The Two Worst Smells

The runner-up for worst smell I have smelled so far was from the factories near Richmond, Virginia.  I was riding shotgun with a friend of mine who rented a moving truck so we could move him from North Carolina and back to New Jersey. Being from New Jersey, and having been to Atlantic City, and most of the other urban areas of New Jersey, it is impressively disgusting that Richmond could out-odor everything else I had smelled in my life before that moment, including poopoo-peepee diapers I had changed for my friend’s son.  I am even more impressed by the people who somehow manage to live in an area that, presumably, produces that smell regularly, and the people who work in that factory.  However, the people who are responsible for the factory, and the process that produces that smell must not actually work anywhere near there, and certainly must not care one bit about humans outside, and possibly inside, their own families.  The smell gave me a headache and made us speed in a part of the country where it is a really bad idea for people from New Jersey to be stopped by the police.    
 
The Absolute worst smell ever gone up my nose happened to me when I was living in California, taking the subway/train called BART back to the suburb where I was renting a room from two awful people who once went two weeks without fixing our only toilet (when the toilet first clogged, they told me it would eventually go down, but the next day it was still filled to near the top, and I had to take my morning poop urgently enough that I could not hold it until I went to a public toilet, so I went to the backyard with some toilet paper and squatted between a large tool shed and the perimeter fence.  I had to do that about four times in those two weeks, and the rest of the time I went to the local casino to poop and then play some poker.)  On this train ride, I had just gotten on in San Francisco, and a few blocks later a homeless person got onto our car, smelling like walking death.  It was the kind of smell that affects every sense- it made me feel covered in grime, and sincerely hurt my feelings.  It was incredibly similar to an odor I smelled previously in a stairwell in a BART station in San Fran (I abbreviated it because I know it bugs a lot of San Franners…hahaha- that’s what they get for making a city that is causing almost all of its own problems by pricing out almost all of its citizens).  I was walking up the stairs about to turn a corner, when the odor started, and, luckily, I happened to step around the gigantic pile of poop that looked like it had been decaying there for three days- it looked like five pounds of horse turds, mixed with hair and hay: it looked inhuman.  The worst smell ever came from a man who had just gotten onto the train smelling like that mound of poop, if it were also a walking, breathing heap of death on a humid day.  The man, clearly homeless, sat two or three seats behind me, and everyone else moved as far away as they could, many of them making comments about the smell, some of them strangely oblivious to its origin, and deeply insensitive to what must have happened to this person for him to be in that condition.  One woman sprayed some perfume or something into the air and then on her wrists that she rubbed near her nose, like coroners who use lime so they do not have to smell the putrid insides of a real dead body.  I stayed where I was.  I was trying to give this human being the best support I could, despite the real threat of puking.  Some people looked in my direction because, well, sometimes I look like a newbie homeless (In my first month living in the Bay Area, I was walking to a tutoring job and noticed how many homeless people were visibly planted around the city.  I started talking to one of them, asking how the police treat her and other such things about making it as a homeless person in the city, then she asked me how long I had been homeless, which I was not at the time, and debatably have never really been).  However, I have never let myself go so badly that I would look like I would be emanating mung (not the bean- look it up on urbandictionary), so they all looked for a more likely source.  That man got off the train just a few stops later, and as badly as I felt for him, it was a tremendous relief to only smell the normal urine and generic filth smell of the bay area rapid transit system.  That experience serves as the sample for my opinion of the Bay Area, and the Bay Area provides the example I use for many of the problems of the entire country: outrageously high cost of living with people more interested in looking up in admiration at the wealth that is rejecting and hurting them, trying to impress others with shiny button down shirts and more animal product in their hair than I eat in a week, causing far too many people to resort to the streets because of an insurmountable, un-livable wage economy.  We were all in the same station, riding the same train, living in the same metropolitan area, but the insecurity of many weak egos keeps supporting the owners and exacerbates of the wealth gap, while neglecting growing populations of people in need.   Unfortunately, as much as I wanted to do more, I also let my weak ego prevent me from giving that man money, or anything else that would have helped him in the future, because of an inexplicable fear and shame of doing something nice.  I hope I have done more to help than hurt the marginalized and economically victimized, despite that fear and shame.