Yo homes, smell ya later!

We usually eat lunch at Tower City which-for those not from Cleveland-is a mall. Every day after we finish eating we walk down to this little store that sells candy and lottery tickets and hosiery for black women only. Today was no different. However, when we walked out of the store, I noticed something a little...funky. Actually it wasn't a little funky. It was pure funk. It was the smell of body funk. I turned to Erik and Scott, "Do you guys smell that? That's B.O., right?" They wrinkled their noses. "Uh...yes it is," they said. Figuring it would go away in a few seconds, I continued to breathe normally.

A couple minutes later, I turned to the guys again, "It's still here, right? I'm not crazy-it still smells like B.O.?" They confirmed that I was not crazy. It did indeed still smell. My eyes began to water, and I decided to breathe through my mouth.

A minute later, "Seriously-what the hell going on in here? Is that from a human?" At this point we were incapable of carrying on a conversation about anything besides the rancid B.O. We had walked through half of the lower level of the mall, and not only was the smell still there, it's power had not even diminished. Scott felt sure we were slowly triangulating the position of the source. And he was right. It was not more than a few seconds later that the smell physically reached up and slapped me in the face*. I looked up and quickly saw the source. As I was about to warn Erik who was slightly ahead of us, he turned back to talk to us. "So we--AH!!" The smell had slapped him in the face as well, and I actually saw his head jerk back violently.

The source of the smell was a few feet ahead of us heading toward the escalators. Luckily there was an alternate route. We could cross under the escalators past Original Cookie and out the other side. This route poses a risk as there is always a high probability I will stop and buy cookies. But I didn't have a choice. I was literally suffocating right in front of Panera, and I was not going to go out like that. "Go! Go! Go!" we all yelled and ran by the Original Cookie. When we got to the other side, the air was clear, but we weren't out of the woods yet. We had to get to the escalator before the smell did.

From our new vantage point, we got a clearer look at the offender. It was a very large woman wearing a giant t-shirt and no pants. Seriously she didn't have pants on. She was also wearing only one shoe. The other one she was carrying in her hands along with roughly 27 million shopping bags. She was moving at a slow but steady pace carefully dispersing her poison evenly throughout the mall. We hopped onto the escalator in enough time to avoid the stank.

Scott posed the question, "Just how many showers do you have to miss until you reach that point?" I'm no scientist, but I think the answer is "a whole effing lot of effing showers holy shit for the love of God what just happened I never thought I would be so happy to be breathing in downtown Cleveland air". At least that is what was going through my mind. Scott said that the B.O. Scale must be like the Richter Scale where each number indicates an increase in magnitude by the power of 10. So 8 is 10 times more powerful than 7. We hypothesized that most people reside between 0 and 1 on the B.O. Scale, and this lady was at a 9.9. The highest recorded level of B.O. in the world.

I feel like I need to take a shower again because I'm pretty sure it's still on me.

*Scott would later say that if we had that moment on tape and we played it in slow motion, you could probably see my cheek moving as if being slapped by some invisible force. Okay not just some invisible force. The force of body odor manifesting itself in physical form.