I came home after going to go see a movie with my friend
when I noticed that something in my apartment stunk, and what it stunk of, I
wasn’t quite sure. While it smelled a bit ripe, I also smelled something that
was akin to rotting meat and the smells of tissue cultures from back when I
worked in a lab that had monkey kidney cells growing. I have always had a relatively strong sense of
smell. So much so that I can go to the bathroom after somebody and am able to
smell what their last meal has been, with extreme detail. So that being said,
rather pungent odors really bother me: candles, incense, perfume, cologne, and Cambodian
food.
I sniffed about my apartment to see what it could be coming
from, and after smelling the trash can, the garbage disposal, the unplugged
fridge that is dwelling in my living room, the new fridge that was just
installed, and finally I came to start smelling some fruit that I had left out
to ripen on my counter.
I had bought a lovely bunch of melons earlier in the week.
Why I decided I needed more melons in my life, I can’t be sure, but I still
felt the need to buy as many melons as I could possibly eat within the next week.
The problem was that I didn’t know how to pick out a good melon, and so I loaded
up my cart with the most symmetrical melons I could find, and I went to find an
employee who could tell me which melons I should buy.
The first employee I could find was working the sample
booth, and when I asked him how I could find a good melon, he replied, “You
have to smell it. You want the ones that smell melon-y.” I haven’t purchased a
melon in years, let alone sniffed one, so I picked up two of my melons out of
the stack in my cart and reached over the sneeze guard of the sample table to
have him sniff my melons. But sneeze guards are put up for reasons, and he
scolded me for reaching over, possibly contaminating all of the food he just
set up. Embarrassed, I loaded up my melons and searched the aisles for another
employee.
“I’m sorry, can you sniff my melons?” is not a question that
should be asked to a stranger, but after being rather coy about it with three
employees, I was done beating around the bush, and I was ready for somebody to
tell me which of my melons were best. The produce stocker told me that he preferred
to knock on melons to see if they were ripe, and after he knocked on a few, he
found one that he especially liked. After turning it around in his hands, he
brought it slowly up to his ear and shook it gently. “This is the one. It’ll be
good for four days.” He passed me back my melon, and the melon whisperer went
back to stacking produce.
Intimidated by the melon, I left it out for a few days so
that I could find out how to cut up melons, but then I had left it in a spot
where the sun shone in, and maybe that would throw off the melon’s juju, the
ripeness prophecy that I had received from the soothsayer of melon. Lazy as I am, I decided to ignore it and I would
deal with it the next day and by the time I got to it, the melon possibly could
have been the offender.
I cut into the melon the day after to see if it had rotted,
but instead, it just seemed rather juicy and fresh. I ate a slice, and then
another, but there was no rot to be found. And even after I had disposed of my
melon, my apartment still stunk of death and chemical solvent. What could this
smell be? It would be my luck that a rat would have made its way into my new cabinets
while my kitchen was being refurbished, getting sealed into a crevice, and
dying.
Lazy again, I decided to take a nap whilst airing out my
apartment, thinking that maybe it was some awful gas cloud that had descended
upon my dwelling, and I fell asleep quick, and hard; the hard sleep that you
get where you have no dreams and you don’t move. And then I was slapped in the
face by the smell, more pungent than ever.
After evacuating my apartment, I turned and saw a shell on
my neighbor’s countertop and I knew instantly what it was: durian. And when I
walked up a little closer, I could see that my neighbors also had two more
durian, wrapped up in a towel in their apartment. My hoarding, Asian neighbors
were now starting to collect durian, and I saw my life flash before my eyes.
If you are unfamiliar with durian, it is a fruit from
Southeast Asia that has a spiny outside, which is supposed to be the sweetest
fruit that you will ever eat. But this fruit is banned by most hotels and
public places because of its stench that stains everything in sight, leaving
anything in its path to smell like meat, and death, and skunk. The stench is so
bad that I can tell if a grocery store carries durian by just standing at the
door. And that is how powerful the stench is when unopened. But when durian is
cracked open, the smell increases tenfold.
I already hate my downstairs, Asian neighbors, and so I
decided to let them know that I would not be okay with them eating durian under
my apartment. I stood at the doorway and yelled into the apartment, trying to
get one to come out, and the old, Asian woman that I had taken into my
apartment one cold night came from the back bedroom. She gave me a greasy smile
that was literally greasy due to the durian, and after I told her that she
couldn’t keep any more durian, she just smiled and closed the door. I feel as
though she plans on continuing to eat the vile fruit.
