H.O.
By Gene Aronowitz
On our way to see a movie, we stopped at a health food store and bought a supply of valerian root, which we thought might help Linda deal with the anxiety and stress she was experiencing at work.
We were living in Brooklyn in 1992, and that day, we were heading toward the Film Forum, a nonprofit art movie house in Greenwich Village, the go-to theater for the NYC community of cinephiles.
When we sat down in the almost empty theater, we noticed a fetid smell. Sitting in front of us was an enormous and rather unkempt person. Linda leaned over toward me and whispered, “H.O.”
“What?” I asked.
“Heinie odor,” she answered, an acronym she rarely used, acquired as a teenager from one of her friends to refer to the repeated flatulence of someone they knew. We nodded to each other knowingly. I tilted my head, indicating that we should move, and we changed our seats to others about ten rows away.
But the new location had the same stinky scent. Linda said, “It wasn’t that guy. It’s the theater that stinks.”
Back inside our house later that afternoon, Linda placed her backpack on the stairway. Bending down to take off her shoes, she noticed the same odor and removed the brown paper bag containing the valerian root. “It’s this,” she yelled. “This is what stinks.”
We laughed and wondered how many people might have sat behind us, scrunched their noses, and silently transferred to seats with presumably sweeter-smelling neighbors.
