Breath strokes

There once was a guy with bad breath. And no, that’s not the beginning of a limerick.

 

Not only does the man exist, but he was a coworker of mine for a time – long ago, when I was but a wide-eyed rookie on the make. (As opposed to a cynical schmuck on the make.) This unfortunate fellow had breath so foul it had become a kind of legend; children tell ghost stories around campfires that aren’t nearly as horrifying as half a puff from this fellow’s noxious cavern of a mouth. 

 

It would begin as a faint cloud around his head and then spread with alarming range and force, withering flowers and triggering gag reflexes within a shockingly large radius. If the U.S. government were made aware of the sheer power of the guys’ halitosis, he’d immediately be whisked away to the Middle East and employed as a biological weapon. The Islamic State would surrender their arms, sequester themselves in an underground bunker and never be seen again, save for the occasional beer run or selfie with a malnourished camel.

 

It was like a clump of rotting flowers wrapped in a deerskin sack.

 

Or a petrified dinosaur turd slicked up with dog slobber.

 

Can you endure one more of these? I’ve got a real peach.

 

It was like moldy bread crammed into an armpit and lathered with decade-old Nutella.

 

Yuck.

 

Bad breath is one of those ailments no one likes to talk about. It’s a strangely personal thing, tied up as it is with a person’s natural musk – a biological effervescence, as it were. No one likes to think that any aspect of their body is gross, and so legions of unfortunate stink-breathed souls live their entire lives never knowing they have the power to kill iguanas and small birds with a simple exhale. I can’t imagine any other physical conditions are subject to the same level of tactful secrecy.

 

“Well, Joe, according to Mrs. Bubbledink’s charts, she’s got an advanced case of malaria. Let’s not tell her, though. We wouldn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

 

If anything, you’d think that knowledge of one’s own lizard breath would be empowering. It’s an affliction that can, in many cases, be remedied easily enough with a few unobtrusive lifestyle changes.

 

A quick trip to WebMD – everyone’s favorite web-based self-diagnosis tool – reveals the most common causes of bad breath to be the obvious suspects: diet and cleaning habits. There’s no real secret here. There are certain serious conditions which can augment bad breath, like pneumonia, bronchitis, and liver and kidney problems, but these are in the minority, and in the case of my eye-watering former workmate, I think he’s more or less in the clear. He never went on hacking spurts of machine gun-level force, and otherwise seemed virile enough, attacking his assignments with the gusto of a ’roided-up linebacker, albeit with fewer emotional outbursts. 

 

He did, however, eat a lot of burgers. McDonald’s burgers. And as anyone who’s eaten at McDonald’s knows well, their burgers are rife with minced onions.

 

Onions alone would not be enough to explain his mutant funk. His overall aura was more like the bastard lovechild of a giant bratwurst and a butt-sniffing Australian dingo. But they surely didn’t help. Onions, like all other foods, are broken down in the mouth, absorbed into the bloodstream during digestion, and carried off to, among other places, the lungs – where they can resurface as an olfactory assault. Foods with stronger odors, sensibly enough, translate into stronger odors emitted from the mouth, which is why you never see dating couples noshing on seaweed and old engine parts.

 

The fix? Easy. Drop the onion-laced burgers (and the jalapeno dip, and the grouse necks dipped in garlic butter), and replace them with something boring, like apples. You may be left wanting in terms of culinary excitement, but no one’s ever said, “Eww, step back, dude! What is that, Golden Delicious?”

 

Oral hygiene is of course the other common culprit, and adapting to a new routine can be tricky. Personally, I’ve never been able to adhere to a consistent flossing schedule. I’ll succumb to Floss Fever and go ape on the ol’ gums for about a week, during which time I feel absurdly virtuous, like I’ve just donated money to cancer research or cleaned Lucky Strikes off a beach. Then I start to feel silly with a string in my teeth and go slack for several days, letting sweet pea skin accumulate next to virtual nests of those brown crusty things that are in popcorn. Do those crusty things have a name? They should have a name.

 

Painfully aware of my lax ways, I try to avoid talking into peoples’ faces while I’m on these breaks from flossing. How terrible it would be to rival my good buddy Stinkbreath in the legendary smell department. Better to retain my current legend as a man whose piercing falsetto can make spiders explode.

 

Again, the fix is easy. Suck it up and start cleaning house. You might even find that silver earring you lost when you blacked out on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

 

People are stinky, when you get right down to it. Between brushing, flossing, bathing and washing, we spend a great deal of our time subduing our natural proclivity to reek. It’s a necessary endeavor, but well worth the fight, since neglect in this area can lead to unwanted reputations, as is the case with my mushroom-breathed compatriot. I haven’t seen the man in years, but I imagine his oral swamp is still the cause of many a noxious cloud, polluting his personal space with an aroma more pungent than a moldy golf bag stuffed with rotten oranges.

 

Or a half-melted tractor tire lathered in old salsa.

 

One more, because I can: a pair of ancient underwear drenched with the sweat of an alcoholic sumo wrestler.

 

I’m tellin' you, I’ve got a million of ’em.

 

Grad you could make it

It may be an ominous sign that I’m starting this off with a disclaimer, but here goes: Graduations are wonderful events. They are. They allow students and their families to celebrate a praiseworthy accomplishment, and I know from personal experience that the gowns are almost sweatpants-level comfortable. You can let your belt out a couple of notches and cram down a breakfast of cake and beer and still look great in pictures. That’s not a small thing.

 

What’s frustrating about graduations is that they all follow the same pattern. Every single one.

 

Which wouldn’t normally be an issue. I mean, how many graduations does the typical person attend in their lifetime? Around five at most? Let’s break it down. Person X has to attend her own, of course; her parents made her. That’s one. Years later she has a family of her own, with two lovely children who make it through high school intact. That’s three. One of the children becomes a sword juggler hustling for change on the streetcorners of Bangkok, but the other follows a more traditional route and graduates from Northeastern with a Bachelor’s degree in interspecies electrolysis. Person X is up to four graduations now. Just when she thought she was done with them, her nephew graduates summa cum laude from a little-known university whose mascot appears to be Satan making a welcome mat out of plastic canvas. She attends. Person X has now gone to five graduations throughout her life, and since they were spread out over time, she doesn’t mind that they were all essentially the same, but with the colors and music swapped out.

 

Person X was never a journalist, though. Which means she probably didn’t have to go to three graduations within a two-week span, unless of course her sister, Person Y, has children the exact same age in the next town over. But let’s leave Persons X and Y alone for now. I’m getting tired of the Letter People.

 

The point – and I’m pretty sure there was one – is that a journalist, at least on the local level, goes to a ton of graduations. And since they’re not connected to the graduates in any way, the journalist notices things with a more objective eye, such as the general uniformity that pervades these ceremonies.

 

Think of every one you’ve ever been to. They all follow more or less the same rhythm. The music swells, and the graduates walk to their seats, marching in the awkward lockstep of zombies getting up to pee in the middle of the night. There’s an opening speaker. Then another. Then a musical number. Then two more speakers, then the handing of diplomas. Then everyone throws their caps in the air and cavorts with family before heading off to various graduation parties, many of them consisting of pick-up games of basketball and bittersweet reminiscences of the time they filled Joey Flapperdoodle’s locker with canned foam. Poor Flapperdoodle. Between locker pranks and his penchant for playing chess in Harry Potter garb, the guy just couldn’t catch a break.

 

The cookie-cutter sameness of these ceremonies is somewhat necessary;  budget constraints make it virtually impossible to hire the rock band U2 to send off graduates with a pyrotechnics-laden performance of “Beautiful Day.” And for anyone not suffering from overexposure, these events are still nice capstones for the young men and women in their flowing robes. Graduating high school isn’t as simple as most of us remember, and it’s a milestone worthy of a fuss.

 

Still, in an alternate reality in which money doesn’t matter, it would be nice to stage a really rockin’ extravaganza, something to break through the monotony. For the graduates, yes, but also for we, the jaded journalistic audience.

 

Consider the following fantasy scenario.

 

Awesome High School is about to kick off its commencement ceremony at the former Civic Center in Portland. The lights dim. The audience hushes. Suddenly, the opening chords of “Sweet Emotion” shake the walls as Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler ziplines from the rafters to the stage, dressed in a zebra-print leotard and combat boots the bright neon green of radioactive chemicals. The curtains part to reveal the rest of the band, decked out in Awesome High School’s trademark purple and orange. (Students endure a lot of headaches at Awesome High School.) After a few choice numbers, the students come running onto the floor full-tilt, bursting through a large paper cutout of their logo, a generic superhero drop-kicking a Nazi in the teeth. They’re ushered in by a recording of the theme music from “Rocky” and an indoor fireworks display just a few degrees cooler than the surface of the sun.

 

Speech time. Only, instead of the usual faculty speeches, comedian Louis C.K. rises to the podium from a hidden trap door and delivers a virtuoso half-hour set, crushing with a riff on how history would have played out had Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in a rap battle. The valedictorian and salutatorian then dazzle with a bravura performance from Riverdance; and festivities come to a close with Megadeth axeman Dave Mustaine shredding on a 12-minute guitar solo while prop comic Gallagher smashes watermelons with a wooden sledgehammer.

 

Now that’s a graduation.

 

But you know what? Maybe I’m being selfish. Even though that epic commencement would be talked about for years – nay, decades – it would be geared primarily toward the rare group that’s perhaps a little grad-weary from years of exposure. The focus should be on the graduates, of course, and it usually is. It’s just that you can’t stop a guy from dreamin’, and I’d like to think that one day, with the right school and under the right circumstances, something spectacular will happen.

 

In case it does, someone should tell Steven Tyler to keep his June schedule clear.

 

According to gym

If you had asked me a couple of years ago whether I was a gym person, I would have replied, “The gym? You mean that place with all the weights and whirring machines and grunting men? Get outta here!” Then I would have pointed at you and laughed, ’cause I’m a tool.

 

Turns out the joke is on me. Here I am, a grunting man with weights in my hands, wondering how on earth I ended up standing in front of a wall-length mirror next to a beefcake clad in a Spider-Man T-shirt. I’m pretty sure he’s wearing cologne to cover up the stink of his sweat, which frankly isn’t working. He just smells like a lilac with armpits.

 

I feel like an intruder.

 

It’s not that I’m a stranger to exercise, exactly. It’s just that, until recently, my workouts have been private affairs – long walks along the banks of a river, quiet bicep curls at home, and maybe some haphazard situps to put a dent in a gut that looks like half a melting coconut. Only in solitude can I let go of self-consciousness and achieve my Zen state, which is another way of saying that I generally look like an ignorant boob while doing this kind of stuff. Full disclosure: I also look like an ignorant boob while not doing this kind of stuff.

 

Then the back injury happened, and the physical therapy, and a new mission statement emerged – to fortify my spine by strengthening the muscles that support it. That meant ditching my humble home setup in favor of the gym’s ample offerings. It also meant taking my scarecrow-esque gyrations out where they could be readily seen and scrutinized, which naturally filled me with trepidation. I’d have been more comfortable with a directive to pee in front of a panel of judges.

 

I figured I was in for a strange world. I wasn’t wrong.

 

The first thing you notice when you walk into the gym is that everyone’s a blur of motion, but nobody’s actually going anywhere. This is in contrast to everyday life, in which people are going somewhere, but at a pace that makes growing grass look like the Indy 500. The second thing you notice is the smell. Apparently, when you work out, your burned-up calories evaporate and collect in the atmosphere like steam, only this calorie-steam brings back memories of when your brother tried to suffocate you with a pair of used socks in middle school. Sidebar: Why did humans evolve to be stinky when they sweat? Think of how much more pleasant exercise would be if we emitted dryer sheet odors during squat thrusts.

 

That’s all stuff you get used to, though. What’s tougher to overcome – at least if you’re a wallflower – is the sense of intimidation.

 

Take the guy next to me in the Spider-Man shirt. His biceps alone are the size of small dogs; he probably gets a decent workout just lifting his arm to pick his nose. Between sets, he walks around with his chest puffed out as if to say, “I’m a bro, bro. I could armwrestle Godzilla and win, bro. I drink protein shakes and own many pairs of neon-colored running shoes. Bro.”

 

To be clear, it’s not his physical strength that intimidates me. I could totally take him in a fight, mostly ’cause I’m kinda weird and I cheat a lot. It’s just that he’s so much better at this whole workout thing than I am. Look at him! He’s lifting 45-lb. weights over his head and smiling! His form is perfect! Meanwhile, in my attempts to gradually re-build a brittle body, I look like a gazelle with a broken leg trying to get out of the way of traffic.

 

What separates a gym person from a non-gym person is not physique, but mindset. People of all shapes and sizes go there, which is awesome – that’s how it should be. But you don’t see a lot of overly neurotic people working on their pecs. Crippling neurosis has always been my great downfall when it comes to doing pretty much anything in a public space. This includes breathing and existing.

 

My main problem is that I think too much. The woman on the stair machine, the dude doing leg lifts – I worry that they’re watching my attempts at rehab and silently mocking me, and honestly I couldn’t blame them if they were. Because of my oddly-shaped frame and gangly limbs, it’s a veritable comedy show when I walk across a room, let alone bang out crunches on a medicine ball. Think of a drunk guy trying to get to his feet after stumbling into a rosebush. That’s more or less what it looks like.

 

In reality, it’s likely that no one cares how I look, and can’t be bothered to expend precious energy on mocking. But I obsess, because I do mock. I’ve got it coming, and it’s only a matter of time before someone derisively notes that I’m wearing white socks with black windpants.

 

I’ve gradually become accustomed to going to the gym, like any routine. In my case, it’s worth the imagined public shaming, since my upper back in particular is no longer feeble, like a collapsing accordion. The body is an amazing machine; given enough time and patience, you can direct its development to an uncanny degree, even if you create a YouTube-worthy spectacle in the process. It shouldn’t matter what other people think, because improved health is the endgame, and there are many roads that lead to this goal.

 

But that doesn’t mean I’ll ever think of myself as a “gym person,” per se. I don’t own nearly enough Spandex. Is that a stereotype? That’s probably a stereotype.

 

My good buddy Spider-Man just re-racked his weights and headed back toward the changing room. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me. Maybe now I can finally concentrate.

 

Childspeak

If everybody spoke the way a child did, the world would be a much more honest place. More ridiculous, as well, since world leaders would frequently call each other “booger faces” and shoot spitballs at each other. But at least they’d be saying what they’re thinking.

 

On a recent lazy Sunday, in the midst of an afternoon which demanded that one spend time in the sunkissed outdoors, I drove down to Rotary Park in Biddeford with a camping chair and a book, intent on reading the afternoon away while a warm river breeze caressed my face. I found a shady spot on the riverbank, started unfolding the chair, and looked down to find a small blond boy staring up at me with a Kool-Aid-stained grin spread from cheek to cheek. He held a stick in each hand.

 

“I’m gonna throw this stick in the river!” he announced emphatically. He then followed up on his promise with a mighty chuck, the stick tumbling end over end as it smacked the water’s surface. Not a bad arm for a kid probably no older than 4.

 

“Nice work,” I said.

 

The boy’s demeanor and countenance then took a sharp detour. This happens with some kids. One minute they’re happy-go-lucky bundles of positivity, the next they’re sulking like a caped avenger brooding over a bank robbery. His grin became a frown, tinged with confusion.

 

“Are you sticking around for marshmallows?” he asked.

 

Needless to say, I had not planned on marshmallows. The boy’s family apparently had, for nearby in the park, I could hear the sounds of an imminent barbecue; a woman, presumably the boy’s mother, appeared from between a thicket of trees, approaching us and looking positively horrified.

 

“No,” I told the boy, “I love marshmallows, but I forgot to bring mine.”

 

A beat passed. And then, just as his mother came within earshot, the boy said, “You forgot to bring your hair.”

 

I’ve got to hand it to him. That was a pretty awesome line.

 

Mom came and whisked him away, shooting me an apologetic look, and as they retreated back to their area of the park I could hear the poor woman explaining to her son that some people shave their heads as a matter of style; she still sounded embarassed.

 

Only she had no reason to be. I was fine with the whole encounter. The boy was just speaking his mind, and that’s what kids do.

 

We lose that as we grow into adults, largely out of pure necessity. Daily life requires some modicum of tact. Imaging if we introduced the loose tak of youth into everyday situations –

 

At work: “Hey boss, your ideas are stupid and you smell like an armpit!”

 

At a job interview: “Why are your eyes so big? Is it because of those dumb glasses?”

 

At the movies: “Nice underwater escape, Stallone! ADRIAAAAANNN!”

 

You can see how this would be problematic.

 

By the same token, adults often have a tendency to play it too safe, and could probably learn a thing or two from their diminutive counterparts.

 

I offer the English language itself as proof of this. The more adept we become at playing the whole adulthood game – and it’s definitely a game – the more we hide behind euphemisms, mask our true intentions, and say things without actually saying them. We ensconce ourselves in a complex web of B.S.

 

Here’s a for-instance for you. You’re on a first date. It’s going badly. The person sitting across from you forgot to shower, and smells like a plastic bag of animal hair burning in an oil field. She’s eating spaghetti with her fingers and can’t stop talking about how Hitler really wasn’t such a bad guy. Clearly, things aren’t going to work out. You handle the situation by politely engaging in small talk – “So, it sure has been humid lately!” – and refraining from rude behavior, like checking the time on your phone, or silently weeping into your mashed potatoes. Then, as you’re about to part ways for the night, you compose a parting line: “Thanks for coming out tonight. I’ll call you sometime.” You call her sometime, but only to inform her that you won’t be treating her to enchilladas in the near future.

 

That’s typical adult-speak.

 

Child-speak would go something like this: “You’re a smelly, racist pig! See you later, butthead!”

 

It’s mean, but there’s something cathartic and no-nonsense about the child’s approach. It leaves no wiggle room, no space for interpretation. It’s pure honesty, unmolested by airs. And you don’t even have to call her again! What an adult can learn from this situation is to meld their grown-up tact with a child’s forthrightness, and say something like, “Thanks for coming out tonight. I didn’t feel a spark, but I wish you the very best.” No games, no messing around. Just the truth. And you don’t even have to call her again!

 

Here’s another one. You’re at a family reunion, and you’re locked into a conversation with crazy Uncle Lenny, to whom you haven’t spoken in about six years, mostly because he spends the majority of his time tripping on acid and staring at his Hubert Humphrey campaign bumper sticker. You’re trying to extricate yourself from the encounter when he floats you an unappealing invitation: to help him choreograph a Barry Manilow-themed dance number for his “America’s Got Talent” audition.

 

The adult lies: “Sorry, I’m having an operation to remove my sphincter. I’ll be out of commission for a while.”

 

The child tells the truth: “That sounds dumb. You’re dumb. I want cake!”

 

In a way, I admire the blond boy for speaking his mind – even as I’m jealous that he can get away with it. But there’ll come a time, one day soon, when he’ll walk up to another head-shaver, and instead of saying, “You forgot your hair,” he’ll say, “I really like your hair-do,” and the person he’s speaking to won’t be  certain as to whether there’s a hint of sarcasm buried under the surface. 

 

On that day, the boy will become a man.