You’ve surely heard it: that splash in the rotten swamp, that cavernous rasp, that mining prospecting in the throat in search of a gem of pure phlegm. Then you turn around and see him: the gentleman —it’s always a gentleman or a young master— who, after having collected snotty matter deep within his being, expels it with contempt onto the public ground. With luck, the gob is powerful and explodes forcefully against the tile making ¡splasssh! How disgusting.
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At the sight of the excreted substance, pure body horror, never was the term toxic masculinity so literally toxic. Then someone comes along and steps on it and takes it home, and the particles of that mutant gob end up scattered across the carpet or parquet. Or, worse, my daughter dangerously approaches it, with that irresponsible adventurous and biochemical eagerness that children have: No, daughter, no!
The other day I interviewed journalist Antonio Maestre, who in his new book (Me crie como un fascista, published by Seix Barral) explains how the far-right leanings of young men can be originated by socialization in an environment of violent excitement. The lads with their boorish behavior in gangs: showing strength and defiance, aggressively occupying public space, crushing the weak. Maestre doesn’t get into the topic of spitting on the ground, but I suggest it here: in my adolescence, in the mid-90s, spitting with substance, skill, and power, implied a certain social status in the cruel jungle of male youth. It wasn’t just a dirty habit: it was a way of being in the world.
I hastened to learn the technique, because I was one of those many who, when spitting, couldn’t shoot beyond a few centimeters, sometimes even falling into the ridiculous act of spitting on my own Airwalk sneakers. Worse for others, who when spitting generated a ridiculous, timid, pointillist, almost conceptual aerosol. But others, the best, the alpha males, the toughest guys, would spit, after a sonorous collection of phlegm —the more sonorous the better: the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth—, like someone launching a pellet, with unheard-of force and precision and a completely straight trajectory. A bullet that seemed to escape the parabola inherent to gravitational force. The fury of Achilles before the walls of Troy.
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The trick, I understood, was to act like a blowgun: first collect a projectile of the proper consistency, with the right density and size, place it on the tip of the tongue —where those words you can’t say are hidden— and blow with all your might. ¡Voilà! I now met the necessary, though not sufficient, requirements to be cool. And so I spent a significant part of my adolescence: covering the things of the world with my biological matter.
“Are you a llama, sweetheart, a dromedary?” asks internet comedian Germán Sánchez (@gersanc, a very funny guy) to those types who stubbornly insist on spitting in the street, seemingly unaware of tissues or restrooms. “A person who is unable to manage their mucus should have their social rights revoked,” he adds, “how is that person going to vote? Or drive a car? Or have a child? How are they going to work with the public if we don’t know if they’re going to spit snot on our forehead?”
He’s right. The spit-loving friends seem to have no control over their physiology or think the world is theirs: may they disappear with their green phlegm down the drain of history.