My Polo Green Friend

Misadventures in vintage cologne hunting

I can recall three very distinct scent combinations from my childhood that I likely won’t ever smell again.

• The “Old-Style beer, cigarettes, and wax” smell of a Chicagoland bowling alley from my childhood.

• The mix of leather and diesel from a 1983 Mercedes-Benz 300D as I sip a hot chocolate on my way to school.

• Polo cologne. Specifically Polo cologne and cannabis in a Porsche being driven by my friend’s freshly-divorced dad when I was 9, but I’d also just settle for the original scent that my own father also wore when I was young.

You’d think the third wouldn’t be so hard to replicate. Hardly anybody bats an eye if you smoke weed these days, and it can’t be that hard for a guy in Brooklyn to find a dad who just signed away all his money to alimony but kept the Porsche he bought to soothe his mid-life malaise. It’s conceivable I could pull off that particular scent reunion all these years later, except the big X factor is what Polo cologne I use. I can’t use a bottle I go and buy from a store because the stuff you buy now smells different than it smelled back then. Eric Twardzik wrote one of the better explainers on the subject last year, about how he came across a bottle of the cologne’s “older formula” in 2018, and liked the scent so much that he went to a Polo store to buy another bottle. The fragrance came in the same green glass bottle and was “still dark and masculine — smoky and piney, like an ashtray left in the woods — it didn’t have that same weird, wet, green note that characterized mine.”

A few years before Twardzik’s experience, I went on my own hunt for bottles of Polo scent I recalled from my childhood, the type that had actual oakmoss in the mix and not a synthetic replacement the fragrance makers started using in 2003, the point which Twardzik believes separates the Polo cologne I knew then and the one we have today. I didn’t expect I’d end up learning a lot about myself.

It started with a Craigslist ad for “old Ralph Lauren Polo cologne.” I love looking through the stuff people sell on that website. It’s hilarious to me that people would choose to unload things like a Rolex Submariner “with papers” at a steep discount, a baseball bat signed by some guy who had one good season with the Mets before fizzling out by 1996, or a leather couch that looks like it was used in the background of a few homemade pornos in 1998 on Craigslist, but I’ve always held back buying anything. The one exception was when I saw an ad for “1980s Polo Cologne.” Three bottles at $25 a pop. I reached out and asked if it had the Warner/Lauren LTD sticker from the late-1970s/early-’80s or a Cosmair one on the bottom that signified it was from the period between the mid-’80s and the start of the 21st century when Cosmair was consolidated into its parent company L’Oreal.

“Sticker yes,” the person listed in the ad with the AOL account responded. His lack of details didn’t bother me; $25 per bottle was a good deal, so I said I’d take them. I said I could send him money through PayPal, but Grisha shot down that idea. “You meet with me tomorrow 8,” he replied, sending an address to meet him at. I asked whether he meant 8 in the morning or night, but didn’t get a response. I guessed he’d meant the earlier time, so I got on the Q and headed down to the address off Coney Island Ave. address he’d given me. When I got there, I found an old tire shop that looked closed. Out front was a short man sitting on an old office chair, watching something on his iPhone. He was bald and had an olive complexion. I asked if he was Grisha. He squinted and said “Yes? Maybe.” His accent was less Odesa or St. Petersburg, and more “former Soviet Republic with a name that ends in -stan.” I told him I was there to buy the bottles of cologne. He nodded, then walked over to another guy who was sitting on a bench nearby. The guy who was maybe Grisha whispered something in the man’s ear. The man nodded, yanwed, got up, and ran inside a nearby apartment.

“We will wait,” the man who was maybe Grisha said. I asked if he was the person I talked to over e-mail. He said “Of course,” so I decided that I was, in fact, in the presence of Grisha. I asked who that other guy was. “My daughter’s son,” Grisha said.

After five minutes of silence, the Grisha’s grandson came back out holding a box. He walked over to us, and I couldn’t tell if the guy was young, old, or just really weathered for his age. He had on a black baseball cap that was covered in dust. His hands were chapped and filthy, but his t-shirt looked like it had just been pulled freshly out of a five-pack and his basketball shorts had a high school logo on them I couldn’t make out. He gave me a nasty look as he pushed the box into my hands.

“OK,” Grisha said. “$100 whole box is yours.”

I opened the box. Inside was an assortment of different kinds of cologne. All of them were Ralph Lauren, but none of them were in the green bottle, let alone the discontinued version I was looking for.

“OK,” Grisha said. “$50 for this box and I find you the green bottle.”

I pulled a bottle of Polo Sport out of the box and couldn’t help but make a face that gave away my dissatisfaction.

“$40 and the green bottle another $25,” Grisha said. I reminded him the green bottle he didn’t have was already $25 according to the ad I’d responded to.

“OK.” Grihsa thought for a second. “$50 for box, green bottle, and I have sunglasses I could sell you. Ray-Ban? Versace? I sell you box of cologne, Prada sunglasses, and I have perfume for your wife I give as gift.”

I declined, and after 30 more minutes of playing Let’s Make a Deal with Grisha while his grandson hovered behind me smoking a cigarette and mumbling “That’s good price,” I eventually walked back to the Q train without the thing I’d schlepped down to the end of Brooklyn to buy.

A few months later I was on 47th getting falafel with a friend of mine. His family had been working in the Diamond District for a few decades, so he knew a little bit about haggling with people who lived under communist rule. I told him my story about going down to meet with Grisha, about how he told me to give him my phone number so he could call me when he got the bottle of old Polo cologne he’d for some reason advertised having on Craigslist. I gave him a fake number.

“You know it was stolen goods, right? They were just trying to make a quick buck,” my friend said. I told him I figured that, which is why I lied about my contact. I didn’t want Grisha calling me. If he e-mailed me I could just delete that, but there’s still something so personal about receiving a call. But I still couldn’t figure out why they had advertised it so specifically as Polo cologne from the 1980s. My friend shrugged.

“That’s how they get people like you to go all the way to them. They figure nobody wants to leave empty-handed.”

“Like me?”

“You don’t think these guys do their research? They know you can find Polo cologne anywhere, but they look around the Internet and see there are guys out there paying a bunch of money for old Polo cologne so that’s how they market it. It hardly ever works, but every now and then somebody takes the bait and you did.”

We finished our falafel, went inside a shop to look at a watch my friend wanted to buy and then parted ways. Two weeks later there was an e-mail from an AOL account in my inbox.

“I have old polo cologne now you want to come buy” was the subject and the message. It was from Grisha. I deleted it. Maybe someday I’d have the original scent on my skin, but I wasn’t going to get it from a guy on Coney Island Ave.