So I'm going about my business here at home when I hear a jaunty knock at the door. Opening it, I find an equally jaunty-looking young man on the front step. "Mike?" he says by way of greeting.

After we compare notes it turns out that he had an appointment to demonstrate some sort of advanced carpet cleaning technology in Mike's apartment just around the way, but since nobody answered the door he thought he might have gotten the wrong place. He asks if he can use my telephone to call his home office. I only hesitate a moment, calculating the odds that this is some elaborate ploy which will end with me broken and bloodied on the floor and my earthly possessions in the back of this kid's van, before agreeing.*

He calls the office, and we engage in idle chitchat while he waits for his superiors to make a decision. Finally he thanks me and leaves.

The next time I use the phone, maybe two hours later, I smell cigarette smoke and, faintly, the scent of Obsession for Men. I peer out through our kitchen window wondering if some pungent fellow, redolent of these odors, is standing on our patio for some reason. Then I realize that these smells are coming from the phone itself. The mouthpiece smells like smoke, and the rest of it smells like cologne. Just like that kid! That cologne-wearing smoker of a kid!

When I hang up I discover that the smell still lingers. Now I smell like cigarettes and Obsession! DAMN YOU, YOUNG CARPET-CLEANER MAN!!

* It didn't occur to me until much later that a lot of gay porn movies probably start this way too.

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