Just beginning to write and it’s 11pm. It’s an ambitious topic so I have doubts I can finish.
Back in the late eighties, the days when I wasn’t much more than a pimple-stricken hair-trigger-hard-on of a lad, all the hottest girls wore something called Malibu Musk. I am convinced that marketing studies were done for this product. Focus groups made up of newly-minted teenage boys. A demographic wholly unfamiliar with anything sexual yet for whom hormones are suddenly richly in bloom. Confused teenage boys who begin to look at the bra and panties section of mom’s JC Penney catalog in a whole new way. If I can liken this group of sexually-adrift proto-men to felines, then I posit that Malibu Musk was chemically engineered to be their catnip.
I would smell this intoxicating dollar store toilet-water on those girls in their babydoll dresses and stirrup pants and LA Gear shoes. They’d brush past me, Trapper Keepers clutched tight and filled science notes where future last-names were tested out in margins, and that scent would waft my way. This stuff was aerosol from the Gods. Gifted to earth-bound females so they could in complete innocence short-circuit developing male brains. One whiff and the neural pathways were immediately re-wired, cortex to gonads, an even swap for driver’s seat.
I fell in love with most girls in middle school. It’s really easy to do. Happens to boys often in those years. I would sit in class and visually move from chair to chair down the rows, stopping to contemplate each girl in turn. Would I take that one? No? What about if the sun exploded and I had eight minutes to live and she said it was on? What about in that case? Yeah, she’d do if the sun exploded. I hope all guys did this. Man I sure did. I had mental relations with all manner of girls when the imaginary sun exploded. Girls who wore Malibu Musk were it, though. The tops. You had the Musk and you had my heart; no supernova required. I’m yours.
I can’t even remember now what it smelled like. Probably candy. Something sweet and simple. Breezy. Maybe something guys of an age would like; Now and Laters or Skittles. Later in high school the Gods struck again with that insidious pear-smelling stuff from Victoria’s Secret. Ubiquitous on attractive girls of the early nineties it was Malibu Musk reborn into a higher caste, having left behind its lowly former instantiation and been reborn. Oh but it still titillated just the same, still lured and taunted and floated you along by the nose like the pies in windows do in cartoons.
Apparently they still sell the stuff; I should get some for Sharaun as a joke. A joke that I’ll implore her to humor me in, that is.
…
Turns out I lowballed it. I couldn’t concentrate to write. Sharaun had the TV on so I threw on the headphones and listened to something abstract to keep my attention on the laptop. I don’t know, maybe I did it justice. I wanted to write about Malibu Musk.
Goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- breakfast with no hog is a good day? - 2009
- anywhere but here - 2005
i used to smell the girls too. you were not alone.
It was the opposite for girls. I remember guys in junior high buying this awful, musky, musty smelling cologne at the K-Mart. They would drown themselve in it for the school dances and then ask you to slow dance after a multi-song set of fast dancing. The sweat would intensify the effect of the cologne transforming it from tolerable to down right pukey. Man… that smell is still in my nose.
And I wore Debbie Gibson’s Electric Youth. Pink cologne in a pink bottle with a pink swirled pump. Maybe I should have worn the Musk.
That’s what that stuff was called? I’m guilty as well.
Although it was the Berry V.S. lotion that did it for me in the 80’s, not the pear.
Aqua has a song for you off their greatest hits tour. I sent you the live version last night.
Back to the 80’s….