Last night, Q and I settled down on the couch with a couple of big sandwiches, a bag of chips, a bottle of wine, and the premiere of Degrassi: The Next Generation. I’d had the date marked on my calendar for weeks; I couldn’t wait to see what overly earnest, cringe-inducingly cheesy Important Issues the Degrassi kids would face as they returned for their ten-year reunion. And the show did not disappoint. Snake — balding! Joey Jeremiah — a brooding widower! Spike’s daughter Emma — a snippety, gullible tween prone to wearing two tank tops at once! The dialogue — as ripe as aged Camembert!

But as much as I enjoyed it, and as much as I always enjoy hanging out with Q, I kind of missed my brother. I did all of my childhood Degrassi-watching with Mr. Stupidhead; the two of us used to dash home from church every Sunday to catch the 11:30 a.m. rerun on PBS, stopping only briefly in the kitchen to scoop up an armload of sandwich makings and drink boxes before charging full-speed into the den and lunging at the cable box: “Channel thirteen, THIRTEEN, hurry UP we’re gonna MISS IT!” My parents would come into the den a few minutes later, mystified by the lack of bickering, to find us silent, enthralled, quietly eating turkey sandwiches while Claude (whom we referred to, for reasons lost to history, as “Drone”) and Joey battled for Caitlin’s affections. It just seemed weird to watch the show without Mr. S.

But we used to do a lot of extremely weird things, things that went uncommented on by our parents because, if it meant we got along for a change instead of arguing, they didn’t care. Take Compulsive Waving Family as an example. Compulsive Waving Family is a game played in the car; you honk and wave happily at pedestrians as if you know them, and bet on whether the pedestrians will peer at your car, confused, and then wave back tentatively just in case they actually know you, which of course they don’t. When I first got my driver’s license, my parents used to have me drive Mr. S to and from school or tennis lessons or whatever, and the two of us whiled away many a happy hour playing Compulsive Waving Family. By the time Mr. S graduated from high school, I think we’d waved at every perambulator between our house and the Delaware Water Gap.

And, you know, the fart humor. We could, and did — and do — find fart humor in everything. Again, our parents seldom interfered; when it came down to a choice between mediating another earsplitting squabble over who had usurped whose rights to the front seat and enduring a thunderous armpit-farting clinic, they shrugged and went with the armpit farting. Well, “shrugged” isn’t accurate, exactly. Dad attempted to keep a straight face; Ma covered her eyes with her hand and thanked God we didn’t look like her.

Poor Ma. She waged an ongoing battle with our predilection for fart humor, a battle that usually began at the dinner table. One night, she announced with great portent that from now on, we could not pass audible gas during a meal; we responded to the edict by stampeding out to the front hall with forks still in hand, ripping farts, stampeding back into the kitchen, and pointedly ignoring the stony glare that met us upon our return.

“What?”
“You know ‘what.'”
“What — what? You said ‘not at the table,’ we didn’t do it at the –”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
“Ma. If you don’t want us farting at the table –”
“[Gbrrbbrrt.]”
“Okay, so Dad gets to fart, but we –”
“Your father will not be doing any more farting at the table. Will he.”
“You want me to get up while I’m carving the roast?”
“More like cutting the cheese.”
“Sarah!”
“Ha ha, Sar said ‘cutting the cheese.'”
“Oh, forget it. I give up. I GIVE UP.”

She didn’t give up, though. She should have — she should have seen the hopelessness of the situation — but she didn’t.

“Mr. S, if you don’t stop making that noise with your hands –”
“What noise?”
“You know what noise?”
“[Skwwrrrrpp.] You mean that noise?”
“Hee hee. How do you do that, dude?”
“Sarah, don’t encourage him.”
“Okay, start with your palms at right angles to each other, like this.”
“What did I just say?”
“Okay, good. Now just press the air out using the heel of your –”
“Excuse me? EXCUSE ME!”
“It’s not working.”
“Try moving your thumb. See? [Pprrrrpppt.]”
“Am I talking to myself? STOP it, BOTH of you!”
“It’s still not working. It sounds like a silent-but-deadly.”
“No, no, no. You have to use — okay, lace your thumb in there. Okay, now try it.”
“Hey guys — what’s everyone up to?”
“Well, your namesake is teaching your daughter how to make fart noises with her hands.”
“Oh, you mean [bbbrrrprpppt]?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I — OH, JESUS. You’re doing it now?”
“Sure, it’s easy. See, you just start with your palms at right angles to each other –”
“I DON’T WANT TO KNOW HOW TO DO IT!”
“Sar does. Dad, show Sar how to do it.”
“DON’T SHOW HER HOW TO DO IT! DON’T ENCOURAGE THEM!”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Oh, SURE YOU WEREN’T!”
“I wasn’t! I’m left-handed — that’s no good to her.”
“That is REALLY NOT the –”
“[Pwwrrrrpt?] Hey, I did one!”
“See, I told you you could do it. Now the trick is to get an air bubble so you can do a bunch of them in a row. [Brrrrppptt, brrrrppptt, brrrrppptt.] See?”
“I want a DIVORCE from this ENTIRE FAMILY!”

I have to believe that, most of the time, Ma found it funny. If she hadn’t, she’d have gone crazy. We spent so much time discussing farts, replicating farts, congratulating each other on and/or heckling each other for farting, classifying farts we heard and smelled, threatening to fart, inserting fart noises into songs, and otherwise weaving farts into every element of our daily lives that she’d have long ago changed her name and moved to another state if she hadn’t gotten the occasional giggle out of it. And we knew she’d given the subject proper study. How did we know? Well, it all began during an innocent trip to the supermarket, when I rounded a corner at a dead run and nearly hip-checked my mother into a Tostitos display…

“Oops, sorry, Ma.”
“Slow down, for heaven’s sake. Did you get the cold cuts? And what’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Um. Mr. S is getting the cold cuts.”
“Mr. S can’t ‘get the cold cuts,’ he’s six years old. Go back and get your little…oh, yuck. Was that you?”
“What?”
“Oh, ‘what’ — you farted, didn’t you?”
“No!”
“Sarah, what was I, born yesterday? You farted!”
“Shhhhh!”
“You farted in the deli aisle, and then you ran over here.”
“I did not!”
“Because everyone knows you can’t outrun a fart.”
“You can’t?”
“No, you can’t.”
“I mean, not that I farted.”
“Right.”
“Because I didn’t.”
“Uh huh.”
“I didn’t!”
“Maaaa, Sar left me at the deli counter and I couldn’t — ew, Sar! That stinks!”
“Shut up!”
“You ran away from your fart and left me!”
“I did not! I didn’t fart!”
“Farts cling to your butt, Sar.”
“Yeah, Sar.”

Still, Ma must have gotten tired of the endless debates on the difference between a Jockey scorcher and a sizzler…

“Well, a Jockey scorcher really burns the surface that’s getting farted on, whereas a sizzler burns you –”
“ENOUGH!”

…whether egg farts and bathtub farts overlap…

“Well, some bathtub farts smell eggy.”
“Oh, sure, but it’s not so much the smell that they have in common, it’s the implied humidity. It’s kind of compost-y, and it sort of hangs in the air like a –”
“ENOUGH!”

…the risks involved in The Lean…

“That’s the thing, though. You can lean onto one cheek and try to sneak it out, but the chance of it backfiring is so high that you’re better off just ripping it, because half the time it doesn’t come out silently anyway.”
“I disagree, Sar. With The Lean, you can always lie and say you were just shifting your weight or something, and besides, if you’re a good actor, you can glare at the person next to you and try to shift the blame –”
“ENOUGH!”

…if it’s possible to fart all alone in the elevator but escape detection if the doors open…which is funnier, the tiny little squeaker or the thunderclap…on and on and on. The debates continue to this day, probably made even more annoying now that Mr. S and I have college degrees and can bandy pretentious vocabulary words about in connection with beer farts.

“There’s a duality to the beer fart — an eggy bouquet that suggests the miracle of life, coupled with a smell that suggests the stench of decay and death. It challenges all of our cultural assumptions about the body’s role in our sense of self.”
“I would categorize that quality as more circular, Mr. S; it contains everything and nothing, and as such is reminiscent of certain Shinto traditions in which –”
“ENOUGH!”

In spite of our mother’s half-hearted fulminations, it never occurred to us as we grew up that other families — sane, well-mannered families; families with lives; families, in short, with whom we had nothing in common — might not take the sheer delight in flatulence that we did. I mean, everything we knew about comic timing, we’d learned from farts. Releasing a silent-but-deadly in the car, then cracking a window and smiling smugly as offended realization dawned on the faces of the rest of the family. Hearing a fart, waiting a beat, and running out of the room with much melodramatic screeching and waving of arms (“Oh, it’s not that bad.” “YEEAAAAAAAGH!”). Entering a room, smiling, farting, and leaving, all without a word. Punctuating tense moments during a horror movie by imitating a tiny little squeak of a poon. Waiting until Grandma bent over to retrieve a pan from a bottom shelf, making a fart noise, and bellowing in mock horror, “GRANDMA! That is EXTREMELY RUDE, young lady!” Yanking a turtleneck up over your entire head and bellowing, “CAT FART! CAT FART! All hands, MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS!”

So…your family didn’t do that stuff? Wow. Okay, but…why not? Seriously. So what did your family do — you know, for fun? Like, after dinner, did you guys just do the dishes, like, in silence, instead of singing songs with [Bwwwwwwpppppt!] substituted for key words in the chorus? Oh. So, on car trips, you probably didn’t replace the handclaps in “B-I-N-G-O” with deafening armpit poots, either. No, it’s fine with just the handclaps, I guess, but…your dad would have grounded you for doing that? Wow. ‘Cause our dad almost drove off the road laughing, and then he made us do it again when we got to the hotel so that he could videotape it. Yeah, our dad is pretty cool. Oh, our mom doesn’t mind. Well, she says she minds, but then she’ll go, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury…[Frrrrrrrwwwwp!]” No, a real one. You’ve never done that? No “Friends, Romans, countrymen…[Hhhwwrrrppppt.]”? Yeah, it is pretty funny. But dude, one time we’d all eaten a ton of creamed onions — yeah, you know, creamed onions? You never had those? Man, the creamed onion is farterrific, you should really look into that. Anyhow, we all got really farty as a result, so we sat around that whole night giving famous speeches from history and substituting farts for certain words, and my brother chimed in with “it’s one small [frrrrrpppt] for man, one giant [HHWWWRRRPPPT] for mankind,” and I still can’t believe I didn’t get it on video.

What? Yeah, it’s totally immature. Hee. And…?

October 15, 2001

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