A friend of mine has a vintage Jaguar — a beautiful, impractical thing that he loves the way some men love boats, which is to say expensively and idiotically. He talks about it a lot, and I nod and pretend to listen — I know next to nothing about cars, which is why I happily drive a Subaru. But as much as I love my Subaru — it’s a practical, reliable car, which cannot be said about my friend’s vintage Jaguar — I have to admit it’s missing something in the romantic pizazz department.
For instance, ashtrays. My friend’s vintage Jag has ashtrays aplenty. I counted: four of them. One in each door panel, plus two more in the center console up front, because apparently in 1971 the engineers at Jaguar looked at a car with seating for four and thought: What if they all light up at once? I found myself trying to imagine what the inside of that car must have been like at full burn. Four passengers, windows up against the English rain, everyone lighting up. The interior filling with the white smoke of, presumably, English cigarette brands with some “By Appointment” nonsense on the wrapper. Benson & Hedges or Silk Cut or that kind of thing. How did they not suffocate themselves? What could the interior of that car smelled like?
And then I stopped trying to imagine it, because of course I know exactly how it smelled. It smelled like my grandfather’s Lincoln.
Some families were Cadillac families. Mine were Lincoln people. My grandfather drove a succession of Lincoln Continentals — long, dark, serious cars that smelled, every one of them, exactly the same way: cold air, cigarette smoke, and Bay Rum.
The memory I keep coming back to is summer. He’d pick me up from the swimming pool, and I’d climb into the front seat still damp, wrapped in a towel, the chlorine from the pool mixing with the Freon from the AC and the slow burn of whatever he was smoking up front — a Winston, always a Winston, glowing orange in the dimness of the car. The windows were up. The radio was on low. The while smoke curling upward, then getting caught in the AC blast and shooting to the back seat.
Chlorine. Coppertone. AC. Winston. It is one of the most specific smells I know. I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast on any given Tuesday in 1974, but that smell is imprinted forever.
I don’t smoke cigarettes, but I do smoke cigars, “on occasion,” I tell my doctor or say on healthcare intake forms, but that’s not really accurate, unless “occasion” means “daily.” It’s not 1974 anymore, so I don’t smoke them in restaurants, or in other people’s houses, or anywhere that would cause a reasonable person to object — which is nearly everywhere, these days.
But on occasion, in the car — see note re “occasion” above — I’ll light one up. My car has no ashtray, of course, because my car is a Subaru, and my guess is that I might be the only Subaru owner who needs one. So I have to flick the ash out the window like some kind of roadside criminal. But the windows are open anyway — even in the cold, even in the rain — because I don’t have the sheer reckless courage of those folks in the Jaguar, or my grandfather in the Lincoln, to fill the car with carbonized tobacco fumes. I even keep an old poncho in the back seat — I bought it years ago on a trip to Mexico — which I drape over myself so the smell doesn’t get into my clothes.
I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: Rob is such a wuss.
My grandfather, in his Lincoln, with his Winston, on a hot summer afternoon, didn’t wear a poncho. He didn’t crack the window. He didn’t check the direction of the wind before he lit up or stuff his jacket into a plastic bag when he got home. He just smoked, and drove, and turned the AC up, and the whole car smelled like him for as long as he owned it and probably for years after. I think about that sometimes, huddled in my poncho, one arm out the window, flicking ash onto the highway with exactly zero romantic pizazz.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
