Armpit Adventures

This will come as a shock to you, but I’m not as cool as you think.  No really, I’m not.  By most standards, I’m middle age.  I live in a suburban house with two kids.  I read the newspaper on Sundays.  I tuck in my shirts when I go to work.  I will tell my boys I love them in front of their friends.  Totally not cool.  I know that, which is why I think I am cool anyway.  My coolness trumps my not coolness.

Until I ran out of deodorant. 

Apparently I have sensitive skin.  It dries up easily and I have various splotches and odd-looking bumps courtesy of heredity.  With a history of skin cancer in the family, I have to keep an eye on this stuff, so I get it checked regularly like most guys do with doc appointments – about every five to seven years. 

I’ve been using the same deodorant since I started using deodorant.  I don’t know how I landed on the kind I use – I don’t recall going to Walgreens and testing every brand like the bums do.  Always check your deodorant for bum use before you buy it.  You don’t want bum pits.  It covers up one smell with quite another.   Anyway, I probably started with whatever my dad used.

The thing is; although the brand I use is common, the scent and combo of antiperspirant/deodorant I use from that brand isn’t sold in all stores.  Like Walgreens – they don’t carry it for some reason.  But my grocery store does.  Every once in a blue moon, I’ll run out of deodorant and due to sheer laziness, I’ll buy another kind if the store I’m in when I actually remember I’m out of deodorant doesn’t have my kind. 

I’ll take home this foreign brand and apply it to my sensitive armpits.  And inevitably it will cause irritation and/or cause me to perspire (or rather not prevent me from perspiring).  I’d rather have a rash than sweaty pits but that sucks too, so I try to always have backup of my brand stored somewhere in my bathroom.

What happens is that I’ll tap into the backup and forget to buy a backup for the backup and thereby possibly get stuck with nothing for my man-stink when the backup is out.  This happened recently.  I was plumb out.  I scraped my armpit enough with that plastic push-up thing and figured I should just run to the grocery store and stock up. 

I had to get a few other things like bread, milk, porn and something for dinner that night.  Kidding on the porn, I get that for free on the World Wide Web.  And then I hit the deodorant aisle and put a couple in my basket.  And then I thought I should stock up so I grabbed four more.  Six total.  I don’t know why I grabbed six.  I just did.  Listen to me; I can’t explain half the shit I do, so just go with it.  Six deodorants, bread, milk, dinner and no porn. 

I headed to the front and a full service checkout lane was wide open.  The checker was a young woman, probably in her early twenties.  I put my basket down and stood there, looking cool like I do.  

Ding.  There goes my bread.  Ding.  The milk.  Ding ding ding.  Stuff for dinner.  No ding for no porn.  And then ding ding ding ding ding ding.  Six deodorants to help me smell like roses and skittles while not sweating a drip.  The young checkout girl looked at me and laughed.  She said, “My dad does that.”

I smiled and said, “Does what?”

“Buys stuff like deodorant in bulk.  He has a closet full of deodorant.”

I said, “Haha, yeah that is kind of funny isn’t it?  Maybe your dad is really smelly and sweats a lot.”  I subconsciously put my hands in my armpits like that Mary Pat chick from Saturday Night Live.  I removed my hands and said, “I figured why not.  They don’t take up much space and I keep running out.”

She said, “So you are going to be fine for awhile and then after using all these you will be surprised to be empty and then come back here to buy twelve.  And then twenty and then a hundred.”

That made me laugh.  I said, “You don’t know me!”  And I shook my fist at her in a way that made my armpit vulnerable to scrutiny.  I put my arm down and said, “Well, I am a dad too.”

She looked me in the eyes and said, “Oh, I know.”

I took my bag of milk, bread, dinner, six deodorants and no porn and told her to peace-out, yo, and then I strutted out of there.  I’m pretty sure a GILF was checking me out.

It’s cool to be uncool.