Whiffs
By Michael Colbert
Photography by Julia Cassell.
Henry got Whiffs the summer Bacchus came to town. We were meeting for brunch to discuss our upcoming trip to Fire Island, and Whiffs made him late. Caden and Chase went looking while I held down the table. They came back with Henry, his palms to nose, and Chase ran to his tote bag to dig for Purell because don’t touch your hands like that, city germs. They found him standing outside a bakery, nostrils to the air vent, huffing bread fumes.
You must have Whiffs, I said.
It had been going around, men contracting it left and right. By the solstice, every gay club had become some olfactory orgy. It reminded Chase of his olfactophilic ex-boyfriend. Gay men sniffing–whiffing–each other with abandon.
You got it like this. During sex, if you huffed in your partner’s musk too much, then you got Whiffs. It only really worked if he didn’t wear deodorant or if you’d just had sweaty sex. Something carried in the sweat glands made you love everything you smelled from then on. Chase and Caden were serial monogamists, religious shower-takers. Henry and I were cousins. Our aunts and uncles used to laugh–what are the odds, two gay grandsons. I hadn’t been with anyone since Jared, before Whiffs opened our noses to New York in June. Jared had cried in bed when he ended things. Jared had said he needed to focus on himself, his career. I was supposed to be finding myself again, but Henry was getting around. In an MDMA haze of glitter and foam, he’d met Bacchus at the club.
It happened so fast, Henry said. He swatted away Chase’s Purell and melted into the patina of his palm. He perked up when our perfumed waitress came to talk specials.
It was heady, Henry said. Bacchus was so musky that when we got back to his place it happened almost instantly. It was the best sex I’ve ever had.
Henry said Bacchus turned everyone he slept with to the other side. Henry said Bacchus was from the 80s and loved how Whiffs augmented pleasure.
You guys have to get it, Henry said.
It became his refrain. I’d find him in our bathroom, uncapping deodorants and my forgotten date night cologne. He would bring to our apartment men from the park and fuck them in the close chamber of his closet bedroom. When I went in to ask if he wanted takeout for dinner, I nearly fainted from the smell. He stroked his sticky chest with a stoner’s satisfaction.
Henry quit his job and started working at a candle shop. He’d stand in the back, unboxing their stock. He got a raise when his manager saw how intimately he understood smellscapes. He uncapped all our spices. I thought he might snort them. Henry planted on our couch with his laptop, searching for cheap flights to smell Venice in July. He talked about how aromatic the world was and wasn’t I missing out? This was condition without consequence, the pinnacle of pleasure. I told Henry I didn’t want it. I saw how obsessed he was. Henry couldn’t watch TV without blindly rubbing Tiger Balm into the canoe of his philtrum.
Jared went to all the same clubs we did. When we used to go out together, he would spritz Bay Rum behind his ears, and I’d chomp his earlobe before we were out the door. Now, Jared would be finding himself out there, Whiffs and Bay Rum too perfectly paired. Now in the clubs, Henry catalogued every cologne–he had it in for Abercrombie. Each time Henry opened his bedroom door, I’d stagger through the haze and wonder what would happen if I stepped in.
Each time Henry left, I’d stand in the kitchen, replacing the cap on the vanilla extract, huffing to see if I could find this euphoria too.
···
Henry skipped our trip. He found a flight to Venice he couldn't pass up. Think of the airport, the airplane air. Think of the caffè, the pizzerias, the green canals. I sat in the backseat of Caden’s rented Prius when we drove out. On the ferry, gay nostrils flared. They winked at us, all buttoned up and shampooed, like we didn’t know where we were going.
We did what we’d been planning to do: cooked dinners in the rental’s modern kitchen, ate shellfish by the ocean, swam naked in the Pines. We went to the beach bar, slithering through ripe bodies, and men dragged their noses up our necks and wrapped hands over our bare stomachs. Caden and Chase found the other monogamists and that was when I found Jared, shirtless with a younger guy. He caught me looking and ran my way. His black hair held more oil, more curl. He smelled of Old Spice, clasped my hips in his hands, Hey, you.
Weeks ago, he’d gotten drunk, met Bacchus playing pool, and had been whiffing the city ever since. It put things in perspective, he said.
Our aunts and uncles used to say that, having two gay grandsons, beating the odds, beaten down by some odds, put something in perspective. They found middle-aged gay hairdressers and clothing salesmen to give us pre-approved, vanilla advice on how to be good gays.
Henry huffed our vanilla extract. Henry didn’t call home to tell about Whiffs. Henry and Jared and everyone here had something right, so maybe I should take vanilla advice and put it in a new perspective.
Everyone said Bacchus had gone to Cherry Grove for some fun with the lesbians. Everyone said I should hurry up, hurry back, get it over with already.
He was easy to find, naked, hairy, in the dunes, twinks suckling noses into each crease of his body, clawing over each other, panting saliva-stained mouths to the moon.
Henry and I would host East Village olfactory bacchanals. We’d share the scene with nobody to answer to. We’d watch our aunts and uncles furrow their brows when we nearly orgasmed on Thanksgiving, inhaling every dish at once. We’d run back out after dinner. We wouldn’t have to stay long.
About the Author
Michael Colbert is an MFA student at UNC Wilmington, where he’s working on a novel-in-stories about bisexual love, loss, and hauntings. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among others.
Julia Cassell
About the Photographer
Julia Cassell lives, studies, and photographs in Western Massachusetts and Brooklyn, NY.
A Celebration of LGBTQ Writers & Artists
Taken from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and the poem “Rooms,” our series title appears in the line: “Cadences, real cadences, real cadences and a quiet color. Careful and curved, cake and sober, all accounts and mixture, a guess at anything is righteous, should there be a call there would be a voice.”
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