The Last Time I Saw Richard, Chapter 5
Richard was a lot calmer after talking with Vince, and after I got a third beer in me I started to relax a bit as well. I ordered another round and waters for both of us; I still felt Vince’s eyes burning a hole in the back of my head and didn’t want to lose all my edge. Richard was oblivious to his new friend’s interest and kept rambling semi-coherently about hunters and odors, secret societies, and cover-ups. He was stuttering and stumbling over his words as they poured out of him. Half-finished ideas were dropped as new trains of thought came to him, only to resurface minutes later in the middle of some unrelated rant. I let it all wash over me and tried not to let him see how very sad it made me. My friend - my smart, vibrant, take-life-by-the-balls friend - was gone, replaced by this blubbering and rancid crazy person.
“What do you know about perfume?” I only registered the question from the silence that followed it. Richard had been talking so much, a constant stream of white noise, its absence jolted me out of my thoughts.
“Sorry. Perfume? Nothing, really. It’s, uh, stronger than cologne, right? There’s toilet water, cologne, and perfume?”
“Western people have been using scented oils and balms for thousands of years and—”
“—Wait. Just western people? No ancient Chinese perfume secrets?”
“In the east they had incense but didn’t anoint with scents so much. That’s more a western thing, the spice routes, resins, oils. You know, the spice road ran through…”
He started to wander off on a tangent again, his eyes getting that thousand-yard stare, and I regretted interrupting him for my stupid joke. “Wait man. Just get back to the perfume history, okay? You can tell me about the spice road later.”
“Oh, yeah, sure. So, where was I? Right. Scented oils. You know the gifts the three wise men brought Jesus?”
“Gold, frankincense, and myrrh, right? I always figured those two took their buddy behind the manger for a beat down for showing them up with gold.” I took a last swallow of my beer and motioned for another round. Vince was standing like a cigar store Indian, impassively staring at Richard.
“Oh no! Not at all. If anything, he probably felt like a chump. Frankincense and myrrh were much more valuable. They were used for anointing: priests, kings, the dead.”
“Okay, so they were the first perfumes?”
“No, not perfumes. Not perfumes at all! Scented oils. Resins and herbs. Sometimes the petals of flowers. But no fixatives, no distillation, nothing like what we know today. Not until they came.”
Richard shook a cigarette out of his crumpled pack and banged it on the tabletop like John Henry, racing for his life. “Buddy, you can’t light up in here. Remember?”
The waitress glided over with two bottles and two fresh glasses of water. She placed a clean ashtray in front of Richard as he shook his match out and dropped it in, still smoking and sulfurous. “Vince has it covered.”
I sighed and waved the smoke out of my face.
Richard continued, “Four thousand years ago there was this huge factory on Cyprus, churning out these oils for the wealthy merchants and priests and kings to use. But that was it. The masses didn’t use them. Hell, the bible forbids it. Then a thousand years ago it all changed.”
I caught Vince moving out of the corner of my eye and shot a look his way. Another customer, looking as wayworn and ripe as Richard, was dragging herself in the door and Vince rushed over to welcome her. “Another regular?” I asked Richard, nodding my head her way.
Richard’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. “That’s Mary. You’ll love her!”
I doubted very much I’d love Mary, or the mix of catbox and week-old goulash that was already wafting our way, but this was the happiest Richard had looked all evening. I took a swallow of beer while I could still taste it and braced myself.
Mary plopped into the booth next to Richard and, grateful she hadn’t sat by me, I reached my hand over. She stared at it for a few seconds, confused or concerned I couldn’t tell, then daintily shook it. Even so, I could feel that her hands were rough as a longshoreman’s. I stifled a laugh when she grabbed a paper napkin and wiped her hand clean after releasing mine.
“I was just telling Matt all about perfume.”
“Did you tell him about Avicenna?” Her voice was raspy; when she pulled out a pack of the same noxious cigarettes as Richard I knew why. The waitress came by and put a bottle of rye and shot glass in front of Mary as she blew a cloud of blue smoke in my face.
“No. I was just about to. Why don’t you tell it? I need to hit the head.”
Despite the three beers and all the water, I felt okay but I wasn’t about to stay alone with Mary while Richard scurried off. “I’ll join you.”
It was a bright and surprisingly clean bathroom. The floor was a checkerboard tile that looked as though it had been recently mopped and the sink didn’t have those inexplicable spots of abraded enamel. Richard claimed the urinal so I went to the single stall and opened the door. The walls had a fresh coat of off-white paint and there was no graffiti inside the stall. Richard was already shaking off before I’d started - even before this turn of events he’d never suffered from a shy bladder like me - and started talking as he washed his hands. “What do you think of Mary?”
Under cover of the running water I was able to relax and start draining. Which was fortunate because I had no idea how to answer.
I finished and flushed. When I turned around I saw some punk had tagged the inside of the door. I never understood the point. I mean, a few guys were real artists and their graffiti was beautiful, but a couple of quick squiggles of spray paint, that’s not art. They looked really out of place in this clean, almost sterile room and I just stared at them in disgust for a minute until I noticed they were familiar. They looked like some of the shapes I’d seen drawn on the bedsheets back in Richard’s apartment. His breakdown was starting to make a little more sense to me, now.
“So?”
“She seems nice. Are you two, uh…” I couldn’t imagine it. Richard had always pursued the most beautiful women. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they were—
“—We’ve been together a few months now. When it’s safe, anyway.”
I washed up and we went back to the booth where Mary had already made a considerable dent in her bottle. Before I was even seated she started. “Abu Ali Sina was a Persian scholar around the year 1000. Wrote books on medicine and pharmacology; wrote about physics and geology. He was years ahead of everyone else. Greeks called him Avicenna.”
Richard put two cigarettes in his mouth and lit them off one match. He handed one to Mary who shut her eyes and took a long drag. The creases, filled with soot and sebum, relaxed for the first time and I saw the face of a young woman hiding beneath the dirt and nicotine. I wondered how long she’d been crazy and then realized Richard was just as far gone. It was like being hit in the gut. This moment, seeing the two of them smoking quietly, made his condition more obvious than all the ranting and weird behavior had. My friend was sick and I didn’t know what to do about it. Mary blew one last plume of acrid smoke through her nose and stubbed out her cigarette.
“You see, up until then it was just scented oils and incense. But they taught Avicenna all about distillation and how to use fixatives like musk and myrrh.”
“I thought people already used myrhh?”
“As a fragrance, yeah. But not like this. Avicenna used it as a base note. It wasn’t the aroma. It was just the bit that kept the aroma around.”
Mary nodded appreciatively at Richard’s explanation, even though it didn’t mean anything to me.
She continued, “Once the Persians and Arabs had perfumes they had thousands of different recipes. It wasn’t just a couple dozen scents anymore. And these were long-lasting. Perfect for tagging.” She stared at me, waiting for me to ask a question or nod understanding, I wasn’t sure which. I chose to nod silently.
Richard finished off his beer and slammed the bottle on the table. “So now you see, right? They’re tagging us like wild animals so they can track us.”
