Spit Out Your Gum

"Did you just spit?"

"Yeah, I love to spit."

She was the most beautiful tomboy I've ever known, and she had just expectorated a rather throaty gob on the sidewalk right next to the main doors of the venerable all-girls private school where I taught and she learned. Hundreds of girls in requisite plaid skirts were jamming the narrow entrance-way after a routine fire drill when I first heard then saw the spit.

It truly was "the spit" of my time at that school. After years of teaching at a similarly venerable all-boys school where there was "a spit" about every 90 seconds (so much so that the head maintenance guy would inform faculty meetings about the astronomical costs of spit removal around campus), including the rite of passage attempt to spit down six flights of steps and hit bottom rather than a banister (oh the demerits meted out for such salivary, phlegmatic infractions), my time at the girls school was happily spit-free, until that glorious moment when that particular girl let go.

Her spit shocked me, but her response delighted me. Instead of some blatant quick lie, "No, I didn't just spit," or some long-winded excuse about asthma, bronchitis, or accidentally inhaling a mosquito, the girl's no-shame, matter-of-fact, nearly proud declaration or her love of spitting just made me chuckle, and maybe shake my head a bit (no demerit was issued).

Shaking not in any "kids these days" impotent dismissal, but shaking in an almost awed respect for her honesty and, most important, her wisdom. Because really, who doesn't love to spit? I had thought it was just a guy thing, but as in so many other ways at that school, the girls--in this case, the girl--taught me a thing or two about the ways of the world. Yes, hopefully we all do move on from the twelve-year-old boy "I spit, therefore I am" ethos, but still, a good spit when needed, or in the right situation, just for the hell of it, is wholly satisfying.

But yes, gum. The girls might not have spit spit, but they sure chewed a helluva lot of gum, which under my vigilant watch entailed a lot of spitting out of gum. I'm sure by the time I taught girls, the boys had taught me the conniving trick of walking to the wastebasket and very demonstratively pulling out a long string of gum, snapping it off, then loudly dropping the gum into the trash--all the better to distract the teacher from the fact that there was still a good-sized hunk of gum in the offender's mouth. "All of it, Sara or Maya or Sarah or Eva or Marcella or whoever."

Some of them were armed with statistics about chewing gum and burning calories, others pleaded the age-old girls-school lament about being "so stressed out." Others just smiled, disposed of the gum, and I'm sure were chewing a fresh piece thirty seconds later.

When chaperoning a dance, it was easy to tell the kids you had to keep an eye on: the ones sloppily chewing a wad of gum.

One of my childhood friends, Tom, and I developed a ritual around the age of ten, when bubblegum chewing was a quasi-religious experience. After an hour or two of gnashing gum and replenishing the wad with fresh pieces every so often, one of us would pull out the well-masticated slab of whitened gunk and announce proudly, "Man, I chewed the HECK out of that gum." To this day, I can't get rid of a piece of gum without looking at it and saying softly, "Man, I chewed the HECK out of that gum."

But mainly for the great line in Bob (Uncle Bob) Dylan's "4th Time Around," his devastating parody of John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood." "Your words are not clear/You better spit out your gum."



Bob Dylan-4th Time Around

Robyn Hitchcock-4th Time Around

Chris Whitley-4th Time Around