Did you love bubble gum during your childhood as much as so many of us did? It kept our jaws busy without talking, sometimes served as currency in our kid culture, and gave us yet another way to compete with our contemporaries.
I wasn’t kidding when I mentioned bubble gum as currency. We all traded baseball cards which came with a steamrolled piece of bubble gum, both the size of a cigarette pack. Typical negotiations: “I’ll give you two Pee Wee Reese’s for one Mickey Mantle.” To this day I don’t know if the gum or the card was the draw. In my case, it was definitely the gum, since I wasn’t much of a baseball fan.
Besides the baseball card gum, there were plenty of brands, Double Bubble and Bubble Yum among them. I favored Bubble Yum because it was cheapest-- five for a nickel, and wrapped like a piece of taffy. I became quite a connoisseur of the sweet concoction; the softer it was, the fresher it was. The ancient stuff, which I often bought at McCool’s Grocery Store, was like putting a piece of Plymouth Rock in my mouth.
Bazooka was the classier, but more expensive choice, a pink rectangle encased in a red and blue waxed paper wrapper. It came with a bonus, too: a cute comic strip on the same waxed paper, folded into quarters. Usually it had a joke for a punchline, which made my friends and me groan. Other times it would offer a riddle which, even at that age, I thought pretty lame.
But the real draw of the pink goo was the ability to blow bubbles, preferably bigger than your friend’s. If we were serious “bubblers,” we’d chew two pieces at once—bigger bang for our buck, as they say. My burst bubble made a pink blob on my face, edged with the dirt I hadn’t wiped off after some other adventure. I was never good at the job, so a burst bubble that covered my nose was as good as it got. Let’s put it this way: if blowing bubbles were a team sport, I’d have been “last pick.”
I did, however, get good enough to clamp my teeth on the end of the bubble, then take it out of my mouth attached to its mother ship, and proudly show it off to younger kids who were easier to impress. Some of my friends could huff and puff creations big enough to cover their faces. I knew one kid whose bubble stuck in his hair when it popped.
And speaking of “huffing and puffing,” it required technique. We had to blow hard enough to inflate the creation, but not so hard or fast that it popped. Ever impatient, that step always did me in. I huffed those kid lungs too hard and my promising bubble always exploded. We sometimes indulged in ABC gum (Already Been Chewed,) swapping with another kid, and lived to tell about it.
Of course, gum wasn’t allowed at school, so we devised plenty of tricks to keep it hidden from our teachers. My only attempt was hiding it behind my ear, and I ended up with a missing clump of hair sprouting from the reclaimed blob. After that fiasco, bubble gum and I parted company while at school.
My question: if no one was chewing it at school, why was the underside of the desk like a gum graveyard?
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