A Cloud of Axe, a Cup of Rum, and Ben

The other night, I squinted through the swirling miasma of Axe body wash clouding the interior of my car. The semi-formal dance at my son's school was obviously an occasion that required him to smell like some sort of mid-range, 13 year-old gigolo.

"The girls love this stuff," he assured me. "Could you close your window? It's kind of cold in here."

This question, by the way, from the boy who is–I am not kidding–allergic to cold and absolutely refuses to wear anything warmer than a sweatshirt, no matter what the temperature.

I gagged, wiped my eyes, and tried to focus on not breathing for the entire 35 minute drive to his school.

If the girls do indeed love the musky, manly, overwhelming aroma of Axe, then I can only assume it is because it deprives their brains of oxygen, thus muddling their thinking. Perhaps the boys are confusing the effects of oxygen deprivation with olfactory delight.

Whatever the truth, everyone within a half-mile of the dance was able to inhale several lifetimes' worth of the heady aroma at the dance. Huge, billowing clouds of Axe swirled dangerously from the entrance to the school, roiling in oily, undulating waves across the parking lot, enveloping everything it reached.

Not wanting to be the next victim of Axe-phyxiation™ (I just invented that word. It's MINE.), I slowed my car and instructed Alex to jump as I drove by. "Tuck and roll!" I yelled over the thumping bass rumbling from the bowels of the school. "You'll be fine. And don't rip your new pants!"

Alex jumped from the car and, I can only assume, rolled into the parking lot, relatively unharmed. Just as I gunned the engine to make my escape before the hungry cloud of Axe could envelope me, a shadowy shape flickered through the fog and my buddy Ben dived through the still open door of my car.

"GO! GO! GO!" he screamed, slamming the door shut as the tires on my super-charged Camry exploded on the Axe-slick pavement. We raced from the parking lot in a desperate attempt to save ourselves.

As we pulled out onto the road, Ben sniffed tentatively at his coat and rolled down his window. "I think some of it is clinging to me. There's only one thing that can overpower the smell of Axe. Indian food."

I nodded and stomped on the accelerator.

Ben has been my best friend since we were 10 years old. He knows me better than anyone. He knows about my weakness for Indian food. He knows everything. Except the exact location of the great new Indian restaurant he heard about.

"It's somewhere over by the mall," he told me with assurance.

That narrowed the possible location down to a few hundred clustered strip malls that swarm around the big mall like ramoras clinging to the belly of a shark.

This is how directions from Ben work and, through some mystery of the universe, they are enough. He once gave Kerri and me directions to a lake house he was staying at. The directions included the phrase, "When you go through town, there's a place where a bunch of roads come together. You'll find the right one. It will just feel right."

And we found it. Just as, after missing it only once, Ben and I found the stark, florescently lit Grand India, or whatever it was called. We snaked our way through crowds of Christmas shoppers and pulled to a stop in the parking lot, the last wispy tendrils of Axe swirling harmlessly off my car and into the night.

We opened the door and a cloud of desperation, tinged with curry wafted out to greet us. Or, possibly, to warn us. Not heeding that warning or the warning that the restaurant contained a sole, depressed-looking customer on a Friday night in the busiest part of town in the busiest shopping season of the year.

We marched in and stood there for a few moments wondering how to proceed. There was a buffet set, with enticing, hand-written signs announcing a variety of dishes, all of which looked vaguely soupy and similar. The sole customer hung his head low over his plate an sullenly moved food to his mouth. No restaurant employees were to be seen anywhere.

We stood for a minute, wondering what to do. "Let's take a seat and see what happens," I suggested, my mind obviously still under the pernicious hold of Axe-phyxiation™. What I should have said, of course, was, "Shall we seek another establishment in which we may find sustenance?"

But alas, we sat down and waited patiently until an angry face popped out of the kitchen door and eyed us suspiciously. "Buffet?" he growled.

I looked at Ben and shrugged. "Sure," he said to the angry face.

Our kind host irritably jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of the buffet table before disappearing back into the suspiciously silent kitchen.

We made our way to the buffet and, with less enthusiasm than should have been expected on such an occasion, filled our plates. I will not bore you with a review of the individual dishes, but neither of us will be returning there.

With 2 hours left to kill before we had to pick up our kids at the dance, we decided that the only reasonable option available to us was to head to the Chinese food place across the street from the school and use alcohol as a solvent to wash the taste of dinner from our mouths.

We pulled into the parking lot and Ben pointed to another restaurant in the same building, which, I feel compelled to point out here, is only 1,000 yards from the school.

"That's a really good Indian place," he said.

Once in the Chinese restaurant, we pushed through the crowd at the bar and settled in at a table for 8 in the back of the lounge. Once the Mai Tais were delivered, we scoured our mouths and talked.

And talked

And talked

And talked.

Although we have been friends for over three decades,  we usually have a lot to talk about. And when we don't, the silences that settle upon us are comfortable. I've found that the older Ben and I get, the more different we become, but those differences do not separate us. If anything, they make us closer.

The talk spiraled from art to food to old friends to stuff I'm not going to write here because it's none of your darned business.

As the evening wound down and the time to gather our kids came upon us, we sucked the last of the rum from the ice cubes in our sweating glasses and walked into the cold parking lot.

"Have you ever noticed how talking to other adults is usually really boring?" I asked Ben.

"Yeah!" he laughed.

Then I launched into a mind-numbingly boring story about repairs I had recently performed on my car's exhaust system.

And you want to know what a good friend Ben is? He didn't even comment on how boring my story was and the bitter, unpleasant coincidence of the fact that I had just commented on how boring adults are.
At least, he didn't comment out loud.
That's what kind of buddy Ben is.


We pulled into the parking lot of the school, the Axe fog now diluted by swirling puffs of exhaust from parents who–it appeared–sat in the parking lot, diddling on their cel-phones with their engines idling for the entire dance.

Ben jumped from the car and made a dash for his truck before the fumes could overwhelm him. We collected our kids and made our separate ways home.

It wasn't until the next morning that I discovered Ben's hat in the passenger seat of my car. I would hate for him to have a cold head and think that we'll have to get together again so I can return it to him.

After I wash the Axe smell out of it, of course.

You're Allergic to WHAT?!? (with disgusting medical-grade pictures!)

I'd have to say that it all started with the new pool and the mysterious, magical green water that we filled it with.

We have been saving our pennies for several years in order to buy a nice pool.  I have found out the hard way that pools scavenged from the local dump tend to be not everything that one desires in the way of summertime enjoyment. They tend to leak and collapse at inopportune moments. Like when you're languidly floating around in them, drinking a delicious rum-based beverage of immeasurable joy, listening to Bob Marley singing about three little birds. The sun is shining on your gently smiling face. There isn't anything in the world but you, your drink, and Mr. Marley. And, it appears, a grave structural flaw in your pool. And then, you're sprawled across your soggy lawn, wondering what happened to your drink.

If you ever find yourself in this position, refrain from the real, and very understandable, urge to salvage your drink by slurping up the pool water that is slowly disappearing into the grass beneath you. The chlorine and the ants will give even the best drink a slightly off flavor.

I speak from experience, people.

So, a couple years ago, we upgraded to one of those ring-top pools purchased from that recognized dealer of pool-related excellence, Toys-R-Us. The box, covered with pictures of happy families, frolicking in the crystal clear water of their new pools, promised that the entire thing could be installed in minutes.

I mixed my rum-based beverage of immeasurable joy and opened the box, which failed to mention that you can also measure the age of the universe in minutes if you are so inclined.

Minutes stretched into hours which stretched into days. The ice cubes melted in my drink. My children stood by in their bathing suits, helping me along by asking every 30 seconds if the pool was ready yet. They clearly thought that I was hogging all the fun as I spent 3 days in the blistering sun, digging up our lawn and wheeling in hundreds of pounds of sand so we could have a somewhat level place to put the pool. It was fun, of course, but not as much fun as I made it look like.

I was thrilled to discover that after digging up the grass, leveling it off, and hauling in all the sand, the pool itself did actually unroll and inflate in just a few minutes. Then, with our weak and impoverished well, it took another week to fill it up enough for the filter to work.

Which it didn't.

So we bought a bigger, better, faster, shinier filter that cost more than the entire pool.

Then the pool popped.

So we started saving and finally bought a brand-new, real pool with a real filter and had it installed by real pool installer guys complete with butt cracks hanging out of their pants so you know they're official.

This is not the disgusting picture I mentioned in the title. That's coming up later. This is a bonus disgusting picture.        You're welcome.

But before the installers could work their magic, the dump truck fairy had to deliver 10 tons of stone dust to my home.

No, actually, I'm not exaggerating.

And, as an added bonus, when the installers were finished, there were 5 tons left over. Anybody need some stone dust? Bring a wheelbarrow and a shovel.

So the pool went up and it got filled with three giant tanker trucks full of water. This was exciting to watch. See how excited I am?

The water had a delightful greenish cast to it that made the entire pool look like a magical mermaid swimming grotto, where mermaids splash and play in the tropical sun.

Or a nasty stagnant swamp, if you lack imagination like some people in my family whom I am married to.

But, through the magic of chemical enhancement, the water cleared up overnight.

And the kids, who were vibrating with excitement, jumped into the pool.

Tori's pink floaty pony popped 2 seconds after this picture was taken.

Alex wished it was just a popped pony for him.

You will notice how happy Tori looks. She looked much less happy two minutes later when her pink, inflatable pony suffered a tragic blow-out, rendering him useless. You might also notice the look of unbridled horror on Alex's face. That look was mirrored on all our faces just a few short minutes later when Alex emerged from the pool looking like this.

This is the disgusting picture I was talking about.

And this is another bonus one. See how good I am to you people?

I almost spilled my drink, but because of past experience, I now use a sippy cup for all my rum-based beverages of immeasurable joy.

These hideous hives covered much of his torso and, naturally, we were deeply concerned.

What if whatever horrible disease he had contracted had contaminated the sparkling clean pool water, ruining it for the rest of us?

The hives disappeared a few minutes after they appeared. Seeking a scientific explanation for what was going on, we tossed Alex back in the pool. Because that's how scientists work, I believe. A result must be repeatable. And it was. The hideous hives reappeared.

And I still didn't spill my drink.

Because I had finished it by then.

We spent two days trying to figure out what was happening. Nobody else was reacting to the water like that. Mostly, the rest of us were reacting by splashing and swimming and playing and assuring Alex that he really wasn't missing much because the pool wasn't actually even that much fun, really.

In between swims, I spent many hours poring over medical sites on the internet, a habit I do not recommend to anyone for any reason. You start looking for information on hives and suddenly you find yourself diagnosing it as a rare flesh-eating bacteria that will totally ruin the pool for everyone.

Also, I do not recommend that you do any sort of image search for full body hives if you have a tasty beverage in your mouth. Or if you ever want to eat again.

I searched and searched until I found something that perfectly matched Alex's symptoms:

Cold Urticaria

He is allergic to cold.

Go ahead. Look it up.

A carefully performed in-home medical procedure (a phrase I have never used in reference to myself before) involving an ice cube and Alex's extreme discomfort for 5 minutes reproduced the hives brilliantly in the exact spot where the ice cube had been.

A trip to the doctor the next day confirmed the results.

"Gonna be a long summer for you, buddy," the nurse said to him.

"Can I have the cool new pool float that mom bought you?" I asked.

It turns out that his case is a mild one and the hives can be easily controlled with a dose of anti-histamine before he gets in the pool.

But he can't go to the drugstore by himself.

And I still want that pool float.