Cooling Poison
On or nearly on Nicholson Baker
A list of special substances could be made, but for each person the list is different. The list represents your catalog of personal poisons. For example, I have since I was a child found the smell of cucumber nauseating. A mere whiff upsets me; the idea of eating a crisp slice: nightmarish. If my aversion comes up in everyday conversation, people say it can’t be true and object in a reasonable tone of voice that cucumbers don’t really smell like anything, as if I’m trying to argue the point. I, however, am offering no argument. This is simply the way it is between me and those horrid vegetables. And besides, the almost-no-smell of cucumber constitutes a significant portion of my disgust. The crisp tang of faintly vegetable-flavored water given off by your average cucumber makes me gag. Imagine a floral perfume spritzed directly against the back of your throat, and you’ll have an idea. The body must reject this awful little sparkle. Honeydew, cantaloupe, watermelon: same, though I can handle them better than cucumber. Repulsive smells, repulsive substances, all that faintly flavored water.
Once I had some friends who were born and raised in Mexico City, and to the man they all found peanut butter unfathomably revolting. They’d swivel away from an open can of peanut butter like you turn away from a lit firework someone’s waving around nearby. Not that I made a habit of waving condiments (or fireworks) at them. I liked their revulsion, though, because in it I could see a place where the matrix had been changed, a different configuration of my world. It felt like noticing the architecture and not only the buildings.
There is of course a perverse pleasure in these turnoffs. For example, gasoline, which has a head-swimming sweetness in its fume-y toxic stench. The smell of cat food, half gross, half enticing, mostly gross. I remember in my youth seeing someone abuse an aerosol can, huffing directly from it. I remember a friend snorting yellow mustard at the lunch table. His reactive facial expression made me think of cucumbers, if cucumbers were a torture device.
In an essay called “Model Airplanes,” Nicholson Baker describes airplane glue:
Certainly glue, especially during those long summer afternoons in the late sixties and early seventies, before oil of mustard was added to the recipe to discourage any direct attempts at mood alteration, was lovely stuff. When you tweaked off the dried wastrel from an earlier session and applied a gentle pressure to the Testor’s tube, a brand-new Steuben-grade art-blob of cooling poison would silently ensphere itself at the machined metal tip, looking with its sharp gnomonic surface highlights and distilled, vodkal interior purity, like a self-contained world of incorruptible mental concentration, the voluptuously pantographed miniaturization of the surrounding room, and the artist’s rendering on the Monogram box top, and the half-built fighter itself, along with the hands that now reached to complete it; and as the smell of this pellucid solvent, suggestive of impossible Mach numbers and upper atmospheres and limitless congressional funding, drove away any incompatible carbon-based signals of hunger or human frailty, you felt as if your head had somehow gained admission to and submerged itself within that glowing globule of formalism and fine-motor skills.
If I were in a bad mood, I’d say Baker is a highfalutin standup comic. But I’m not in a bad mood. So I’ll say Baker has a thing for the strip of gloss on vinyl records and escalators in the sunlight; he has a thing for the unexpected homology of office staplers and train cars. He’d be a hopeless description-drunk bore if he did not tend to be hilarious (as in The Mezzanine) and often amusingly perverted (as in Vox)—sometimes both at the same time (House of Holes). You could rebuild the world from his precise preservation of details.
At any rate, the fight against the urge to huff airplane glue as a kid represented an exercise of moral willpower. That or fear of brain death. Baker’s description is so ludicrous but beautiful. It feels itself like an ensphered bubble of vocabulary. You always remember where you first learned the word gnomonic, but no one ever uses vodkal and that’s a shame.