly) had just been
promoted, given a huge raise and told they would
be sent to London or Paris for a vacation junket
at company expense.
My mind half-heartedly
tried to cope with all these possibilities, but I
knew all along that the laughs were mocking, that
something incredibly ridiculous had just occurred.
That something was that our Dolly, of perfect
form, impeccable fashion sense and unerring scent,
had just slipped out of her place in the
firmament above – she had become ordinary;
worse than that, she had become bourgeois,
commonplace, provincial, parochial – a
member of the hoi polloi, the proletariat. She
had become, in effect a buffoon, a clown, a
figure of fun – a laughing stock. The reason
for her undoing became obvious in the next few
seconds, as the guffaws were replaced by catcalls
– it was her cologne! Dolly’s fall from
grace was accomplished with just a few well-chosen
expressions: “That stuff you’re wearing
- it stinks!” “Essence of Latex!”
and “Scent of Camel’s Breath!”
accompanied by more laughing. Our Dolly had
managed to purchase a perfume, a cologne that
simply smelled awful, in other words, her eau de
toilette had become an eau de commode.
How could a
thing like this happen? It’s like asking how
great empires fall, how a warm breeze is replaced
by a cold wind, how a sunny sky suddenly becomes
dark and rainy. For a few seconds it seemed
beyond imagining and more than a little surreal.
I just had to see, or should I say smell, for
myself. I sauntered over to Dolly’s door and
stepped inside, to see a look of utter chagrin on
her face. I took it that she had never been
embarrassed like this before and as I smelled
what the other girls found so … ah …
unappetizing, I didn’t really notice
anything that unusual about whatever scent the
dispirited Dolly was wearing. I finally had to
tell her it smelled ok to me and the girls were
just being silly and acting like, well –
girls – of the junior high school variety.
Dolly seem a bit reassured that a kind word was
being spoken in her defense and told me that it
was nice of me to stop by and offer condolences -
my word, not hers.
We never got
the name of that new fragrance and naturally it
never reared its ugly head in our presence again.
Unwilling to risk any more sensory debacles I
think Dolly went back to the tried-and-true, the
old standbys and every time I walked by her after
that I smelled something familiar, like the scent
of lilacs and roses – or maybe Chanel No. 5.
Then again could it have been Christian Demure?
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