The sweet smell of success (a tale of pheromones)

I suppose it’s the natural thing to do.
Attract the opposite sex by any means possible.
Watching Planet Earth the Sunday, I was amused by the bluebird of happiness dancing his fucking ass off for the ladies.
It is wild turkey season in Northern California, and the toms are doing some serious strutting.
Male peacocks, perfect example of flash.
Humans do it to.
In some pretty spectacularly bizarre ways.
Back at the university, we had a huge campus party coming up. I was a free agent. A buddy convinced me to try something new to attract the ladies (he’s a very successful actuary these days; I can’t account for what happened in the wayback machine of 1984).
“I know how we’re going to score tonight,” he said.
“How?”
“We’ll use pheromones.”
“What the fuck are pheromones?”
“Your body produces them. It’s a smell. Only women can smell it.”
“Where?”
“Testicle sweat.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, I read about it.”
“Where?”
“Penthouse.”
(Penthouse, the magazine famous for it’s letters that all start “…I was at a small Midwestern university…” and the fuzzy-focus Pet of the Month centerfold. Not the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of American Medicine – fuck, not even Nature. But Penthouse. Doomed. Doomed I tell you.)
“OK, cool. I’m in.”
So how does one go about collecting pheromones?
We put bandanas in the cup of a jock straps, put the jock strap on, pulled on a pair of shorts – and went for a 5-mile run.
A couple of hours before the party.
“Now what?” I asked.
“We get cleaned up, and wipe the bandana on our neck and our wrists, so the heat from our arteries will release the pheromones.”
“OK.”
So I’m about to wipe sweat from my nutsack across the carotid arteries in my neck and the ulnar and radial arteries on my wrist, and I have one spectacular second thought – “This is sweat. From my nuts. Fuck am I doing?”
I pride myself on being fastidiously clean. I smell good most of the time. And in 1984, I’m about to pull a bandana across clean parts of my body that’s been soaking up sweat from my unit. My package.
“Uhhhh, I’m not so sure about this,” I said. “What if they smell something. Something like scrotum smell?”
“Dumbass. That’s what we want. That’s where the pheromones are. But just in case, wear some cologne, too.”
“Oh, OK.”
It didn’t work for either of us that night. But he did meet his wife a week later at a sorority mixer. I don’t think he was wearing any nutsack sweat, however.
I bring this up because there’s big doings Friday night. The Jim Dyar Band is playing Klub Klondike in Lakehead (c'mon down, bring your friends).
There will be ladies there.
I want to be attractive. To the ladies.
I googled “testicle sweat pheromones” and came back with 10,400 hits.
I guess there’s something to it.
I think I’ll stick with a shower.
And a couple of spritz’s of Kenneth Cole’s Reaction.