Late 90s cigarette scent memory
My relationship with incense started, as I imagine it did for many late 90s teenage delinquents, in an attempt to cover up the smell of cigarettes. I choked down my first puffs before I ever hit puberty, but I didn’t become a regular smoker until high school. By that time, I was smoking more than Marlboro Lights. Cigarettes were a daily habit and weed had become a regular weekend occurrence, which meant my mall rat patchouli sticks were working overtime.
Around 16, my friends and I started getting serious about what we smoked. With fake IDs and older siblings in our pockets, we weren’t dependent on “hey misters” and shoplifting. We experimented with menthols and bidis, and European imports. I started smoking Dunhill blues because that’s what Courtney Love smoked, but there was something about Djarum Blacks that captured my heart. I never smoked them regularly, but cloves were a singular, multisensory experience.
The crackle of burning black paper, the sweet aftertaste of spiced sugar, the numbing sensation of burning cloves, and the smell–sweet, spicy, sticky. It clung to whatever it touched, making goth girls and Toyota Corolla's scent memory super spreaders. But cloves weren’t just another late 90s misfit indicator, they’re one of Indonesia’s biggest money makers.
As much as they might remind me of my American youth, “cloves” have a history over one hundred years deep, with roots dating back even further. In Indonesia, where they originated in the late 1880s as a cure for asthma and sore throats, they’re known as kretek, a word derived from the signature sound of crackling clove.
They’re made from a combination of clove buds, tobacco, and a secret “sauce” containing flavors like chocolate, licorice, strawberry, banana, and rum. It’s sadly a seductive combination forever tied to slavery, war, and death. Colonialists committed unthinkable acts to profit from tobacco and spices, but it was Indonesian ingenuity that brought the two together.
Kretek cigarettes were technically outlawed in the US in 2009 under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, but they’ve since been reformulated and repackaged to fit a cigar-shaped loophole in the restrictions. In any case, smoking isn’t what it used to be. The older I get the harder it is to ignore the harsh reality that smoking kills. I still crave cigarettes all the time, but I just can’t smoke with the same enthusiasm.
That’s why my latest scent experiment is an attempt at mimicking not masking. Instead of covering up the scent of stale butts with incense or air fresheners, I want to resurrect the memory of a freshly smoked clove still smoldering in the ashtray of my best friend’s first car.
