like flies ‘round the honeypot

You might have noticed the “aversion to garlic” line in my profile information. Lest folks get the impression that I’m one of those folks with delusions of vampirism, a bit of explanation is in order.

During my junior and most of my senior years of high school, I worked in the kitchen of the local hospital washing pans and other random cleaning tasks. Before I started working there, I was a foodie in embryo who relished the prospect of a well prepared meal. Fourteen months spent scraping pans, cleaning out the catch basin of the industrial dishwasher, and hosing down the disposal trench irrevocably altered my stance toward food. The petit gourmand within me withered and died, replaced by a joyless pod-person who views the process of eating in the starkest, most functionalist terms.

Of all the on-the-job traumas I experienced at the hospital kitchen, none match the Garlic Paste Incident as far as deep psychological scarring goes. The all-too-frequent prospecting expeditions for lost dentures in cubic tons of food waste, as stomach-churning as they were, don’t even come close.

Even though it was outside my usual set of assigned tasks, one Sunday evening during the post-dinner breakdown process, I somehow got stuck with the job of mopping out the walk-in fridges and freezers. They were “walk-in” in only the most rudimentary sense, and were little more than refrigerated broom closets with very little room to maneuver while mopping the floor. On this particular night, I happened to put a bit too much elbow grease into the job while eradicating a tenacious jelly stain off the tiles, and the broom handle struck a gallon jar of garlic paste off the shelf and knocked it onto the floor.

The story would have ended there, except whoever used the paste last forgot to screw the cap on properly, and the entire contents of the nearly full jar ended up splattered all over the inside of the cold room, as well as on my pants and boots. Industrial-grade garlic paste looks like partially-congealed pus and is the olfactory equivalent of white phosphorus in terms of staying power. Cat piss and uncut natural deer musk are easier scents to eradicate than the aroma of InstitutoConglomCo Foods mixture of lard and crushed garlic is, and I sucked down lungfuls of the noxious vapor as I went into a panicked damage control mode, scraping furiously at the mess with a spatula and spray bottle of disinfectant, then bagging up all the evidence – mop heads, spatulas, rags and all – and dropping it into a medical waste bin by the incinerator. I then put the empty container back on the shelf, punched out while the supervisors were out of the office, went home, and called in sick for the following three or four shifts.

No one at the job ever copped on to my role in the “Mystery of the Lingering Stink,” though I was punished in a karmic fashion; to this day I can not abide the smell of garlic and even feel queasy when in the presence of someone who has eaten garlic recently. (I can smell it though their pores, I swear.) So, you see, it is not vampirism that is the cause of my aversion, but rather lingering trauma from working in the food service industry.

Alien Sex Fiend – Smells Like… (from It: The Album, 1986; collected on All Our Yesterdays, 1988) – I may not be a child of the night, but I can appreciate a nice bit of gothic rock, especially when the Fiends are behind it.

Massive Attack – Fake the Aroma (from the Help compilation album, 1995) – There’s no faking one’s way around the smell of garlic. Attempts to do so inevitably take on a “It smells like someone shit under a pine tree” character.