Fart as weapon
In January of 1987, I met Karin Anderson at NYU and became a vegetarian, sort of. I had no idea what I was doing. I only wanted her to like me more, and to do the same things she did, which included at the time abstaining from eating certain things, mostly in the meat category. We broke up after less than 2 month, but the silly vegetarianism lasted for 2 whole years. I felt like shit. I was fed up with it. No dis-respect to vegetarians. I just didn’t do it right, and not for the right reasons, neither. After Karin was out of the picture, abstaining from eating meat became for me a sort of symbolic way for me to suppress the things I disliked about myself, like the fact there was obesity in my family. As it turned out, I think the fat gene skipped me. I’ve never been fat, lucky me. But my 2 year experiment with vegetarianism has had a permanent effect on me, I believe.
I’ll never forget my first non-vegetarian meal. I’d been thinking about quitting for a while, but when Dad and Anthony (my brother) suggested we go to Jackson Hole burgers, I was all in. The burger was fantastic, but on the way home in the car my stomach began to rumble and I began to feel a gaseous pressure down below. I had never been shy about farting. I was the sort of little kid who farted and ran out of the room laughing. I’d always delighted in making people smell my farts. I let loose in the car. Silently. We were riding in my dad’s still-pretty-new BMW 5 series, which had leather seats. Right away, it was obvious this was no ordinary fart. I was sitting in the back seat by myself. Dad was driving. Anthony was sitting shotgun. As soon as the smell reached my nostrils, it took the smile right off my face. Whenever I farted inside a car with the windows closed, my usual pleasure was just sitting there, stifling the guffaws that would come as soon as the first cry of “Jesus Christ, who farted!” was heard. But this time, I was scared. I was actually worried what would happen when the terrible smell I’d unleashed reached my unsuspecting brother and Dad. It was winter. There was no way to open the window inconspicuously. The fart seemed to take forever to reach the front seat. It was a heavy, oily kind of fart. It moved slowly and seemed to stick to surfaces with unusual tenacity.
I really must now describe the special quality of that fart’s smell, and of the thousands of farts like it which I have permitted to escape my body in the last 20 years. In a word, it was horrible. It did not smell like a normal fart. If you smelled it without knowing it was a fart, you might never guess what it was. It smelled so bad, it was impossible to think such a noxiousness had been produced inside the body of a living human being. Because I had never farted like this before, I was forced to conclude that my 2 years of vegetarianism had somehow broken me. For abstaining from eating meat so long, maybe I lost some critical enzyme or my digestive process had been altered in some other way. Whatever the exact physiological cause, it was clear that I had changed. The BMW had to be aired-out in the garage for several days before anyone could occupy it again. Years later, you could press your nose to the spot on the leather upholstery where I’d released the fart, and smell it still.
I look back over the last 20 years now with a mixture of guilt and a kind of resignation to my lot that reminds me of the way superheroes must feel when they come to terms with their difference. In spite of the hurt I have caused with my farts, the personal relationships to which I have caused irreparable harm, I feel an obligation to make a gift of my awful farts, to somehow serve mankind with them…