My boyfriend gave me ablutophobia because one time after I’d just showered, shampooed, conditioned, scrubbed, pumiced, shaved, flossed, brushed, and moisturized—the whole regimen—he said I smelled like gorgonzola. Gor-gon-zo-la. This, as you can imagine, was crippling, the resultant phobia, not the alleged smell but the idea of me wafting through the world like stinky cheese, and I couldn’t shake it no matter how many pita chips I stuffed in my pockets as my CBT shrink suggested or how many Reiki sessions I completed with Jürgen or how many microdoses of LSD I ate while standing in the shower without the water running.
No cure, no bathing, until the pandemic made me agoraphobic which hit me at a yacht rock cover band show in a parking lot in Burlington, all these old white farts shaking their old white fart extruders to an off-beat version of “Private Eyes.” I passed out. Then and there, amidst that throng of rhythmless Vermonter flesh.
I could bathe, finally, but people and spaces freaked me out. The scale of it all, a horror. I tried everything. I went back to Jürgen. I took more LSD while riding the escalator after hours at my local mall, up and down in the void at the heart of the American economy. I ate pages of Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” that I’d balled up into little paper pills. No cure until I saw my neighbor beating his labradoodle Benjamin with a brass-handled cane which made me androphobic as you can imagine, witness to this gratuitous display of male cruelty from old Mr. Simonson who’d I always thought of as harmless, who duped me with his chunky cardigans and tender waves into thinking such harmlessness was possible. Yet I’m still attracted to men, unfortunately. A part of me, whether out of habit or social conditioning or hormones, and this time I didn’t call Jürgen or eat acid or dine on any modernist texts because I knew that the only cure to my phobia was another phobia. I need a new phobia to squeeze out the current one. There’s a slot in my head that needs a fear and will only evict the current tenant if a new one’s lined up, ink drying on the phobic lease. This is the secret to life, to my fearful life anyway—to be constantly juggling phobias, have one lined up, in the air, hovering just above me but ready, ever ready, to drop.
I ran into Jürgen’s office last week shrieking like Tippi Hedren with terror as crows and blue jays picked at burrito scraps in the parking lot, terror but also joy as my orinthphobia morphed into scoptophobia and said, “Jürgen, don’t you dare fucking look at me,” and he closed his eyes and me I closed mine and I felt Jürgen’s big hands coaxing my energies throughout my body not blindly but with a different sort of vision and for the first time in a hellish long while I was excited, ecstatic, even, dying to find out what I’d be afraid of next, when Jürgen took an audible sniff and said, “Do you smell that?” and I said, “Smell what?” and he said, this Reiki master, this healer, he said, “Blue cheese,” and what could I do but thank him?