Tales from Exit 22, By Al Batt

I had a gum problem.

It wasn’t my fault I was part of the gum-chewing community. I blamed the ancient Greeks. They chewed resin from the mastic tree. Modern chewing gum dates back to the 1860s, when gum was made from chicle, originally imported from Mexico as a rubber substitute and tapped from a sapodilla tree just as latex was from a rubber tree. Modern chewing gum uses synthetic materials, which allow longer-lasting flavor, better texture and less tackiness.

When I had no gum, I tried to not think about gum. I knew I could do it. I’d already stopped thinking about the Diet of Worms and serial commas. I freed my mind of thoughts of gum, but I couldn’t stop thinking about baseball cards.

I used all my available funds to buy baseball cards produced by the Topps Co. There were five or six trading cards in each pack. I separated the cards by teams, wrapped them in rubber bands and put them in sturdy cigar boxes provided by my Uncle Bill, a notorious smoker of cigars.

What did baseball cards have to do with gum? Baseball cards smelled like bubble gum in those days. Each pack of cards contained a rigid and brittle piece of pink bubble gum. The cards were made of cardboard. The gum’s taste was fleeting. I chewed it because I had no gag reflex. Once, I mistakenly chewed a card instead of the bubble gum. I didn’t notice any difference in taste.

There were certain cards that were nearly impossible to get and others that were almost impossible not to get. The cards everyone had were without value other than when clipped by a clothespin into the spokes of a bicycle wheel. This made a bicycle sound like a motorcycle to someone with a gifted imagination.

Desirable cards were traded amongst collectors, shrewd traders giving an inkling of the successful businessmen they’d become.

A girl who rode on my school bus collected baseball cards. She did it just to irritate boys. She kept only the most coveted cards. She showed me a card she knew I wanted. I tried to play it cool, but the closer a lab rat gets to the food, the faster the rat runs.

I nearly wept with joy as I examined a card of my dreams. She snatched it from my hand before I drooled on it.

I offered her the world and eight pounds of baseball cards for that card.

She told me that she wouldn’t trade with me if I were the last whatever I was on earth. Then she rolled her eyes before giving me a lecture on how society limited the value of women by their physical appearances.

I liked Bazooka bubble gum. It was educational bubble gum. It had reading material wrapped around the gum. Bazooka Joe, wearing a distinctive eye patch, was a comic strip character featured on the small comics included with each piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

The record for the largest bubble gum bubble is 20 inches set in 2004. I’d blow the biggest bubble I could. When it popped, it turned me into a pink-masked lout.

Have you ever wondered why bubble gum is usually pink? I just did.

During the 1920s, Walter Diemer, an accountant at the Fleer Chewing Gum Co. in Philadelphia, experimented with gum recipes. Many accountants do that — at least one. He claimed his discovery of a formula that wasn’t too sticky, yet pliable enough to blow bubbles was an accident. Named Dubble Bubble, his creation was pink as that was the food coloring the company had in abundance.

When I declared I needed gum (I never wanted gum, I needed gum), there was no outpouring of support. The amount of gum I chewed wasn’t determined by me. I’d little say in the matter.

I’d whine about the lack of gum. It was to no avail. My mother believed in gum control.

So did my teachers. They told me to spit my gum into the wastebasket or into their hands. Some forced a child to wear the gum on his nose.

My family’s permanent record documents an incident when little me had a glide in my stride. I was walking and chewing gum at the same time. Quite a feat for me. The problem wasn’t the walking. It was the gum. I didn’t have gum and yet I did. I’d discovered some Black Jack gum stuck under a table. It was ABC gum — already been chewed.

That free gum was worth every penny.

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday.