Word: spearmint
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Chew Brew Peppermint, spearmint, cinnamon and other traditional stick flavors are old chew to the growing band of gumo-philes who prefer to make their own. Using a powdered gum base called POW!, combined with corn syrup, confectioners' sugar and just about any flavoring and color imaginable, chew-it-yourselfers can concoct a 25-ft. length of bubble gum from a $2, 2-lb. package of mix-about half the price of the manufactured product. Says POW! Entrepreneur Fred Starkey: "If scotch is your favorite drink, flavor it with scotch. If you like fruit cocktail, use that...
...air?some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries on her head and another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters profligately tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships, discarded like pop-top beer cans to make room for later-arriving choppers...
Despite Malamud's careful portrayal of the young black writer, Willie Spearmint, and his intuition for the kind of stories Willie would invent and the plots he would pick, most blacks would probably still say that only a black writer could describe this experience. Malamud disagrees. "Anyone with imagination and a strong sense of involvement with the black experience can write about some aspect of it which in fiction will speak the truth about that experience. The key to all writing is imagination. All writers write about what they know. Even a revolutionary black writer, if he's good writer...
...situation is primed for disaster, not by urban sociology or racial tensions, but because human needs lead to confusion and tragedy. When Lesser tells him that his writing lacks form, Spearmint furiously rejects the criticism as an attack on black art. When Lesser says that he and Irene have fallen in love, Spearmint assaults a flaking wall with his head and moans, "I forgot to go on hating you." Later he burns Lesser's unfinished manuscript and writes graffiti with its ashes...
When Lesser and Spearmint have a showdown, with hatchet and saber respectively, the abandoned tenement is transformed into a hallucination of a jungle battleground. The realistic props that Malamud has so expertly designed are yanked away, and the two writers assume the proportions of brutal historical forces. Significant blows are struck. White buries his weapon in black's brain. Black directs a castrating swipe at white's sexuality. Malamud himself brings the curtain down with the brooding thought that at the moment of ritual bloodletting each felt the anguish of the other...