The Daily Write: The Smell of Sadness (July 24, 2012. 12 minutes)

The smell of sadness

John wet his pants, every day. A tall and lanky geek, he had red hair, freckles and very pale skin. He was nice enough, except the smell of urine was so overwhelmingly pungent and sour that it was hard not to gag. This must've been before they had adult diapers. It was also before the word "oarder" was commonly understood. OCD too. These terms were private back then in the 70s. They either weren't known, or weren't used outside the context of a psychiatrist's office and the DSM.

I'm not sure why my dad let us go to Fred's house. Fred was John's father. And father to Mary and Frankie. Mary was a year or two older than me, but my friend. Frankie was my age and a friend of my younger brother. Fred, I guess, was a Ham radio operator like my dad. Otherwise, I can't imagine what they would have had in common.

Seems to me like my dad was in hiding back then. He never fessed up to being a Jew. It was bad enough that he was a therapist in a tiny bedroom community of old and new money. It was bad enough he got paid by the county and didn't come with his own inheritance. So maybe, in that strange state of WASP-wannbeness, my dad was perfectly comfortable being friends with a man whose house was so full of junk you had to cut a path through to get to the bathroom. And I guess we all pretended to ignore the pee smell, even if we found ourselves involuntarily breathing through the mouth to avoid the embarrassment of being caught noticing.

Poor John. He must've been miserable. Mary and Frankie too. I have no idea what happened to their mother. That's another thing we had in common with them - motherless children living with our single dads in an era when few couples were divorced and fathers raising kids alone was unheard of. So maybe the dads, however ill fitting they were as friends, were sticking together, a sort of male feminist embodiment of what happens when the mother isn't the primary caregiver.

I lost touch with Mary and Frankie and I was never friends with John, although it wasn't because he smelled. He was a lot older, and a guy, and an introvert. I heard Frankie changed his name, Mary disappeared and the house burnt down. Which I guess, when all is said and done, is maybe the best outcome you could hope for. As long as no one got hurt.