When your shit smells like roses

I'm a man who has woken up choking on his own alcohol-and-drug-cocktail-riddled puke countless times since adulthood, got urinated on by a crazy Swedish teenager in exchange for sexual favours regularly for about three months and seriously considered taking a shit on camera for an amateur Glaswegian film-maker with good intentions whose intentions I cannot now recollect.

Despite which, I'm oddly paranoid about hygiene. I will happily cook in the nude, but my body refuses kebabs outright because somebody told me all Turkish men are compulsive nose-pickers. I'd like to think this is reflective of a common school of human hypocrisy I like to call, "my shit smells likes roses". For instance, I have slept/passed out (what's the difference really?) on pavements back home in Chennai in my smack-attack days, but even then I couldn't have a cup of tea without washing my hands fanatically if I'd partaken of public transport. Even more funnily, I went through at least two years of college without ever using public transport, because everybody knows public transport in India is cattle-class, as Shashi Tharoor (in)famously tweeted.    

So, here we are then. A detergent-happy, dirty old man and you, an undergraduate with tits most men would sell their souls for. I'm just trying to put myself in your shoes. Clearly, your first mistake was: "don't worry about taking off your shoes." In young-people-parlance, "WTF?!!" How can you not insist that people take their shoes off when they enter your Lilliputian place of residence? Who knows where they've been?

It doesn't make it any easier that you're my temporary flatmate. You're here because your French boyfriend is here on an internship selling Frenchy eco-friendly electrical products to companies that frankly just don't care about carbon footprints or corporate social responsibility. These things don't matter in Asia because we've been blindsided for long enough; we think the wild ugly West should pay for what they've done first. I don't.  I'll fuck you if you're technically the right mix of X and Y. That, and clean.

But you piss in the shower. I can smell it. You piss all over my toilet seat. I have to wreath the damn thing in toilet paper first thing every morning because I'm scared you'll inadvertently pass on some contagious disease. I have to actually stop breathing every time I pass by your open door because the gases that escape the barely chambered walls of your box-room existence smell of old pizza and very-worn socks.

Yet, you're hot. You're silent-movie hot. Not that you talk funny, but I wish you were in a movie so I didn't have to smell you. When you charmingly extemporize on your disdain for showering, I'm really just imagining corpses and people-in-comas. That's not sexy. When you complain about your boyfriend working on Sundays, I'm full of empathy for the poor bastard because he's forced to live with the terribly stained underwear you regularly hang on the fucking bathroom door knob.  Just so you know, those chopsticks on the flush tank were left there for a reason - so I can move your bloody underthings when I need to lock the door.

And when you're seated at the foot of my bed, your dopey eyes making eyes at my weak desperate self, all I can really tell myself is: "you're too old to excuse this kind of behavior". The morally correct course of action would be to bend you over my knees and spank some sense of hygiene into you. But I worry that would sow them wild thoughts in me ol' head. Besides, you'd probably fart in my face or something, for a laugh. If only you'd stop smelling of super-market cologne and onions. We could have been so much more.