Subway Gum

Years and years ago, they sold gum on the subway platforms in New York City. I don't chew gum any more, but I do see the ghosts of the gum machines.

There were little, flat, square, glass-fronted machines attached to the steel beams that hold up the underground ceilngs at Times Square. You put in a penny and pushed or pulled a lever and out slid chewing gum.

One kind of gum -- Beeman's Pepsin Chewing Gum -- came wrapped in a little piece of translucent white paper. It was flat and a little powdery when you folded back the wrapping. It wasn't quite soft, but not as hard as the pink slabs of bubble gum that came wrapped in every pack of baseball cards sold up until the 1970s. YOu could tell the difference between the pink gum and the baseball card because the gum shattered when you bit it and the cards didn't.

The other kind of subway gum was Chiclets. Those came two to a little yellow box that you had to open before the pieces slid -- white, shiny and pepperminty -- onto your tongue. The cardboard had it's own particular dry, gray taste for the moments that it rested on your tongue before the gum dropped out. Chiclet shells crunched under your teeth then the same way they do now until your teeth mix the shell into the chewy part and all the sugar and mint gets used up.

Under the gum machines were little metal baskets to catch the paper wrappers and little yellow Chiclet boxes. Usually the paper actually ended up in the container.

But the chewed gum was dropped willy nilly, helter skelter all over the subway platform and trampled until it formed hard black blobs on the cement.

Someone in administration probably removed the gum machines because of the troubles scraping the dried gum off of the subway platforms. The thousands and thousands of pennies the gum earned must not have made up for the labor of cleaning.

Ironically, that's the only part of this tradition that's survived: The hard black blobs.

I'm sure they're not the black blobs of my childhood, those were cleaned up or paved over long ago. But they look the same and have the same uneven feeling under you feet when you walk over them that spoils for a moment the smoothness of the cement.

I miss those machines. That was all of the fun: You put in a penny and out came gum. Pennies don't generate that much joy these days. I do so miss those machines.