Butt Gloves

I got a nifty new hand sanitizer giveaway thingy the other day.  And since Sissy loves hand sanitizer almost as much as I do, I let her do the honors of being the first to use it.

She went to town!  Acted like she was scrubbing in for surgery or something – rubbed big liquid-y handfuls of sanitizer all over both hands and up her forearms.  We’re sitting in the front seat of the car at this point, she with her arms bent at the elbows and her hands raised in the air in reverse surrender, me driving, when a really terrible smell hits us both.

Sissy looks over at me, her Littlest Petshop eyes huge in her face and says, “Mom?  MOM?!?  Is this a JOKE???”

The smell of someone’s unwashed backside was shimmering like a heat mirage off her hands.

“Oh, BOY, Babe!   I think the hand sanitizer must be skunked.  I’m pretty sure hand sanitizer shouldn’t smell like dirty bee-hind.”

The rest of the car ride was filled with no talking; only retching noises, and when we got home Sissy bolted to the sink and washed her hands-up-to-the-elbows.  Repeatedly.  (And no, we didn’t pitch the hand sanitizer.  Because that’s gonna be a funny joke on some unsuspecting dirty-handed boy we know.  After we send him off to a field by himself to clean up.  Ha ha ha.)

But you know what all of that reminded me of?!  The time I bought a pair of gloves in Paris.

Huh?!  How so?  Glad you asked.  Let me explain.

I was a young and lovely Jersey-haired ingénue in Paris.  It was November and I was setting out for a hiking holiday in Switzerland.  This naturally meant that I needed to purchase a last minute pair of gorgeous pink gloves from a street vendor.  I then proceeded to wear them through the miles and miles of the Paris Metro while touching various subway handrails, escalators, seat backs before finally getting to the train station where I met my friends and we boarded a train bound for Geneva.  It was right about the time we were settling into our compartment that I lifted my backpack up to its resting place above my head and discovered as my gloves were moving past my nose that they smelled…bad.  Really.  Really.  Bad.  Like butt if we’re being honest.  Either I had inadvertently PURCHASED butt gloves from the street vendor, or I had inadvertently made them INTO butt gloves by touching every filthy surface on the Paris metro.

Acck!  Knowing I had to wear these stank thangs the whole trip, I tried everything I could to get them smelling better, starting with peeling an orange on the train while wearing the gloves.  And?  Nothin’ doin’.  Still smelled like butt with an overlay of orange scent.

When we got to the hostel run by nuns where we stayed the first night, I washed the gloves out in the shared bathroom sink.  A little known fact here is that butt gloves, much like dogs, smell WORSE when wet.  And all hope of a light orange scent flees from the vengeful glove gods.

This went on the whole trip.  I washed those gloves at night in every sink I came to, scrubbed them with dry soap leaves, sprayed them with perfume in a department store, held a fir tree for fifteen minutes (that just got weird glops of sap on them and they STILL smelled) and rubbed deodorant on my hands before inserting them into the gloves.  Nothin’ doin’.  Butt per usual.  AND because they were rode hard and put up wet every night, they faded to a weird flesh color.  At which point I was giving the impression I had thickset putrid hands so I just had to throw the gloves away.

That’s it.  Just wanted to tell you how smelly hands accidentally run in the family.  No ifs, ands, or butts heh, heh, heh about it.

One thought on “Butt Gloves

  1. Love the Paris glove story, I think I bought those when I was in Paris
    There were a lot of dirty things on the marathon route — any germaphobe
    would have passed out;)

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