The Gum Wall

An amusement park can collect a horrifying amount of chewed gum over the course of a season. Sure, the regular cleaning crew would scrape off whatever they saw, or more likely, whatever they felt like, during their early morning shifts, but there was always more. This realization hit Dan hard when he pulled the short straw and wound up on gum duty on his last day of work for the year. Dan’s manager handed him and Antwon two long handled metal scrapers and two buckets and ushered them out of the supply closet and into the weak September sun.

“We should start on the wall,” Antwon said as he took off towards the Thunderstorm.

Dan grimaced, “Why? That’ll take forever.”

“Exactly. Better now than three o’clock when the sun will be hitting us right in the face. I had gum duty last year, trust me.”

So Dan trusted him and they went to the edge of the park where the old wooden rollercoaster sat. They hopped over the railings that normally divided riders into a twisting line and went to the front. At some point in the now distant past someone decided to stick their chewing gum to the wall that divided the line and the loading zone, and it started a trend that was still going strong. When Dan rode the coaster for the first time as a scared ten-year-old, his older brother had told him it was like a wishing well. You made a wish and then stuck your gum on the wall. Dan eagerly complied, making a wish that he wouldn’t puke from fear. Now he felt like puking at the thought of all of the chewed gum he was about to get involved with.

“Well, dig in,” Antwon said, expertly scraping the pieces on the far end so that they dropped in his bucket with a tinny plunk.

Dan joined in, trying to mimic the technique, but still having to pick some off the ground with his gloved hand.

“You know these are people’s wishes we’re throwing away, don’t you?” he asked Antwon.

“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” Plunk, plunk, right into the bucket.

“Kind of makes you feel bad, doesn’t it?”

“Nope. If they’re making me work like this, I don’t care if they don’t come true.”

Dan stopped. “Do you think they won’t come true if we scrape them off?”

Antwon rolled his eyes. “No, I think they don’t come true because it’s gum.”

“So you’ve never wished on gum?”

“No.”

“What about on a penny in a fountain?”

“Nope.”

“A shooting star?”

“Listen man, I make my own luck.” Antwon continued scraping, each piece making less and less of a sound as it hit the growing pile in his bucket.

Dan scraped too, but with less enthusiasm. He looked down to the edge of the wall. A dab of neon orange stood out, right as the wall gave way to the platform. He had put it there three months ago. That night, he hung around the park after his shift with his friend Josh. Dan managed to talk him into riding the Thunderstorm three times in a row. Most of it had to do with Marissa, the girl who worked the control booth. On the first two rides he couldn’t catch her eye. But on the third time through the line, he stuck his gum to the wall. Sure enough, when he was loaded into his seat and looked her way, she had seen him. He smiled. She smiled back.

“This stuff isn’t going to fall off by itself,” Antwon said, staring at Dan.

“Right, sorry.” Dan renewed his efforts. His body removed gum, his mind replayed the summer. He had meant to talk to her, but all he managed was an occasional “Hi, how’s it going?” She was always on her way somewhere and he never had anything to say that could keep her in the same spot.

Now his time was almost up. This was the last day for the seasonal crew. As the gum piled up in his bucket he thought up things to say to her, but none of them sounded like they would lead anywhere. He could ask her about her fall semester, or music, or he could just up and ask her out. But then again, his one piece of luck was about to be scraped into a bucket. Dan tried to maneuver his way in front of Antwon, but as the hour wore on they ended up shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the wall. He eyed his orange piece.

“Hey Antwon, how exactly do you make your own luck?” He asked, nervously eyeing his scraper.

“I dunno. Whatever it is I really want, I go after it. Maybe I have to scrape gum to get there, but that’s the price you pay for having dreams, man.” He reached in front of Dan and dislodged the last of the pieces. Dan watched as the little blob of orange fell into the bucket and disappeared among the others. “Come on, I bet we can get Kiddy-Land before lunch.”

Although Kiddy-Land seemed like it would be worse, the regular cleaning crew had obviously paid it more attention, so Dan and Antwon arrived in the staff room early. As he grabbed his lunch bag from his locker, another crew came in. Dan looked up and saw Marissa. He fumbled around for a moment, giving her time to get her things. When she walked past him, he called out to her.

“Hey, Marissa?”

She turned. “Yeah? Dan, right?”

He smiled. “Right. Hey, are you busy after work today? I was going to go out and meet some friends downtown. Do you want to come?”

She hesitated, looking over at the girls waiting for her. “Uh, no, sorry. I’ve already got plans.”

“Oh. Another time, maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe.” She turned and left, faster than she normally moved.

Dan looked down at his lunch, feeling more like puking than eating. A hand clapped him on the back.

“That was rough,” Antwon said, in a laughing kind of condolence. “Come on, let’s eat.” Dan followed him back outside. They sat at the edge of the plaza, Dan keeping his back to the rest of the crew. He sighed a lot and Antwon worked to keep him cheered up. Maybe it was his jokes, or maybe it was just the crisp early fall air, but by the end of lunch he was ready to get back to work. Maybe one morning scraping gum wasn’t enough to get the kind of luck he wanted. But just in case, he got a piece of gum out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth, chewing it into a perfect, sticky blob.

Written by: Leslie Martin

Photograph by: Jennifer Stevens

Flag

In 1954 Jasper Johns painted his most famous work Flag. Forty two years later I would see it for the first time as a fifteen year old and it would carve a desire to paint into my heart. Twenty-one years and I suppose three months after that, I would see it again and wonder what the hell had happened to my life.

That sounds too dramatic. It probably wasn’t the way that, say, former heroin addicts wonder what happened to their life. It was more the way a middle-aged man, beer gut straining his belt, would look at his high school football picture and wonder where that kid went.

I was chaperoning a field trip when it happened. I was keeping my eye on the five kids I had been assigned to supervise. They were sprinting from room to room, eager to get the tour over with, more concerned with the day out of class than the art on the walls. I was trying to soak things in while keeping the backs of their heads in view when I turned a corner and saw Flag exactly where I had left it all those years ago. Have you ever run into someone you were once in love with? Not someone who left you broken hearted, but one you never actually dated? That way you have no bad memories of them, just some sense of things that never were? It was like that.

I stopped and stood in front of it. You have to stand in front of it to really appreciate its glory, all those underlying textures creating a depth that makes it so much more than a picture. The way that the white wasn’t really white and bits of text peaked through like secret messages, it amazes me and always has. And in that moment I remembered what paint smelled like. The sharpness of acrylic, the tantalizing asphyxiation of oils. I lived in those smells for almost a decade, and yet five minutes before I don’t think I could have brought them to mind. They lived in that painting.

“Mrs. Martin are you okay?”

I turned, seeing one of my students, Emma, looking at me.

“Yes, I just really love this painting.”

She smiled and nodded, “Oh, yeah, because it’s an American flag and you teach American history, right?”

No, not right. But how do you tell that to a kid who has to sit in your American history class the next day? Who probably sees you as the robot in front of the room that lives for nothing but to make them memorize the dates of the Civil War? Okay, that’s too depressing. Technically they know I have a life, but in the same way that I know George Washington must have snuggled with Martha; true, but hard to fathom.

“Yeah, something like that,” I replied because telling her any more wasn’t possible.

We looked at it together. She saw a flag. I saw the corner of my bedroom at my parents’ house, my easel, the paint stains on the carpet that made my mother crazy. I saw myself staying up all night in the summer trying to do what Johns did with Flag with as much success as one can expect at seventeen. I saw the stacks of canvases I have in the corner of my laundry room at home, covered with garbage bags because I just don’t know what else to do with them.

She moved on and I had the sense that I was slipping on my official duty. So I turned and hurried to find my group, looking back to give it one last glance. It sat there, waiting for its next admirer, and I said goodbye to it in my mind. I found my kids in the gift shop. They were laughing over a book of cubist nudes. Since they were at least trying to be quiet, I left them to it. And really, cubist nudes are pretty funny. I browsed near enough to them to still be a respectable chaperone. I thought about buying a book on Johns, for old times’ sake, but shrunk down in reproductions, they really are just pictures.

Eventually the rest of the students made their way through the exhibit and we left to wait outside for the bus. The November sky was gray and cold, and we huddled together for warmth in the bus loading zone.

“So what did you like best, Tariq?” I asked one of my students, trying to take my mind off the cold that was seeping into my sneakers.

“I liked the melting clocks one, although it was a lot smaller than I thought it would be.”

The others nodded in agreement.

“I liked the Jackson Pollock,” added Jordan.

“What? The drippy one? I could do that in my basement,” Tariq shook his head at Jordan’s apparent foolishness.

I laughed because that is what they all say, Pollock fans know that all too well. “No offense Tariq, but I doubt that. Maybe if you worked on it for a few decades.”

“Oh come on, Mrs. Martin. It’s just splattered paint.”

“No, trust me. Getting that feeling right, it isn’t easy.”

“How do you know?” Jordan asked.

I shrugged, “I used to paint.” I waited for someone to ask me about that, but no one did. Instead they turned and stared down the street, wishing the bus into existence. When that didn’t work Tariq turned back to me.

“So which one was your favorite? The drippy one?”

I gave him a smirk. “No, I liked the Jasper Johns flag.”

“Of course you do,” he replied.

“Hey, it’s not just because I’m the history teacher. I’ve always loved it, even when I was your age. It’s just so… deep. The colors and the textures. It’s a flag but it’s not a flag, you know?”

He blinked at me. “I don’t know, it just looked like a flag to me.”

Of course it did. And I guess in some ways he’s right. It is just a flag, a flag made of bits of paper, wax, and paint. And somehow, a piece of my soul, too.


Written by: Leslie Martin
Photograph by: Anthony Delanoix