I side-step three pancake piles of beige vomit on my way to the Gumamina party, where perfumers Courtney Rafuse and Marissa Zappas are launching fragrances inspired by Swan Lake: Odile (blood orange, dark chocolate, rubber) and Odette (grapefruit soda, rhubarb, rose). The perfumes have sleeping birds that look like they’re made from marzipan instead of normal caps, so they cost $300. Everyone on Instagram is bleeding through their pores because Gumamina won’t do samples (though you can get them for around $4 on LuckyScent, once they’re back in stock), so I decided to show up at 99 Canal Street for free and use my nose with the abandon of a wild horse.
I worry that I got some vomit grains on my long schoolgirl skirt while walking up the J train stairs, but I figure that, even if I did desecrate vintage wool, it would at least have an interesting scent profile. Likewise, the air in Chinatown is my favorite blend of roasted pork and burning piss when I approach the seemingly abandoned (apart from a life-size decal of a sinuous anime woman lounging on a crescent moon) 99 Canal Street. Was I about to smell some niche perfumes, or was I going to be processed into hamburger?
That, too, could have a silver lining. My value as a hamburger would no doubt surpass the rate I’m offered as a “freelance writer,” an obsolete job interchangeable with “cigarette girl” or “Sam Bankman-Fried’s loose T-shirt.”
But then downtown socialite and actress Ruby McCollister comes down and kindly leads me and my friend Ben to the silver elevator; I immediately interpret her enormous fur hat as a beacon past moldy AC units and a tarnished bronze plaque advertising the Banner of Christ Church in cartoonish font.
This is the way in which New York is like sitting on an endlessly rocking chair—there’s the shuttered storefronts, and then there’s the people who host launch parties behind them.
I ask Ruby why Gumamina decided to celebrate their perfumes in Chinatown. They’d been looking for a free space, she said, and “I was, like…‘Raf has a gallery.’”
Fair enough. Off the elevator, I appreciate the dingy ambiance of Raf’s gallery. I count seven people in attendance when I show up, which is shortly after the event started at 5 p.m. I take full responsibility for being on time for a launch party, so I’m giving attendance a seven-out-of-10.
Ruby hands me and Ben saturated paper test strips, and I start snorting them and pretending like they’re changing my life. Odile smells, to me, like a $120 Maison Crivelli perfume I already have, and Odette smells like carbonated baby powder. I enjoy both of them, but neither are as gripping as my hand is around $300.
But I’m still thoughtfully huffing while I walk around the gallery. Massive blue, green, and red paintings of a barren “DOOM city,” as one piece captions it, are illuminated by huge spotlights in the otherwise scarcely decorated room.
All Gumamina really has for their set-up are two red tables decorated with calla lillies, perfume boxes, and Heiderer Mayer Grüner Veltliner. Ben says the wine tastes “like apple juice,” so I give alcohol a five-out-of-10 because I don’t like juice unless it comes out of my eyes.
I prefer looking through the gallery’s tall windows. They reveal the stars of the city—cars and their headlights, illuminated apartments rented by normal people and people with the same mole as Caroline Polachek. I grow wistful looking at the melange of people going places, taking things from each other, continuing to roam. The atmosphere is an unprecedented nine-out-of-10.
Gumamina’s launch party receives an overall seven-out-of-10. I learn later that I missed the night’s main event, an interpretive ballet-adjacent dance, which probably would have knocked the atmosphere score down to “ummmMMmmmmmmmhmmm” for me. But, for now, I’m not too good for anything. Soaked in weird perfume, I’m just as stinky as my city.