The musty rehearsal room was filled with the sounds of paper rustling, quick bantering, and coughs. Phil, who was playing Iago, asked to share my script. He half-squatted, half-sat on the floor beside me. We got one page into Othello when a pungent body smell wafted over me. I pulled up my sleeve to use it as a mask. Phil was sweating profusely, but this was not a smell I would expect from someone who had forgotten deodorant. Even as I tried to ignore the acrid taste of his revolting odor penetrating all my barriers, I felt sorry for him. I was playing the role of Bianca, the whore with a heart.
Our rehearsals were ritually humiliating and sometimes violent: the director was a screaming bully and the lead actor didn’t know the difference between acting like he was strangling Desdemona and actually choking her to the point of blacking out. Nor did he care. Actors walked out because of the constant belittling. Phil’s eye-watering stench seemed like a minor character flaw in this cast. I learned not to inhale around him and discovered he was great to talk to and funny. He asked me out in a casual way eleven times.
One particularly bad rehearsal the director yelled that I was not sexy and proceeded to make it worse by asking the rest of the terrified cast who would have sex with me. Panic-struck, they didn’t move. They didn’t even blink. My stomach churned; my knees wobbled. My head struggled as I tried to choose between storming out and begging someone to admit they would fuck me. I floundered until the director found the next victim.
A few weeks earlier I had unexpectedly broke up with my boyfriend of two and a half years. I felt entirely undesirable. I needed someone, anyone to say something nice so when smelly boy asked if I wanted to grab some food and chat I said “Yes.”
Phil picked me up at my house and we drove in his blue truck to a hole-in-the-wall vegetarian restaurant. The fusion of stale cigarettes and body stench gave me a spluttering cough. I told him I was warm and rolled down the window. I stuck my head out like an eager Hollywood tourist. We were in Burbank so it was hard finding reasons to be genuinely excited by each new street to justify my head sticking so far out.
After the veggie restaurant we decided we needed a drink to help forget about rehearsals. I was having fun with smelly boy, but didn’t want to admit it to myself. I drank my beer and fancied myself un-superficial, because I could see the man underneath the ghastly odor. As part of a jokey conversation, I mentioned that I was good in bed.
I don’t know where the idea to get two bottles of wine and go back to my house came from but once we had finished the second bottle, I was annihilated. I thought ignoring the fact I was pheromonally repulsed by him would be cool. Instead, I focused on how smart, funny, and engaging he was. The alcohol dulled my senses enough to be near him without gagging, so I took that as a sign that we should make out. The next thing I knew, we were in my bedroom without our clothes.
After a heavy blackness came a rolling thunderous gnawing headache. I awoke to a crushing hangover and Phil’s small, hairy frame clutching me for dear life. The as-yet unidentified smell was everywhere, all over me and over my normally Bounce-fresh outdoor-scented sheets. My body tensed while I assessed the situation.
“Are you ok?” he asked sleepily. “Are you freaking out?”
I wanted to scream, run, and bathe all at the same time. Instead I said, “No. Not freaked out. Just I don’t normally do things like this.”
