Waiting for a stoplight to turn the expected green, I noticed the driver ahead of me open his shiny Mazda door as if he had lost something. Bending slightly into the street, he spit out a big grey gob of phlegm, which I couldn’t help but seal into my tires as I passed.
I’m not surprised. The residue of bad chest colds, chewing tobacco or just too much loose liquid in the mouth seems to be showing up — publicly — more and more. I call these sightings “spit pies,” similar, you could say, to cow pies out on the prairies.
In neighborhoods, on curbs, outside public buildings, at the bottom of urinals, or sometimes even floating in toilet bowls, I’m becoming awfully familiar with this medieval humour of sluggishness.
The posture of young boys “clearing their throats” on the lawn or driveway or public walk is really becoming tiresome. Nobody offers to pick up these secretions like pet owners might. I haven’t seen a run on “phlegm catchers” at Target lately.
O! for the lack of a spittoon. Where this behavior was once relegated to the barber shop, where you could “project” a dark woody mass through the air into a jar the size of an Egyptian antiquity, now we have to be much more observant where we step in life.
Of course spitting has its place, or at least it once had its place. Before dentists invented that plastic suck tube that hangs out of your mouth, you could at least have had a conversation beyond “ahh” and “oww!” with a kindly “Spit in the bowl, please.”
There it was acceptable to expectorate tiny bits of teeth, blood and paste into the drainage system. Sailors of old knew when to spit, and when not to spit. And when hotels morphed into motels, we no longer had bellhops who polished spittoons, as Langston Hughes describes:
Clean the spittoons, boy
Detroit,
Chicago,
Atlantic City,
Palm Beach.
Clean the spittoons.
… and the slime in the hotel spittoons.
You’ll have to go to a pricey antique shop now if you want to evoke a gentlemanly past behavior of slam dunking basketballs into polished cuspidors.
A few months ago, fresh from a yoga session, I stepped off a curb acknowledging a bicyclist who pedaled a bit too close into my personal space.
Still, I nodded a gentle Hello, assuming we members of the human race were still on a fairly hospitable basis with one another. But the cyclist wheeled back and screamed into my face, “What the — (children might be reading!) did you say?” I reassured my new acquaintance I only said Hello.
The day was sunny, so I appreciated even more my new clip-ons over my trifocals, but I wasn’t fast enough to avoid a close encounter of rage and hostility: “If you ever speak to me again like that, I’ll kill you m-f-er.”
Taking several deep yoga breaths, I shrugged him off, agreed never to communicate with him again, but as a finishing touch to our agreement, he sealed the contract with a wad, and I do mean wad, of deep guttural rage.
He was off on his bike, and I was left wiping my face and glasses from the biggest shower of filth I’d had in a long time.
What does another person’s spit on your face mean these days? For the moment, I wasn’t concerned about where I’d walked in my lifetime, nor what I hoped to do in the future, but in the precious moment, I found myself a close observer of personal rage that seems to be increasing incrementally each day by several powers.
Why are we wiping our faces more and more after public discourse? Why are so many more people worked up to a fit of physical rage?
But this spit-in-your-face business is becoming more common, even expected at certain dangerous points.
If you sit in the front row of Richard III, you can certainly expect to see in the floodlights the spray of spittle, a sort of mist which thespians have to tolerate if their voices are going to project Elizabethan wit all the way back to row ZZ.
But when you are the subject of not mist, nor rain showers, but globs of lava from a volatile human being, doesn’t it give you pause to think what we’re becoming — a nation of tobaccoless spitters, a nation of cultural rage?
Actually, I think I would have preferred a bloody nose or a broken chin over the mess I had to wipe from my clip-ons, nose, mouth, cheeks.
So the next time I offer to say Hello to a passerby passing quickly by, I’ll be looking for how the mouth takes shape, looking for either a polite Hello in return or maybe dodging or feinting — in case something wet and gooey is headed my way.
