Ah, the sweet perfume of Spring. Not a man alive can take in that warm fresh air through his nose & not be taken back to some time in his past: a time when he was younger & dumber & more filled to the brim w/ life. For me, that time was a day in the spring of 1994. I was, what? Fifteen? Sixteen? The math says fourteen. Those trying years all blur together. Who really uses birthdates as milestones, anyway? It was the spring of 1994 and my life was not in a good place. I was, as many of my kind were, a social reject in school. I didn't want to associate with anyone there, and they, in turn, did not wish to associate with me. Had they left me alone, I would've been overjoyed, but they did not. Sensing that I didn't have the slightest desire to play their stupid reindeer games, I became the target around which all social niches could unify. I was the common enemy of all of them, simply because I wished to exist apart from them all.

Emotionally, I was starting a downward spiral. I didn't see any beauty in the world. It was full of vermin, garbage, and if God Himself struck the earth into cinders with His flaming sword, I wouldn't be at all upset. The hate was all there, accumulating and perverting into something I didn't want to acknowledge. I looked at myself in the mirror the way Winston Smith does in 1984: berift of passion, berift of joy. I could see the shit piling up around me, and I was helpless to do anything about it. I couldn't escape it and I couldn't undo it.

I'd like to tell you that I met a Julia and everything turned around, but it didn't. There was no Julia. There was only school. School was a suburban nightmare the likes of which I would've chosen death over enduring another day of it. It was spring of 1994, and one of the few friends I had, Jon, was the only person I could talk to without clenching my teeth and coating my speech with lethal amounts of sarcasm. He was the only person I didn't hate.

Jon was a very nice guy. We talked about the typical things adolescents talked about. Video games, TV, and women. I wasn't very deep in 9th grade. Talking to Jon was almost the highlight of my day. The highlight was 2nd period, when I got to sit in a real desk for the first time each day. My homeroom was the drafting room -- just drafting tables and stools. 1st period was Home Ec. -- real tables and real chairs. 2nd period was history. American or World or POD or something. I can't remember which and I don't really care. It was a real desk and chair combination, so I could grab onto the metal sidearm, put my feet against the legs, and torque my back to get it to crack. This was the highlight of my day. This was why I got up in the morning -- to crack my back. You can imagine the sort of hellhole in which you'd have to exist in order to regard cracking your back as the highlight of your day. So I'd talk to Jon and crack my back. This was the extent of things I regarded as worth doing during school hours. The homework all got done, the papers got written, but these were automatic things that required all the persistence of scratching my ass. I read a lot in study halls.

As anyone who knows me well will attest, I know a thing or two about movies, especially trashy movies like Sorority House Massacre II and Night Eyes Three. Well, back in the summer of 1994, I was pretty much the same way, only about half as knowledgeable as I am now. One of the best places to catch these sorts of movies (if you're fourteen and don't want to spend money) is USA's Up All Night, a fiendishly frisky show on the USA Network that makes no excuses as to the fact that they're going to play a heavily-edited titty movie on basic cable. On Friday nights, Gilbert Gottfried would scream about something stupid and then they'd play more of Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell. On Saturdays, Rhonda Shear would act all buxom and blonde. Then they'd play a Troma picture or something. Maybe Rhonda was on Fridays and Gilbert was on Saturdays. I don't know anymore. They just played stupid movies featuring women in bikinis. I loved Up All Night. So did Jon.

One day we were talking about Up All Night, and it came to my attention that the hostess of Up All Night, Rhonda Shear, had posed in an issue of Playboy magazine. This was news to me. I asked him if he could show me the proof. He did, the very next day. Concealed in a portfolio, it was slyly given to me to borrow for 24 hours. The rest of the day ticked slowly by, just as always. I wasn't paying attention in class. I was only interested in seeing Rhonda Shear naked. Who wouldn't be?

That afternoon, I went up to my room and slipped the magazine out of my backpack. I don't remember the magazine so much as I remember the environment. I sat down on my bed and just stared at the cover for awhile. It was a warm day, with lots of sun and that fresh, clean aroma wafting subtly in the soft breeze through my open window. It was the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive, and for the first time, I was. I was glad to be alive. Over the next hour or so -- I can't remember how long it took me, but I read the entire thing from cover to cover, including the Wesley Snipes interview but not the NFL preview article because I still had my standards -- I became a changed person. Here I was, reading a magazine that glamorized beautiful women and interesting, sophisticated topics. I was somehow less full of hate than I was before. I saw a side of society that, though idealized for the purposes of capitalism, consisted of something completely different from proms and pep rallies and midterms. It may seem passé now to contemplate a magazine that had ads for whiskey flasks and frosted-emblem martini glasses, but at the time, it was pretty heady shit. It was adult, and not in a pornographic way. It was adult in a mature way. And maturity was something I was sorely aching to find. Finally, I wasn't the only person in the world who knew that stirring a martini bruises the vermouth. It was as if I'd been given a sign that there was something more, something beyond high school. Something waiting for me, if I could just make it through, if I could only slog my way out of my present mindless Purgatory. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. And there were breasts next to that light. Big symmetrical ones.

There was an insert for a fragrance. I don't remember which one, but I wish to God now I'd checked. Ordinarily, all perfumes and colognes smell alike. This one, on this day, was different. I can't say how exactly, but it was sweet and light and ambient where all the others were sour, heavy, and direct. Occasionally I still smell it on pedestrians, delicate and free, taking me back to that day, that afternoon. When the air is warm and sweet and buzzing with vigorous potential, I can very faintly smell it again, on the breeze, even if no one is around for miles.

I can see the beauty now.