Negligible in every other way that was available to us, Mr. Hessman was in one way gifted: he was the most versatile, prodigious, and downright impressive spitter any of us had ever seen. Because spitting was the sort of pointless, limited talent one was likeliest to perfect in prison, we all assumed that Mr. Hessman had done time--enough time to establish an unparalleled arsenal of spitting styles and effects. Based on the number, variety, and sheer technique he commanded, we figured that he must have committed a pretty substantial crime. Either that, or he had been a hostage somewhere. Possibly he’d been a professional baseball player, that being the only career we could come up with that accommodated the daily attention to spitting someone with his abilities required to master it. No occasional spitter—an accountant trying to remove the lingering effect of stale coffee on his way to the car, say, or a secretary startled by the belched remnants of a chef’s salad—could have managed a fraction of his repertoire. Such spitting was the stuff of local song and story—ours, at any rate, and in keeping with what little kids could compose. To the untutored, Mr. Hessman may not have merited a moment’s notice, but the young wantons and wastrels of Kimball Avenue knew better. The man had status and glamour, raising him above the common run of fathers. Other men, from their dull workdays to their weekend dozes, were just ordinary. But this man spit myth.

Even as a child, Mr. Hessman told us, he was precocious about it, and he could dimple a cheek or stud the back of a neck from halfway across the classroom. Early on, he became a spitter’s spitter, resplendent at recess, where for commanding interest he was easily the equal of any cartwheeling girl or boy with soft porn swiped from his dad’s dresser drawer. His classmates knew not to cross him, for if he took offense, no ear was safe, nor could any eye hide forever.

Eventually, he said, there was no sluice or flume he couldn’t manage. He could produce a junior high kid’s loogie or an old man’s leak. He could spit assiduously or absently, thoughtfully or balefully, in anticipation or in retrospect, with satisfaction or with regret. His spew was encyclopedic. He could work up a projectile globby with mucous or debris from his most recent meal or send a wire-thin stream like water shot through a dentist’s jet. He could arc, dribble, stipple, splash, or spray. He could spit sludgy or spit clean, fire bullets at tree bark or let wet necklaces depend from the leaves. He could flatten an ant to the pavement or sting a bee in flight.

Mr. Hessman could let his spit slop, an event which he’d herald with a throat-purging prelude that sounded as if he were scraping wallpaper or preparing to pronounce Hebrew consonants. But he could also aspire, rendering aesthetic spits, transcendent spits, and spits as extravagant as any courtier could do, could one envision one of the elegant letting fly. He could rain filigrees and festoons, decorating the grass with slimy diadems and dripping corollas more arresting than any accident of morning dew. He could trace columns, arches, volutes, helixes, and (supplied with a pitcher of iced tea) whole entablatures on the floor of the porch with sufficient precision to charm an architect. Or he could spit for sheer power. Legend had it that he could take the tarnish off of silver, blast gum wads from the undersides of patio furniture, power wash the wooden deck a square inch at a time. He could flick twigs from the verge into the gutter or riddle lit cigarettes to death.

Should the challenge arise, he could outspit any competition. No matter how many contestants laid out dimes on the sidewalk to aim at, he’d always hit the most money and in ten minutes sweep up enough change to buy lunch at Morry’s Diner, with enough left over for a moist tip. For he was the Robin Hood of hawkers; of expectorant, the contemporary William Tell. From ten feet away he could douse your pinkie while keeping every other digit dry. Packing his mouth with watermelon seeds, he could ping the Hessmans’ wind chimes a dozen times running. Without moving from his chair he could mist the petunias that lined the porch railing. Then suddenly, changing targets, he could shave a dandelion then bisect the bare stem.

Mr. Hessman spat with matchless alacrity and versatility, easily filling the gamut from spurt to burble. He could spit for accuracy or distance, through pursed lips or bared teeth, to prove or refute, to start an argument or suspend one. He formed the most suggestive saliva you’d ever seen, which could come out dripping with sarcasm or thick with judgment. His spit could be incisive or roundabout. He could spit staccato or spit legato, spit to corrupt, spit to cleanse, or spit to cling. He could do in drool what Titian did in oils. No carom, bank, or ricochet was beyond his spitter’s ken. With but one unannounced burst he could blot, denounce, purify, dispel, or undeceive. A Stanislavski of Method expectoration, the man could spit to embarrass or to emboss, to scoff or to scold, to insinuate or exhort, to seduce or deride. He meted out more and subtler moods in liquid measures than Hollywood’s most honored actors packed into a career’s worth of roles. And where was the Oscar for that?

Mr. Hessman could spit iconically. No one’s spit was richer in connotation than his. On request, he hacked and spat to suggest the spirit and image of a cowboy or a coroner, a kid in detention or a cop on patrol. Just by spitting he emulated a train conductor, a bank president, an auto mechanic, a pimp. The range the man could manifest rivaled Shakespeare himself, who through his thousand invented mouthpieces showed no greater scope than Mr. Hessman did. To commemorate a wedding, he could cast a fountain over the head table. He could splash pleasure and exaltation or send forth a stream of balm to anoint the multitudes—well, as close to a multitude as the neighborhood kids who drew close could be said to have mustered. And we imagined that, facing death, he would have left a transient epitaph on the wall of his hospital room. If Keats’s words were writ on water, Mr. Hessman’s legacy was similarly liquid and just as subject to dissolution.

That was what Mr. Hessman was for us, who implied adages in miniature and sermons spit small. His spit was as bristling with expressiveness as an orange is full of juice. He spat with rhetorical emphasis and visionary gleam. Definitely, he could creep out even the brashest kid if he chose to. From the edge of his porch, with one wet dart heavy and rancid with tobacco, he could indict any one of us, dampen our extravagances, discover our hypocrisies, cover us with shame. He spat acid and grease, curses and blood. With a single broadside, he could turn away wrath. With one protracted drizzle, he could change your luck or ruin your digestion. Against compliments and contradiction, against missing buttons and tears in his shirt, against the summer’s humidity and the winter’s teeth, against meddlesome relatives (his sister-in-law, specifically) and government in general, against the scourge of company and the scourge of loneliness, against every late-inning blown lead by the White Sox and his own mortality, he spat and spat and spat again. From the gouts he dropped between his feet he could read the fate configured there. And his slobber could break your heart.

I cannot attest to Mr. Hessman’s reading habits, but were I to meet him again today I’d urge him to consult Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, which so far as I know represents the paramount achievement in the literature of spit. Indeed, it could be said to constitute the true spitter’s bible. McCarthy’s hard-pressed, hard-bitten characters are the foremost practitioners and true aficionados of the art. They spit to complain of the weather or to test the wind; they spit leaning over their saddles or twisting off of their bar stools; they spit for commentary, sarcasm, and commiseration; they spit to interrupt the silence or to pay their respects to it. In The Cites of the Plain alone there must be thirty separate instances of spitting. It is at once eloquent and austere, the way McCarthy’s knowledgeable spitters spit, in disappearing glyphs leaving their mark, punctuating the dust they’ll ultimately come down to.

Whatever their motives in so dedicating themselves, don’t McCarthy’s cattlemen, as well as all studied and kindred spitters, emulate the sacramental ejaculations of God Himself, Who on the third day of Creation spat the oceans of the globe? (Science tells us today that when He turned His efforts to us, He made our chief component water as well.) Of course, when human beings sullied the earth past saving, He extinguished the lot by letting loose a flood. Whereas once He salivated over our prospects, he eventually drowned us out with His now-dismissive spit.

Clearly, the Lord is otherwise distinguished, and it would be wrong to suggest that Mr. Hessman wasn’t as well. There was the way his moustache attached to the beard that lined his jaw, which looped over his ears to join the remaining fringe of hair at the back of his head, making a kind of widow’s walk about his skull. There were the moles he wore openly in summer, which were grouped over his right shoulder blade like the Pleiades, any one of which might have indicated the onset of an enigmatic disease. There was the quality of his voice, which sounded like something heavy and rusted dredged up from the sea floor. Think Everett Dirksen with a head cold if you can, the ancient senator having by now faded so far from public consciousness. For evaporation finds the eminent and the Hessmans, those with seats in Congress and those anonymously parked on suburban porches, all the same.

Or we might honor Mr. Hessman’s backhanded way of spanking ash off his trousers. We might recognize his tendency to divide boys and girls into "little shits" and "tiny tits" respectively and irrespective of their behavior or of his recognizing them as regular infestations of his own block. We might recall his manner of loading every one of his sneezes with rancor, turning the concluding "choo" into "you dirty" to curse the cause and effect of the discharge together. I am sure that as a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle, a son, and a friend, he made and answered claims, memories, and desires we had no inkling of whatsoever, nor, frankly, that we had any particular interest in. Who knows whether or not what engendered his expectoration was a hole in his bank account? Who can say whether or not what really lifted his spit was a wish to traverse the gap that had grown over time between himself and Mrs. Hessman? There must be a million men on a million porches comparably inclined, their own spit heated by related sources of smolder. Hence, whatever his intentions happened to be during a given display, perhaps Mr. Hessman spat for the masses.

No doubt he had complaints and satisfactions, gainful employment and closet hobbies, dreams and disappointments that exceeded what we saw on his porch. And today I maintain that it is a cruel and arbitrary fate that grants one man millions because he can put a puck in a net or a toss a ball through a hoop while letting a man who can just as unerringly spit lemon seeds into a wastebasket go begging. Surely the shooter’s and the spitter’s dedications must be similarly Hassidic, their eyes equally keen. Hath not a Hessman hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, and pastimes on a par with other athletes and as artful as any prospective Hall of Famer?

Unfortunately, precious few of us get to dictate the angle from which we’re regarded, much less the terms of worship. Truly, we make the future, but we do not know the future we are making. Mr. Hessman may have had a passion for Italian food, light opera, or young boys. Who can say? He never said, not to any of us, the offending shits and noisome tits who, like flies and allergens, kept up our attendance until he’d shrugged off the rest of the afternoon and gone back inside, or school started up again, or no one under ten years old was left to linger. Out of sight and off his lawn, I suspect that we ceased to exist for him, leaving him that much less to suffer.

Against these sentiments and all allusion, out of his gnarled self-involvement, spits the ghost of Mr. Hessman.

Is "destiny" too expansive a term to apply to him? Possibly so, since I assume that like most old men he did little else but grow steadily more wizened and dry. It has been more than forty years since I watched him do his ablutions at the end of our block, so it is hard to imagine that he is anything other than gone now. One cynical thing they say of the dead is that they aren’t worth spit. For what it’s worth, I am here to confirm that, whatever else he might not have been—and it’s no small community of falling short that included him--Mr. Hessman was.