Black Orchid and Bad Decisions

MOM DON’T READ THIS !!

Tom Ford’s 2006 masterpiece, Black Orchid, is an airless melange of syrupy-sweet, dank, overripe florals and spices atop a bed of chocolate patchouli and an oddball truffle mushroom note that gives the whole concoction a bawdy earthiness. Black Orchid smells unnatural—it’s one of those fragrances that cannot be described as the sum of its parts, as those parts create a new whole that surpasses what it is composed of. In this case, it is an ambrosial black hole. David Apel, one of the two perfumers credited with creating Black Orchid, notably also designed Sunflowers for Elizabeth Arden. Together, the pair of fragrances form an olfactive translation of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Black Orchid is for sluts; Sunflowers is for trad wives.

Black Orchid smells like making bad decisions. Like staying out way too late, having one too many drinks, going home with a stranger, flirting with your married friend, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes in one night. The scent of a good time party girl. It’s almost besides the point to say what it literally smells like, what the notes try to tell you, when what Black Orchid truly smells like is being sucked into a spiraling vortex of hedonism and regret, knowing that you’ve wrought this upon yourself through terrible ideas that seemed fun at the time, either of your own design or those brought upon you by nefarious others, cascading you down a path of havoc you will need to repent for later.

When I was a newly-minted adult, in the summer between graduating high school and starting my first semester at college, my friends Blair and Richard¹ called me up and asked if I wanted to hang out. An immensely talented painter and illustrator, Blair had recently started an apprenticeship with a tattoo artist, hoping to make some money before she started attending a prestigious art school in the fall. She told me that her tattooing mentor might be able to hook us up with some cocaine. Since I was the only one in the group who had a car, naturally I would need to pick up Richard and Blair and drive them over to Tattoo Guy’s place. I wasn’t super into drugs or drinking—I occasionally smoked a little weed with friends—but I’d never tried coke before and it sounded exciting so I was game. I figured we’d pick up the stuff, drive back to Blair’s house, have a fun night, I’d sleep on her parents’ couch and drive home the next morning. Just a little evening of revelry to send off the last real year of adolescence.

Blair directed me to Tattoo Guy’s apartment. We arrived at a shoddy little complex. Tattoo Guy was waiting inside with a thin, wrung out looking woman who he introduced as his sister, Susan², the keeper of the coke. What was intended to be a simple transaction turned out to be a little more complicated than I anticipated: instead of selling us a quantity of drugs and letting us go on our way like a normal drug dealer, Susan requested a ride from us. We would take her to some unknown destination not far from there and then she would relinquish the coke. Blair and Richard seemed fine with this so I went along with it. Tattoo Guy offered to give me a free tattoo before we left, which I declined (the only good decision I made this entire day).

Susan suggested we go to a motel; Blair and Richard readily agreed. I was mildly suspicious of the situation at this point. Something seemed off: Susan looked too old to be Tattoo Guy’s sister, for one, and I didn’t get a satisfactory answer for why we needed to go to a motel instead of someone’s house aside from a reassurance that it would be “more fun.” I was still along for the ride, so we checked in and Susan brought out her stash, a brown paper bag filled with white powder and a scale. We gave her what seemed like a moderate amount of money (maybe 60 bucks? I don’t remember exactly) for what seemed like a huge amount of coke. She divvied up the rest of it into teeny tiny bundles that she planned to sell for five dollars each.

Doing a huge pile of cocaine with your friends is a very fun time, of course. Blair, Richard, and I sat around gabbing at each other for a few hours. This was before smoking indoors was banned everywhere so Blair and I chain smoked cigarettes while we yapped. I don’t think we even had any alcohol or music or anything, just each other’s company. We were filled with the kind of hedonic cheer that seems so profound when you are young, the kind that is filled with ease and is endlessly entertaining and creates a moment that you never want to end, but you know is ultimately so fleeting.

Eventually, Susan asked if she could use my phone. I handed it over. She retreated to the bathroom and shut the door behind her.

About twenty minutes later police lights flashed against the curtains on the window. Evidently, whoever Susan called was pissed at her for reasons she would or could not explain and had called the cops on us. I don’t know why she gave him our address. We quickly hid everything and answered the door.

Blair took charge. She explained that Susan was her aunt and made up some semi-plausible story about why we were in the motel. I looked at the floor and tried not to move at all, frozen in place thinking that this was it, this was going to destroy my life. I wouldn’t be going to college in a few weeks, I’d be in a protracted legal situation. My parents were going to kill me. The cops clearly didn’t buy Blair’s story, but they miraculously didn’t find any obvious evidence of wrongdoing so they left.

Blair, Richard, and Susan laughed. “You were all GREAT!” Susan said, “except you,” she pointed at me, “you look like a scared little deer in headlights. If anyone was going to get us busted it would be you. You need to learn how to relax.”

Throughout my adolescence I developed a habit of befriending weirdos and troubled kids. Girls who attended the mental health treatment program school in Philly, kids with bad parents and homes they never wanted to go back to, autists, punks, the few openly gay kids at the Catholic high school I attended. My social circle wasn’t solely composed of these types, but they made up a significant portion. Once, I asked my father why these people seemed to be drawn to me. He told me he thought it was because I was highly empathetic, that I made people feel seen and understood, that I didn’t judge them.

Blair rolled a joint. I asked her if she was crazy. I did not want to smoke a joint. I did not want to do any more cocaine. I wanted to go home, but I was high as a kite and it was two o’clock in the morning, so that wasn’t an option. The reality of the circumstance I was in hit me. Why was I in a seedy motel room with a homeless junkie doing bad cocaine? How had this ever seemed like a good idea? The whole situation felt dumb and embarrassing. For me, the party was over. They figured we were through the worst of it now, so why should the party end? I realized that there was a small but fundamental difference between myself and Blair. While we both craved excitement, novelty, a night that would make a good story, there was a little switch inside me, inside my brain, that would only let me go so far. I was incapable of flipping that switch off. Blair didn’t seem to have that switch at all.³

Eventually, we settled down for the night and tried to get some sleep. I gathered up all my valuables—keys, phone, wallet—placed them in my bag, and stuffed the bag underneath myself while I feigned sleep. I’d been through enough and I wasn’t going to get my car stolen on top of everything.

The next morning, we piled into my car so I could drive everyone home. Blair lived closest to the motel so I dropped her off first. It’s amazing how dense New Jersey is. Blair’s family lived in a beautiful old Victorian in a historic landmarked neighborhood that frequently topped lists of the best places to live in the country. The kind of place that is charming and picturesque, filled with old trees and old houses. Less than fifteen minutes away was Camden, a blighted, rundown city, then the murder capital of the country, where Susan requested I drop her off. We drove up to an apartment and she asked us to wait a minute, hopping out of the car. She returned a moment later, seemingly distraught that the person she was expecting to be home was not. I asked her if there was somewhere else I could take her. She said yes, that there were a few places we could try. We dropped by a couple neighboring houses to no avail.

With Susan directing, we drove deeper into Camden. We couldn’t keep driving her around. A couple of nice looking white kids in this part of the city were basically a beacon to the cops: PEOPLE BUYING DRUGS! HEY HEY! RIGHT HERE! OVER HERE! COME ARREST ME! Eventually we stopped at a seemingly random corner. She exited my car, trying to find the man she was supposed to meet up with, leaving behind the brown paper bag with her meticulously packaged stash within. Richard and I waited silently. We each glanced at the bag in the back seat; the mountain of cocaine stared back at us. We glanced at each other, both thinking the same thing: we could drive away right now. I looked ahead, my mouth dry, my nerves shot.

I started counting:

Ten…

Twenty…

Thirty…

Susan returned, crying.

“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

“NO!” Then, “yeah, I’ll be fine,” she grabbed the bag from the back seat, “thanks for the ride.”

Susan probably made a lot of bad decisions in her life. A lot of those decisions probably weren’t real decisions in the proper sense, not like most of the bad decisions that I’ve made, more likely decisions as the result of circumstances largely beyond her control. I’ll never know what her deal actually was. About a week after our evening in the motel, Blair called and told me that Tattoo Guy fessed up that Susan was not actually his sister. He’d never met her before that day. I didn’t ask why he decided to pawn her off on us. Probably he just needed someone with a car to take her away and I happened to be a convenient ride.

Somehow, Richard and I made our way out of Camden and back to the highway. I drove him home. His parents were abusive alcoholics and he and his two siblings had been removed from their house a few years prior. He was on his third foster home. He eventually went back to living with his father who later had a horrific accident cooking while drunk and died as a result. Richard was the one who found him. He went to live with his grandfather in Michigan after that, got his GED, then went to college and became a history teacher.

For a week or so I received calls from strange men at random times asking for Susan. I told them all that this isn’t Susan’s phone, I don’t know where she is, please stop calling. They eventually did.

The mild penchant I have for making bad decisions persists: I still won’t refuse stimulants when they’re offered to me, I smoke cigarettes at parties, I stay up too late and shirk my day job to write (it’s 3AM on a Tuesday as I’m writing this), I still occasionally go galavanting off with strangers in strange places. (I once made out with a Moroccan tour guide in the Sahara desert who then offered to take me home to meet his family back in Fez. “Sure! Sounds great,” I said. “Do NOT tell my parents that I was drinking!” he pleaded as we drove up to his house, feeling guilty about the couple of beers we had at a rooftop bar the night before. I told him I wouldn’t. His mother had prepared a veritable feast for me, the best meal I had in Morocco (and strangely not the only meal I had in a random person’s house during that trip). I gabbed profusely with, like, six of his female relatives while he sat awkward and quiet in the corner. His family made up a bed for me. The next day he drove me to the bus to Chefchaouen. Later, back in Fez, I made him escort me to dinner because I was being hounded by a group of men and I couldn’t take it anymore. I did all of this because I was mad at my boyfriend for bailing on the vacation we were supposed to take together and feeling sorry for myself.) In my heart I’m still a bit of a degenerate party girl.

However, I’ve moderated myself considerably: I’m usually not the last person to leave the party, I never get sick from drinking, I stopped sleeping with strangers years ago, my money is well-invested, I keep my apartment clean, I go to church on Sundays. The little switch remains in place.

Anyway, that’s what Black Orchid smells like.

1. Obviously not their real names.

2. I’ve long since forgotten this woman’s real name.

3. About a year later, I was hanging out with Blair and a couple of her friends in Philly (a pair of butch lesbian mechanics that she met while painting a mural). They all decided to smoke some meth. I declined and instead spent an hour playing with the couple’s new pet kittens, chasing them around with a ribbon. Blair was always dealing with a lot—coming to terms with being sexually abused by a babysitter as a child, her parents’ ambivalence about her coming out as a lesbian in high school, coping with a bipolar diagnosis. She thankfully got sober before she finished college.