After being unceremoniously evicted from the Cap house in San Francisco by an unscrupulous landlord who wanted to move back in to her home during the early days of spring 1994, I made the decision to strike out on my own and rent a one bedroom apartment on the corner of Taraval and 42nd Ave in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of the City’s Sunset District.
My bedroom was situated on the relatively busy Taraval Street right next to a Muni streetcar stop. In addition to the (again) relatively cacophonous drone and clank of the L-train rolling down the rusty rails either towards the end of the line a few blocks away or towards the heart of the City in the opposite direction, there was always one thing that I could count on to greet me day in and day out. It was the presence of the person I called the Loogeyman.
Every morning about six a.m. I would hear the sound of someone attempting to summon up from his lungs through his throat a phlegmy ball of snot in order to send it on a one-way trip from his tongue to the cold concrete of the sidewalk. In other words, this dude stood outside my window day after day after day trying to hock a loogey until his train could arrive to take him away to parts unknown.
His incessant hock hock hocking used to drive me bat-shit crazy. I suppose it’s more than a little ironic that I have been thinking about the mysterious Loogeyman every single time my overworked lungs and throat struggled to expel the demon phlegm from the depths of my being these past two weeks. I reflected back on his unflappable form to deliver the mucousy goods rain or shine and how I wished that some of that magical hockaloogey mojo could temporarily inhabit my body so that a brother in the neurologically challenged fraternity could get a little relief.
And then we discovered the trick.
If you take the wand end of the suction machine and place it firmly on the rear of my tongue, you can extract quite a bit of the gooey green stuff. The only problem with this scenario is that the so-called mystery spot happens to be my extremely sensitive gag reflex. With every drop of phlegm that gets pulled from my throat brings me perilously close to tossing my cookies on whoever happens to be in the immediate vicinity.
Fehmeen loses heart after just one successful pass. And I can’t say that I blame her. I couldn’t do it either. My caregiver Lhito, however, is always up for the challenge. He stands over me, wand in hand, ready to vacuum up the phlegm from my throat like so much dirt on a carpet. The absolute relief I feel once the offending phlegm has been removed is worth every second of uncomfortability that I had to endure on its way out.
In fact, I would go out on a limb and say it feels a tiny bit better than if I had to have hocked it out the old-fashioned way. No salty aftertaste on the tongue and no unsanitary spitting.
Somewhere in San Francisco, the Loogeyman is envious of my power.
The Adventures of ALS Boy 
cool blog you have 🙂
So glad you’ve found a solution! I found a similar thrill in a neti pot at the height of allergy season one year.
A jewel of loogey lit you’ve written, with “send it on a one-way trip from his tongue to the cold concrete of the sidewalk!”
Heh…I remember that guy. When I used to catch the L-Taraval downtown he’d be walking around the stop and hocking on the ground in front of you. Nice.
I was out in the Sunset a few weeks ago and drove past the Cap house. It’s now a kind of indiscriminate white color. Better than the pink it was the last time I drove by though.
Jas, you have a preternatural ability to wax poetic about bodily functions. Please add that to the unending list of your talents.
I came in on the middle of a story the Garrison Keillor was telling on Prairie Home Companion last Sunday about a sound effects guy who was having trouble making a loon’s sound. He was apparently having some phlegm interference and tried all sorts of things – steroid injections to the back of his throat, right about where his gag reflex was, he had his wisdom teeth pulled, and a suction machine (perhaps very much like yours, Jason). He finally went out to the lake to find a loon and lassoed it by “hocking up a loogey” and reeling it in so he could try and imitate the sound.
All told in Garrison’s deadpan voice, and would’ve grossed me out totally if I hadn’t just read your blog about this very thing a day or two before!
I’ve just looked on the Lake Woebegon podcasts to see if it’s there yet, but it’s not. Rats.
Reminds me of our first apartment on Channing in Palo Alto.. we lived next door to the “The Hacker”… maddening!