ChapStick sharing marks a moment of intimacy

I was sitting in a class recently, listening to the instructor run through the business of journalism, when during a break in the lecture the guy next to me asked, “Do you have any ChapStick?”

Now, I am a Chapstick fiend. I’m one of those people who own a dozen tubes at any given time — one for each of my bags, two for the car, a couple for the kitchen cabinets, anywhere where I might find myself in a dry-lipped frenzy, frantically searching for sweet petroleum relief.

So, when the guy from class asked if I had any on me, the answer, of course, was yes. But here’s my dilemma: While I know him, and I might go so far as to say we’re friends, would I share my lip balm with him? Let’s be honest. ChapStick sharing can be an intimate ritual. It’s like kissing by extension. And who knows where his mouth has been?

There’s an old “Saturday Night Live” skit where Dana Carvey’s character pulls out a tube of ChapStick and the man next to him says, “Oh, ChapStick! Can I borrow that?” Before Mr. Carvey has a chance to decline, the man takes the tube and applies it to his own lips. The ChapStick then gets passed along to a string of increasingly grubby people, including a man with food trapped in his beard and a rough-looking hooker. Finally, an alien with giant, crusty lips rolls up and takes a swipe. When the alien finishes, it insists Dana Carvey take back the tube.

Then there’s the story Ellen DeGeneres read on her show, the one about the mother who shared her ChapStick with her 3-year-old son. One morning, rounding a corner, the mother spotted her son applying the lip salve to the behind of the family cat. “Chapped,” the boy said. In a flash of understanding, the woman realized that the tube of ChapStick she kept in the bathroom cabinet — the one she used religiously — had been doubling as feline butt balm.

The decision to share lip ointment does not come lightly. I remember the first time I lent mine to the Captain, marking the moment when I trusted him enough — and cared about him enough — to allow his lips to grace my personal soothing agent. The moment came with a tub of Vaseline, the travel-sized variety that lasts three years for the moderate user and two months for the true addict. The Captain was visiting my place over the summer, and we had just come in from a long day of play- ing in the park. I stepped into the restroom and pulled my Vaseline jar out of the cabinet above the sink. I dipped my finger into the oily gunk and then offered it to him. He gratefully accepted and

stuck his own finger into the pot. It marked a symbolic moment in our courtship, a kind of baptism by petroleum jelly.

As for the guy in my business class?

“Sorry,” I lied. “I don’t have any on me.”

We just don’t have that kind of relationship. 

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