Jovan Musk

Every morning my father would shower, shave, and splash liberal amounts of Jovan Musk on his neck. The smell was sharpest in the morning, but I could still catch it when he came home at night and wrapped me in a hug. When I was little, he would dress every day in slacks, a button-down shirt and loafers, and tuck a handkerchief in his back pocket. My father had started two businesses in a couple of years- a Burger King franchise, and an independent home video rental store. His video store was one of the first in the area, a real entrepreneurial accomplishment. As a businessman, he dressed and smelled the part.

As the years went on, competition heated up for his video rental store, primarily a newcomer called Blockbuster Video. They opened shop a couple of miles up the road, and their store was larger, brighter, and had a wider selection of videos to rent. My father still dressed and smelled like a businessman every day, though fewer and fewer customers were coming to his store.

Eventually, he had to close his video store. He couldn’t compete with Blockbuster. And his Burger King, once a wildly successful franchise, was weathering the storms of a fickle economy. Where he’d once been able to hire professionals to help with the maintenance of a high-volume fast-food restaurant, he started to take on some of that work himself. He started coming home smelling of French fries.

My father bought a set of navy blue Dickies workwear and a pair of steel toed boots. Some mornings after he showered and shaved and put on his Jovan Musk, he’d pull on his Dickies and boots to go down to the Burger King. He had to do the administration and accounting of the restaurant, but he also had to sling fry baskets and build Whoppers sometimes. He had to kneel down on the red tiled floor to scrub the grout, and bend over in the parking lot to pick up cigarette butts. My father had planned to get rich by opening multiple franchises in the area and run them as a high level manager.  Now he was a part-time maintenance man, working alongside teenagers who had no respect for him. I don’t know if it was more humiliating for him or for us.

By the time he sold the Burger King, his Dickies had become everyday wear. And when I hugged him at night, the smell of the deep fryer obscured his Jovan Musk.