Show me the Rat Money!

Some smells in life you remember vividly and others are the stuff of legend and exist only with a story and a very sharp memory, but no smell at all except what you want it to be.

Growing up, we were all in 4-H. Every summer, the fair would come. That was the time when we loaded up the pigs and steers and chickens and vegetables and baked goods and tea towels sewn by 8-year-old hands and took them to town, slapped an entry tag on them for judging and waited for that sweet, sweet prize money check to come in the mail. Pigs and steers, though, were our bank for the year. After judging, they went to auction, and we got the money they sold for. Even white-ribbon hogs would net over $100, sometimes 200 or 300; steers would go for closer to $1,000 and above. Our job was to look adorable when we paraded them through the auction ring, smiling into the crowd with every bid. It was never entirely clear what was being sold here. Usually it was a popularity contest to see which dad was spending the most money at the elevator or borrowed the most from the bank. This rarely was us, but we did okay based on our charm *twinkling grin*.

This story isn´t about that, though. Every fair had a carnival. Our hometown fair was really small, and we got a very small carnival. With the carnival came the rides put together with electrical tape, the games of chance you couldn´t win and the Carnies. These were people that just scared a youngster a little, except that one swarthy teenage boy that just looked dangerous and hot as hell in his tight jeans, greased back hair and a cigarette dangling from his lips.

My dad loved the Carnies – he loved the Gypsies too, but that´s a different story. This was his one time of the year where he could fleece people unabashedly. He always had to check himself when he played poker locally because he didn´t want his friends and neighbors exiling him from the Reindeer Games. He never felt that kind of restraint when he taught us poker. He took more of my pig money than I care to talk about, until I finally realized I couldn´t win, he was too good and playing angles I didn´t even know existed. He counted cards, knew the odds, was a math genius, and poker was his game.

But the Carnies didn´t know that, at least not at first. So as we took our pigs and steers out for judging and dutifully modeled that A-line shift with the bad seams in the style show, he was over playing poker and taking money from the carnies with gleeful abandon. My mother, of course, hated it.

This story isn´t about that either exactly. Besides our hometown fair, there was the Wakeeney fair, which was the “big one” for us. More rides (and ones that weren´t put together with duct tape), car races, a thriving midway metropolis. We always traveled for one night to the Big Wakeeney Fair. This carnival had

RAT

If you´ve ever seen a Roulette wheel, then you´ve seen The Rat. Just think bigger holes. The wheel was spun round, and then they released the rat. The rat ran around the wheel as it slowed down and would finally pick a black or red or white hole to dive into.
The person who had their money on that hole won the pot. I´m still not sure how this game managed to avoid Police involvement in Bible Belt Kansas - it was just gambling, pure and simple. But run this rat gambling game for several years, they surely did.

Daddy had one night at the Wakeeney Carnival too, and that night was spent with The Rat as his BFF. He only had one night because they would never let him play again that year, and he had to wait until the next year with new Carnies who didn´t know him so he could play again. More than once, they made him leave midway through the night because he was cleaning them out of money. Nobody ever really knew, and my Dad never told exactly how he knew where the Rat would go, but he knew. He told my Mom it was one color of hole they always went in, but given how many holes, that really doesn´t account for it, but it did eliminate 2/3 of the potential holes. He also said he knew which direction the rat would run once it came out. Being an expert on Rat turning behavior doesn´t explain it either, though I’m thinking that a seriously mad skill every woman should have. I saw the Rat run, and it would sometimes dive for a hole quick and sometimes meander around for quite a while. My best guess is, as with humans, rats have predictive behavior, and watching even a couple of times, he found the pattern in Rat Roulette. 

So every year my dad would come home with Rat Money, hundreds of dollars of it, and give it to my Mom. Of course, my Mom hated it. She hated the smell, said she hated spending it because it just reeked of rat. But spend it she did, complaining without one bit of embarrassment.

Rat Money Smell is what sin and whiskey and forbidden sex smells like. It´s the shady side of life, the smoky biker bar full of bad men that look irresistible, the part that nobody really wants to talk about too much because it is fun, and we all go there from time to time and hope we don´t get caught up in the Rat Money current and forget to find our way home. Velvet Rope was supposed to smell like that, but instead came up smelling like Fresca on me. Defintely not Rat Money Smell.

I don´t remember what the Rat Money really smelled like, but it´s my phrase for every smell that I identify with that something that makes you wriggle up up your nose and look the other way while casting furtive backward glances trying to figure out what it is and if it´s as much fun as it looks like and whether anyone will catch you sniffing ’round it. Amber is that smell for me. Whether it´s in Laura Tonatto Amir, Hermes Ambre Narguile (aka The Nazgul) or Parfum D´Empire Ambre Russe, it´s not the perfume itself, it´s that note. All three of these perfumes are lovely renditions with amber as a strong note in them.

Every life needs a little Rat Money smell. It is mixed in with the sweetness, the passion, the sorrow, the loss and regret. It meanders through all of our lives like cigarette smoke, clinging sometimes to what we wear, but never to who we are. My daddy understood that. He would play in the Rat Money World, but he never became part of it. He brought his Rat Money home to his wife and children so we could have a microwave or a new tv, a luxury we couldn´t otherwise afford. (Dante’s Inferno by Rodin)

I think that´s why I always keep amber perfumes around. Sometimes I open up a drawer and I smell it, and I think, ah, Rat Money, and I remember my dad and all the lessons he taught us about life and love and loss and loyalty and honor.