Dorm Room Smell

I got stuck in the hallway as the football team stampeded back into the high school after a practice on a hot September day---I nearly asphyxiated. The noxious fumes rising off their sweaty bodies could have killed a cow. 

  

It took at least 20 minutes after they had passed for the smell to dissipate from the hallway. And it took another 20 minutes or so for the odor to unlatch itself from my olfactory memory---it was that rancid.

In my experience there are some smells that have the ability to chemically affix themselves---they are the Sharpies of odors. Sweat and dirt that gets into athletic gear like shin guards is one of them. Tide, borax and fabric sheets in equal parts cannot completely clean or kill the funk—it can only arrest it until a bit of moisture activates it again.

But the most aggressive odor I have ever had to deal with is dorm room smell. It is distinct yet ubiquitous. I have never been any college dorm in any part of the country in any season of the year where that odor didn’t smack you in the face the second you stepped foot into the building. And I have never been able to dissect its components although I suspect it is a mish-mash of male/female communal bad hygiene mixed with alcoholic adventures gone wrong topped with a fear of failure. It is foul and untamable. It latches itself on to any fabric or plastic. Not even a smoke bomb can dislodge it. No amount of Clorox Febreeze or Lysol can disguise it.

And a week or so ago I stumbled on to a container from the attic which housed some text books from my eldest daughter from her freshman year in college--7 years  ago. When I opened the container a green cloud rose up invading my nasal cavities like General Sherman marching through Georgia. Even the dog, who sniffs other dogs private parts, put his paw over his nose and backed away. It was that nasty. Time and a lack of oxygen did not suck the life from the odor---it had only preserved it.

 I threw all the contents out—container and all.

And people who have not had experience with this dorm room monster are often puzzled as to why at the end of 4 years of college virtually every item unless deemed absolutely necessary is thrown out or donated. They might say—you threw out perfectly good wheel-y carts and fold up chairs? And the answer is yes---there was no choice. They stunk. They were contaminated beyond remedy.

All my daughters’ discarded items now sit in the CDC in Atlanta—the specimens are   being studied for biological warfare—along with the anthrax and the flesh eating bacteria.


 Because dorm room smell is that deadly---and that contagious.

 It is something we should all fear.