A rather large moth fluttered into the torchiere lamp while I worked at my desk this evening. I saw the moth, I saw the lamp, and I just knew my writing session would end with smoke. It wouldn’t be exaggerating to say I nearly dove for the ceiling fan switch as soon as the moth headed for the lamp. The fan is running now. It isn’t helping.
A logical person might wonder why I didn’t instead dive for the lamp. Perhaps I could have turned it off, and saved myself the lingering stench of death? Well, sure. But then I’d still have a moth fluttering around, wouldn’t I? A moth planning to wait until I fell asleep so that it could land on my face and lay eggs in my eyeballs. To which I say, burn you little bastard.
Still. It’s not as bad as the piece of Gene Simmons I was “invited” to sniff last Friday.
Last week, my friend Scott Phillips made a visit to the workshop in Los Angeles that handles, among many other amazing things, repairs for Gene Simmons’s concert armor. (Scott is an original, card-carrying member of the KISS army. Me, I’m agnostic on the whole heavy metal kabuki show concept.) He joined in on some repairs, and even got to take some spare parts home as “souvenirs”.
They do not smell good. Even the tiniest pieces. And it’s not subtle, either.
Just try to imagine the funk that comes from a piece of metallized plastic that has been strapped to a sweaty Gene Simmons for countless KISS concerts since the 1970s.
Sure, there’s sweat. A heavy undernote of biology. But there’s also a melange of face paint, burnt plastic, lighter fluid, tour buses, and 1978. It finishes with a bouquet of bourbon, vomit, and hotel carpet.
Okay, I’m making up that last part about the bouquet. But the rest is true. There’s a reason Scott keeps it all sealed away.
Oh, man Ian! I cannot believe you fell for that. “Here, smell this,” is one of the ways we torment our third year interns at the lab. There’s nothing quite like the smell of a textile that’s been rewetted after being intermittently urinated on by various rodents and then allowed to dry decade after decade.
Hopefully you’ve learned never, NEVER to smell anything “historic” when offered to you with ill concealed glee by the person working with it.
On another note, I need to find out more about this workshop in LA. From a professional standpoint, not a KISS Army one mind you.
Scott did warn me before taking out Exhibit A. I think his exact words were, “It smells really really bad.”
Which I suppose makes me even MORE of a sucker. What kind of person listens to that warning and then thinks, “Man, I have to smell that!”
I think Pat knows the workshop in question. She knows everybody.