On Love and Being a Clove-Smoking Teen of the 1990s*

The scent of a clove cigarette wafts up my nostrils. I’m perched on my bed, in this 5th month of a global pandemic: coronavirus.

It’s 2020. I turn 42 next Thursday.

The floral orange and cinnamon aroma permeates the air. From nowhere. From living memories. I glance at the window, curtains drawn shut at 3:00 in the afternoon. Olfactory nerves still working. Gratitude that I probably don’t have COVID-19. Yet.

The scent is from the 1990s. Carefree high school days. Cruising on Highway 9, I-35, up and down Lindsay Street. I dinged into an elderly couple’s bumper in my station wagon and drove on. A hit and run at the urging of my friend. Overlapping guilt and innocence.

I watch Dead to Me in my bedroom on my iPhone, thankful it was just a bumper, a stunned elderly couple, not a person walking in the night. Not too much harm done.

Now, I’m the woman who leaves notes on the windshield when my child accidentally dings your paint with her door.

The Sunshine Store didn’t ID for cigarettes. I paid for swisher sweets and Cloves and felt like a 17-year-old badass. Shaved head, shy prowess; a cat on the prowl, aloof, lonely, wandering, wondering.

Life ahead and opening.

I turn 42 next Thursday. Life, still ahead and opening. I quit smoking in 2006, on my 28th birthday.

***

In the 1990s, I’d walk with my friends, all girls, around campus corner, past The Lovelight (poetry readings every Thursday), La Baguette (authentic French Café food), and Sugar’s (a strip club where a boyfriend would later take me). We’d walk and walk, underage, so no bars for us.

A haggard woman smoked a cigarette; we knew she was a prostitute. We saw her soliciting a haggard drunk man. Heartbreak is an old haggard woman. I felt sad and scared. How unfair that life could take anyone down that path.

Dervish and tumbleweeds. 17-year-olds. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke weed. I wore red lipstick & smoked swisher sweets and cloves. Felt mysterious. A whole new world, cracking open geodes, opened up in front of me.

Purple crystals hidden inside grey, a listless rock. Listless teenagers. Setting hammers to growing up. Cracking open.

Sometimes, at home, I’d smoke Camels and wander down our dead-end street. My mom didn’t know I was smoking. The deserted hotel wasn’t deserted. We didn’t know then what we know now — there was a drug ring, probably prostitution.

In 2020, the hotel is remodeled. People book there regularly, unaware of its history.

At 17, I wandered by a window, curiosity inviting, tried to peek in at the commotion, and an old bed was quickly thrown up against the window. Scared, heart fluttering in the knowledge that something was wrong, I slipped away. Made myself into a ghost.

Fear pervasive. Life ahead. Inhaled the smoke, the worry, exhaled the sadness, lack of control.

***

Sometimes dance parties erupted at The Lovelight. We’d sway and bump, enchanted and awkward, breaking for air and a puff of those citrus-spice scented cigarettes.

I went to college, to a fishbowl job as a temp at the university. Our boss told women to wear high heels and hose. In response, I played "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads — scared the old geezer as much as I could. Took smoke breaks to get away, inhale the scent of cloves and oranges, carefree memories.

Deena was older, probably my age now. Mike was in his 30s, maybe. We all liked each other. When the boss was away, we’d play. I danced on file cabinets. Somewhere there’s a picture of Mike with a lampshade on his head perched on a file cabinet. We took pictures with cameras in the 1990s. Went to the drugstore to have the film developed.

At the holidays, Mike stuffed airplane whiskey in miniature holiday stockings. Irish creme whiskey. Delicious.

I filed a report against the boss who told the women to wear heels and hose and sat at his desk leering at us.

The temp office gave me a new assignment.

I missed my coworkers.

***

Love. I desperately wanted romantic love. I had braces & felt ugly. I was 18, then 19, then 20.

At 20, I found my first love. French music, driving through the fog, Air Force, longing, letters. My retraction from a bar proposal. First loves are strange.

Paul impromptu-proposed while "Brandi, You’re a Fine Girl" played on the jukebox. I can hardly hear that song anymore. Playing it just now, tears well up.

Hearts can break even when staying in love isn't meant to be.

Or, maybe, my first love was when I was 4, with my next-door neighbor, or 7, with my first-grade crush. But, I think it was when I was 20. Difficult to digest. A love not fully processed.

Around Christmas, as a child, I’d poke cloves into the thick skins of oranges. In childhood, growing a thick skin.

Next Thursday, I turn 42. I quit smoking 14 years ago. The remembered scent of clove cigarettes takes me twisting and turning, yearning, back in time, to the 1990s.

***

Originally published in The Bad Influence