Scents & Sensibility

When I was 13 years old, I stole a bottle of Bath & Body Work’s Warm Vanilla Sugar body lotion from my little sister’s vanity because I thought it smelled like sex.

Being a pre-pubescent micro homo (micro’mo?) with overprotective parents and no vision of the world outside of Cow & Chicken and Dexter’s Laboratory, I couldn’t grasp the concept of porking another human, let alone describe the scent it would give off. But I decided that warm vanilla sugar had to be in the ballpark. It was romantic and intoxicating and made my underwear tighter. So I took the bottle when Rachel wasn’t around, and hid it in my tin X-men lunch box between an unwrapped Ring Pop and several pictures of Erik von Detten that I’d printed out at school. Every now and then, when I was waiting for the bathroom to fill up with steam, I’d take the bottle out, hold it up to my nose and think, “This must be what falling in love smells like.” It smelled like that scene in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the front door of her house in Munchkinland and everything goes gaytechnicolorfiesta. “Ahhhhh, this is lovely.”

Although the bottle of lotion would eventual play a major role in my sex life, my relationship with it never veered into self-gratification territory. Sure it smelled like an Aimee Mann song, but I certainly wasn’t going to rub it on my dick. This was captive romance – the sex we envision when we’re too young to understand it. Candles, and rose petals, and chocolate-dipped strawberries. No, no. This was not for jerking off. This was special. Sacred, almost.

On the evening of Brother Martin High School’s Eighth Grade Dance, I laced up my Doc Martens, walked through a cloud of Axe Body Spray, and smeared a tiny puddle of Warm Vanilla Sugar across my neck. Monica Carlisle’s parents were dropping her off at my house around 6:00, but I’d been ready since 4:30. This was going to be my first date, and Warm Vanilla Sugar was decidedly part of my A-game. I had zero interest in kissing this poor girl, but Monica was one of the prettier girls from my elementary school, and I knew that she would definitely elicit looks from the popular guys at my new high school. This makes me sound like I was using her, but trust me: gay guys and the girls who befriend them mutually benefit from the bond. Girls get a shopping buddy, gays get straight bait.

Needless to say, neither dinner at Bennigan's nor the hormonal, American Eagle-soaked fuckpit of my eighth grade dance resulted in a handy jay for either of us. But my sister’s lotion was now part of who I was when I braved the world.

From then on, I’d wear just a little bit whenever I went on a date. I thought of it as my secret weapon – the one thing you can’t put your finger on. I wasn’t wearing it the night I met my first girlfriend, but every time we hung out after that, I was. And when I graduated high school and moved to Lafayette, it came with me. 

Today, the same bottle of Warm Vanilla Sugar body lotion sits in my shaving kit among a handful of unused LifeStyles Tuxedo Black condoms and a lighter that reads, “Tease.” It only has about two ounces left in it, but I’ll make it lasts as long as possible. Sure I can go out and buy another (and eventually I will), but it’s got good juju attached to it, and it’s seen me through some weird and horny times. And if you’re wondering if I still wear it, I do. But only on first dates or when I’m 100-percent certain of penetration.

Looking back, it's charming how I used to confuse sex with love. Even more so that I believed either could be reduced to a song, or a scene from a movie, or a scent. But when we're young, and primed for fucking up, we see purity and we deserve it. We'll lose our virginity on prom night to the person we'll eventually marry, and then we'll see the world differently. In the mean time, we hold on to the items that will take us there. Some of us even hold on to them long after the fantasy is over; a reminder. A relic. As for me, I wouldn't even trade my secret bottle of lotion for a pair of ruby slippers.

Ruby combat boots? Let me think about it.