Stinky

My best friend sold her car because her cat peed on the backseat.  This urination occurred in July, so she made me drive her everywhere until the weather turned cold in October (I obviously wasn’t living in the south at the time), so she could sell the car to some unsuspecting buyer who wouldn’t know the gravity of their error until the spring when the humidity brought the scent to the surface and made the car once again undriveable for anyone with an even slightly functioning olfactory sense.  See, when we couldn’t clean the smell out of the upholstery, we tried covering it up.  But it just ended up smelling like roses a cat had peed on, vanilla cat piss, cigarettes dipped in cat urine and then smoked, etc.  You get the idea.  I always felt badly for the person who bought that car.  They had no idea their social life was about to come to an abrupt end as soon as the snow thawed the following spring.  I mean, I remember when my mother accidentally locked the cat in my closet for three weeks when we were out of town.  She somehow survived, but she ripped all of the clothes down off my hangers and peed on every single item.  Most of it ended up at Goodwill, but Mom was particularly distressed that my brand-new winter coat was among the ruined items.  After she had it dry cleaned twice, she gifted it to my unsuspecting grandmother.  (I, of course, had refused to get within 10 feet of any of it).   I had a couple of guilty moments where I almost told her, but then I rationalized (as I assumed my mother had) that she would only wear it when visiting us in Illinois (since she lived in Texas where a goose down jacket is about as useful as an umbrella in death valley) and we’d be almost the only people to notice that Grandma smelled like cat piss.  

 

 I hadn’t thought of this for at least 15 years, but all of the sudden it seemed like the perfect (and perhaps only) solution to my problem.

I was attending a graduate class at a university about 40 miles from our home in central Texas.  It was an intensive 3-week course, so class lasted each day from 8:00 am to 4:00 pm.  This was the hottest summer in recent Texas history, and we were hitting 105 or higher every day.   I’d drive the hour to school, park about a half mile from the building where the class was held, attend class, and then melt as I trudged back to my car while carrying my computer and about 6,847 pounds of books and notebooks.  Well, one day I got into my sweltering car and noticed a funky smell.  I looked around and didn’t see anything, so I drove home and forgot about it pretty quickly.  The next morning, I got into my car and noticed a stronger funk.  You know, like particularly pungent camembert or gym shoes some teenaged boy wore without socks to play basketball for a couple of days in the row (those two things smell the same, right?).  Up to this point I haven’t told you what kind of car this is.  It’s a Miata, folks.  Have you ever lost something inside a Miata?  Not possible, right?  I looked under the seats, on the little ledge behind the seat, in the glove box, and….done.  Nada.  What are you gonna do?  I just drove to class and tried to ignore it.

            When I left class that afternoon, it was 107 degrees.  One of my classmates joined me as we walked back to the parking lot.  When we were about 20 parking spaces from our cars (she was parked right next to me), it hit us.  There was a dead body in the parking lot.  OMG, what were we about to discover?   I remembered that funeral home in Ohio that got busted for not really cremating bodies but actually throwing in a creak out back.  Were we about to find a dumpster that served a similar purpose?  We both stopped breathing with our noses and continued toward our cars, shifting our eyes left and right in search of the horror we were surely about to encounter.  Within thirty seconds, it became quite clear that the deceased were being housed in my own car.  Even breathing only through our mouths, there was a barrier about three feet from my car that was almost impossible to breach.  I couldn’t figure it out.  I had searched the entire car (the entire thing just big enough for my purse, myself, my dog, and my Chihuahua) twice! The trunk had little more room than what was taken up by the spare tire, so I never even bothered to use it.  Um, wait…..except 3 nights ago when I went to the grocery store!  Yep, I popped the trunk, and there it was:  an entire raw chicken.  Along with the foul, there were 867,472 flies and twice that many maggots.  Can you smell it?  If you think you can, but you haven’t passed out yet, you can’t.  You just really can’t even begin to imagine the putridity.  Now what the hell was I supposed to do???  I did the only thing I could think of.  I took off my sock, put it on as a glove, picked up the chicken, got in my car, held the chicken out the window, drove until I found a dumpster, and chucked it in.  Then I drove to the nearest car wash and scrubbed the entire INSIDE of my car.  I also removed the carpet from the trunk, threw it in the dumpster at the car wash, and scrubbed the metal trunk.  Did that help?   You would think that would help, right?  Nope, you’d be wrong.  I drove home, in 107 heat, with the top down so I didn’t pass out and kill myself.  Once I got there, I sprinkled the contents of two boxes of baking soda from the fridge into the trunk and onto the seats.  And then I drank about five beers.  Yep, I’m pretty sure it was at least five, because I think it was the fifth that made me think of the Febreeze, so I attacked it with that too.

Did it smell better by morning?  Nope.

When all of that failed to alleviate, or even noticeably diminish, the problem, I suddenly remembered something my husband was always getting onto me about.  “Don’t leave the top down at night!  That cat that always leaves paw prints on the hood will get in and rip up the upholstery or piss on the seats.  You’ll never get that smell out.”  It all came flooding back:  Patricia’s Ford Taurus, Lucy’s piss coat…  Yes, that’s it!  I left the top down, popped the trunk, deposited a nice snuggly blanket, and even threw in a sock full of catnip for good measure.  If you hadn’t quite grasped the intensity of the putrid odor that saturated my car, I hope you now do.  I WANTED it to smell like cat piss instead.   Well, the first night was a big fail, but I was determined to keep it up until I succeeded. 

As it turned out, Walmart had a different plan for my Miata and me.  That next day one of their semi trucks hit and ran me on I-35. Yes, the top was still down because of the stench, and I had no roll bar.  I spun around a few times, hit the retaining wall, flipped upside down, skidded on the top of the windshield until it finally buckled and then skidded on the top of my seat.  Luckily I’m short, so I only skidded on my head the last second.   Although I’m pretty pissed the trucker left me there for dead and Walmart claimed they had no trucks in the area at the time (I was less than 2 miles from a Walmart distribution center and had eye witnesses who also noted it was a Walmart truck), I am ever so grateful to them for allowing me to get rid of my stench-riddled car without having to dupe some unsuspecting soul into the winter purchase of a summer horror.  Thanks, Walmart!

Okay, so this is not my actual car, but it is in fact a smashed Miata.