Rubber. Asphalt. Popcorn. These are a few of the smells I have permanently locked in the vault in relation to a brand new toy. Even the whiff of one of those three things can conjure up that childhood excitement and send me hurtling down Memory Aisle.
We all know the smell of a new toy. If you’ve ever opened up a figure, you know that sweet, sweet toxic potpourri that smacks you in the face and swirls into your nostrils. It’s a vibrant, distinctly unnatural smell that isn’t found anywhere else. The multifarious types of plastic mixing together with strong, chemically obtrusive paints produce a cologne that drenches our toys with an unmistakably seductive scent. If you have ever opened up a box of toys that have been packed away for a brief length of time, then you know how strong those smells can get.
Some might hate it. I can’t get enough. I stick new toys under my nose and breathe in that smell. I love the smell of a new toy in the morning.
It smells like victory.
But rubber, asphalt and popcorn? No, toys don’t smell like that. But toy stores? Yeah, that’s what I’ve got vaulted forever.
I’ve mentioned many times in previous articles that my two primary go-to stores for toys were the local Hills department store (Hills is where the toys are) and Best department store (no catchy jingle). If I couldn’t find it at one, I could find it at the other. If neither store had it, and last-chance Kmart didn’t either? I was screwed. Online shopping was science fiction. The aisle was the first, last, and only shot you had.
In my Hills, the toy department was way back in the far left hand corner of the store. You had to pass through an ocean of peripheries in order to get to the good stuff. But the first thing when you walked in was a popcorn stand. Now, I guess somebody at some point walked into the store and decided that they wanted popcorn. I can’t remember ever seeing anybody actually buy popcorn from that stand. But that smell … that strong, churning scent of overly-buttered, cheap, and slightly stale popcorn was all you could smell when you walked in. It crawled into your nose and infiltrated your clothes. There was no getting around it, no avoiding it. If you went in that store, you had to be prepared to deal with the funk infusion of popped kernels nuzzling your olfactory receptors.
It got to be so strong that I got into a habit of holding my breath when I went into the store. The smell itself was invasive enough to carry to the middle of the store. So often when I went in, I didn’t breathe until I hit the soap aisle. You haven’t lived until your first breath is a weird mixture of soap and stale popcorn.
The popcorn smell never made it past the middle of the store, though. Past the soap were racks and racks of cheap clothes and all the smells associated with unwashed department store clothing. If you’ve reached a decent enough escape velocity to get past all those nasal booby traps, then you were rewarded with another smell, the smell that signaled your arrival into toyland: rubber.
Preceding the toy aisle in Hills were bikes. Row after row of bikes, all with freshly baked rubber tires that had not yet lost any of their bouncy black essence. The toy aisle was infused with the smell of bike tires. The search through the pegs for the brand new G.I. Joe or Masters of the Universe was scored by the orchestral scent of rubber. Every breath drew in a thick black rope of the stuff. Even today, decades removed from the toy aisle of childhood, a brand new tire will transport me to pegs long since gone.
Best was a different animal compared to Hills. It had no popcorn guarding the front gates, and the bikes and other sporting equipment were in a separate section. So that’s where the asphalt comes in.
My Best squatted in the middle of an area that was perpetually being paved and resurfaced. It seems as if the asphalt was barely dry when another area would receive the same treatment. This pattern of freshly poured asphalt combined with the strong smell that lingered afterwards followed again by yet another bout of reconstructive surgery on the roads meant that my trips to Best seem umbilically connected to that asphalt smell, especially in the hot summer months when the trips were more frequent. The fresh pavement would bubble under the merciless sun. You could hear asphalt snapping and cracking as cars passed. The smell would disappear the second you entered Best and stepped onto the escalator that delivered you right at the base of the toy section, but your comings and goings were drowned in asphalt. A freshly paved road reminds me of toys.
If a single entity could sum up my childhood toy collecting, it would be the Michelin Man paving a road while eating a bag of popcorn.
You just don’t see that very often.
