When I was a boy I lived in a neighborhood where older boys and men slouched down the sidewalk and spat with precision and menace and indifference. They scared me and I wanted to be more like them. I started practicing spitting.

In my junior high, blowing your nose was something girls did. If you were a boy you were expected to hawk up your phlegm and spit it somewhere off where people didn't walk, against a tree or in a long arc into the trash. If you were a scrawny boy and could do that well, it reduced your chances of one day getting punched in the arm by every member of the football team for no good reason.

Spitting watermelon seeds was a pleasure. You rested the seed, slick, on the tip of your curled tongue, then blew out a big puff of air. The seed became a bullet and that could stick to a younger brother’s face or neck.

The two-liter coke spit bottle is one of your more horrifying sights, in my experience. Many boys at my school chewed tobacco, or chaw, as did a couple of my older brothers. In junior high I knew a girl named Cindy who used skoal bandits, those little brown pouches you tucked between your teeth and gums.

We were let out of class one day in junior high for a talk about smokeless tobacco and a slide show of shots of freaks with mouth cancer. The doctor running the slide show told us that people who use chaw didn't seem to like going to the doctor. He said one of his patients only came for treatment when the man found food falling through the hole in his cheek. Afterward my hand-me-down jeans with the worn white ring on the back pocket were less humiliating to wear.

I am married to a woman who claims she cannot spit. She holds saliva on the tip of her tongue and blows. She says no upper middle class woman can be expected to spit worth a damn.

I feel now the most shameful thing I ever did was spit in a man’s face. I was drunk and wanted him to take a swing and almost by reflex I spat at him.

I don't know where to begin explaining the circumstances, and I don't like thinking much about it. The way it seems to me now, I was just spitting into my own face.