Literanista
May 3, 2025
Before I ever knew what a perfumer was or that someone could make a living decoding and remixing scent, I knew the smell of secrets. I knew the waxy musk of worn fabric, the offense of tar baked onto a tenement rooftop, the sweet linger of tobacco leaves, curling through a backroom, stubbly and thick with whispers. In the humid uptown, crook of the East River, men ran numbers like old-world magicians. And I watched, a preschooler with street-scuffed knees and a good nose, learning that sometimes, the story of a place lives in what we don’t say but what we can still smell.
It was a palpable smell. Cigarillos and a musky, aged odor, unattributable. Perhaps, polyester, repeatedly worn without washing, or the built-up smell of pigeon dander. It was a closed smell, evident from the layers of dust on the fish tanks and aquarium accessories on the shelves that decorated the perimeter of the shop. Perhaps, it was the lack of ventilation in the underbelly of the pre-war tenement, a cavernous, railroad-type tunnel that provided a glass enclosed entryway into a large main front room, offset with an alcove in the backyard where there was a restroom and closet-sized pigeon coop with access to the yard.
There was a sense of safety in this place. A masculine place, overrun with the men, who “ran the numbers” and young men interested in racing pigeons. No one ever came for the fish or the cats, who were a colony of pristine white or marbled kitties, one of which had different colored eyes. To my preschooler’s mind, this was a mark, I was sure, of being a fearless badass, akin to David Bowie.
Cloistered inside the pigeon coop, I felt transcendent. Time did not intrude here, constrained by the rhythmic throaty, cooing of these intelligent dove-like gray-blue creatures. Sometimes, I was allowed to feed them sunflower seeds while at other times, we checked for eggs.
My mother had a pet hen in Puerto Rico, she told me. The chickens, she said, roosted in the trees, a thing unimaginable to me as an inner city child. One day, after a storm, the hen could not be located, and my grandparents’ rural shanty house had been damaged. My mother, besides herself, stopped eating. I understood.
My father, a second generation Italian American, a man married to someone else, told my Puerto Rican mother, that during the Depression, many people ate the pigeons in NYC, stewed in soups, until it became frowned upon as a sign of being uncultured or “old country.” When he came to visit her, he would always come laden with groceries and gifts for my sister, and my uncle, my mother’s younger sibling closer in age to my sister, than to my mother. When he stopped coming, the Pet Shop owner, continued the tradition, occasionally, gifting me anything I wanted from the shop, sending up full aquarium set-ups or waterlogged bags of Angel Fish and shiny big Goldfish.
The aquarium water smelled green and pleasant. My mother used cups of it to feed her plants, lush in our concrete jungle apartment. In this state of equilibrium, the fish thrived, the plants grew, above a room full of pigeons cooing, while my sister and I played street games like Red Light, Green Light unencumbered, in front of the shop for hours.
In the back of the shop, the owner’s son, kept a gallery wall, covered with covers from his collection of National Geographic magazines. In front of a shop, a street grate, with a long 20-foot drop, thwarted our play, severing us from our small toys and many times, the skin on our knees. We often crouched down, sadly gazing at the trove of lost treasures below. From the shaft, sometimes emanated a cold blast of air, dank with the smell of earth, shale, and darkness.
Years later, while working at one of the world’s leading makers of fragrances and flavors, natural and manufactured in a lab, I would be told I had a good nose. Praise not to be taken lightly as it came from a Master Perfumer, the mind behind Love’s Baby Soft and many other successful fragrances, Ron Winnigrad, who oversaw the organization’s internal perfumery school for over two decades. As a fellow writer and artist, he often told us, don’t think, just smell.
