people say she’s crazy…

Anyway, I never saw the guy’s face, because after I buried my nose in my scarf or something, I lost interest and forgot about it. Who the f wears cK One?

~~~

When I was in 7th grade, in 1995-6, I lived in a universe of Sun-Riped Raspberry body sprays from Ulta Bath & Body Shop Works (which had so many FLAMMABLE warnings on them that one night I couldn’t resist anymore, filled up my bathroom sink with water, sprayed a thick film of Country Apple on top of the water and lit the sucker on fire–hi, Mom!). When I was Bat Mitzvah’d in January 1996, my bedroom became a sea of gift baskets, full of the same impossibly fruity spritzes and lotions and jewelry I’d never wear, but somewhere among the butterfly earrings and crinkly paper basket filler was a brushed chrome bucket–the cK One motherload.

cK One was pretty intense, in comparison. Tubby would soon discover the joys of Clinique Happy (a scent I will forever associate with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and Tubby’s Seester’s car) and plenty of my peers were drowning in early incarnations of Abercrombie perfumes, but cK One had three very important, very distinctive things going for it:

1) It was UNISEX. Having always had trouble pulling off “girly,” this worked nicely for me. Of course, at the time, the message of the commercials, in which a line of diverse but beautiful people, shot in black and white and dressed appropriately post-grunge, said things (not that I remember what) that connected them and offered the moral that we’re all the same and that cK One was for the People (commies?) didn’t matter. Neither did the gender-bending Calvin Klein models, girls who could have been boys and boys prettier than girls. All that mattered was that I could smell like something other than Jr. High Hallway or Juniper Breeze.

2) The bottle. It was frosted and clear, with a metal cap. You screwed the top off, and there was nothing stopping you from bathing in the shit. Not that I did, I think I just liked the danger.

3) It made me feel like I was going to sneeze, but it never did. This was my version of sensory excitement at age 13. Am I gonna? No, I’m not. Maybe I am!! No, I’m not.

As with every beauty product I’ve ever owned, I used it inconsistently for a matter of weeks or a few months, and then it was relegated to the closet or the bathroom cabinet. A few years ago, Mom and I threw out everything in my bathroom that wasn’t worth keeping for possible guests (seeing as how “my” bathroom is hardly that anymore), and though the bucket was long gone, the evidence remained–a mostly full bottle like the one you see here, a washcloth with the logo, and another bottle that had a spritzy option but that I never used. In fact, come to think of it, I think there was some mechanism in which you were supposed to move the spritzy thing from one bottle to the other, depending. Of course, I may have made that up in an attempt at bathroom pyrotechnics, but I definitely have a mental image of the other bottle, a chrome bullet-looking thing, missing its top, with just the insides of a spritzy mechanism sticking out. Huh.

Anyway, after some non-sneezes, we threw it out with its smelly peers.

~~~

Since the original offending bus rider, cK One has popped up a few more times. A vague waft at Nordstrom’s, remnants in an elevator, &c., but I’d still never actually seen an offender, understood what makes a person reach wantonly into the back of their toilette storage or actually spend money on that fogged glass bottle (again).

And then there was yesterday’s trip to the Jewel. (Yes, I know I refer to grocery stores like old people do–the Jewel, the Treasure Island, the Kroger.) It needs to be said that something was already not okay in my universe, some synapses were a little slow or something, as evidenced by the fact that I was later unloading groceries and discovered I had purchased not only six-pack of little OJ cartons but also one large OJ carton. Because apparently I forgot about the wee ones by the time I got to the end of the aisle, where the big ones live. Keep in mind I grocery shop with just a small old lady wheely cart–not much fits in there. So I could have seen the six-pack but did not. Also keep in mind that I myself unloaded groceries from said old lady cart onto the checkout conveyer belt. Did I notice the two separate OJ product then? Of course not.

Anyway, thus incapacitated (by blinding hunger, cold, desire to get home for Friday Night Lights or whatever) but before I succumbed to all the OJ I could carry, I rounded the corner to the organic miscellany aisles in search of Amy’s chili and was met, instead, with a blockade of cK One. The only other person in the aisle, I could tell from behind, was a well dressed boystown neighbor of mine, probably around 30. Expensive jeans, well fitting leather jacket, striped scarf, orange manpurse. He must have heard me gasp, and he turned to make sure no old ladies had passed out (as I am, of course, preceeded by the squeaky old lady wheely cart wheel noises).

He was normal. He was… attractive! I pretended not to have any problems, and he went back to browsing the just-add-water soups. I sidled up next to him on the chili side and took a long, deep breath in. Yep. CK One. Fresh as a daisy. I needed to sneeze. No, I didn’t.

This was all puzzling. Aren’t attractive, put together gay men supposed to keep up with the latest in hygiene? This guy was sporting some appropriate McDreamy stubble, neo-Fallon hair, and (I checked) tidy nails. What’s with the retro scent? Does a decade even count as retro? Chili in hand (by which I mean old lady wheelie cart), I toddled off to the the toilet paper aisle.

Later, though, after blindly deciding to buy all of the OJ in the store, while I was standing in front of the cottage cheese cooler, I smelled it again. Behind me, scoping out the Entemann’s display in the aisle, was my new friend and his boyfriend. I tilted my head back (yes, as awkwardly as you think) and tried again. Still smelled like cK One. But was this… a cK Duo? I followed them to the frozen dinners aisle. The original offender went for the Toaster Strudels, so I followed the boyfriend to the Lean Cuisines, where my suspicions were confirmed. Two perfectly normal men, grocery shopping, doused in cK One.

Now, granted, maybe one was borrowing the other’s coat or maybe they work at the local perfume factory or OH MY GOD maybe there’s like an Axe body spray that is cK One flavored and they are passing it off as sexy new stuff that no one has smelled before. Oh my god.

That explains it. That explains why otherwise normal smelling bus riders (well, normal for the bus), miscellaneous people in my apartment and office buildings and these two seemingly sane young men are all oozing the Calvin.

Does anyone know? Has anyone experienced this like I have? Even a light waft of the stuff puts me squarely at the American Legion Hall by Chastain Park in the mid-1990s in an Old Navy top and high waisted jeans, bangs frizzing out to Alabama, blinking through my new contacts an arm’s length away from some unlucky boy, trying not to belt out ALL the lyrics to that Boyz II Men song. As fondly as I recall those days now, I could do without quite so many reminders.