Fartacus

The Story of when I Flatuated During Silent Reading Time in the Third Grade

Books are a sort of landmark in my memory. I can remember exactly what book I was reading when my fourth grade teacher died in class, what book I was reading when my parents divorced, and what book I was reading the first time my step-dad hit my mother. If I ever need to sort out “which thing happened first,” I try to remember what book I was reading at the time. For a person who lives up in his head quite a lot, the visceral memory of books is often more real to me than the actual events of my life. Not for this memory, though. This memory of humiliation and ugly betrayal I can recall with near perfect clarity. It is story that nevertheless starts with a book.

It was Silent Reading Time. A period of thirty or so minutes, where the teacher could take it easy or catch up on grading papers. A time to carry us over from the last lesson until recess began. I was reading Salamandastron, the latest of the Redwall books by Brian Jacques. For the uninitiated, these books involve a magical world of talking field animals that fight noble battles in the name of honor, truth, and beauty against… usually, pirate rats, tyrant weasels, or evil cats. I’d discovered the series in late second grade, and my heart fully belonged to Martin the Warrior. For all that my mind wanted to be in that faraway place, in desperate battle with the mighty badger lords of Salamandastron, there was only one problem. I really, really, perhaps moreso than at any other point in my life to that point, needed to fart.

The cafeteria ladies all knew me well and due to my tremendous size often offered me seconds. I believe it was likely their generosity that had put me into such a predicament on that day. In third grade, I was already taller than most of my female teachers and eye to eye with most of the men. There were a few teachers bigger than me and some sixth graders, but other than for that I was a mutant freak. If you want to imagine me struggling in a cluster of desks, start with imagining a regular kid and then mentally photoshop him to be comically larger than all the other kids.

The nascent fart was like knives in my stomach. Like a trapped miner with an ice pick, jabbing everywhere in my intestines trying to find his way back to daylight. The fart wanted out, and with my sweaty face and my bitten lower lip, it was all that I could do to keep it in. This was long before I understood that I suffered from panic attacks. Having to fart during Silent Reading Time was definitely giving me a panic attack.

You are of course thinking, “why didn’t you just ask to go to the bathroom?”

This has a long explanation, but suffice it to say this never even occurred to me. Apart from being an abuse survivor, I associated the boy’s bathroom with being retarded.¹ One of my panic attacks had come during a cognitive assessment in first grade. It reduced me to a state that I had barely been able to write down any answers. I’d thereafter been placed in something called Chapter One for remedial learners. It took several days and a few angry phone calls to sort out the whole thing, reassess me, and take me out of Chapter One, but I still remembered the stigma of that period.

The boy’s bathroom was directly across from the Chapter One room. The teacher of that classroom often looked at me as “the one that got away” and if I ever walked by that area of the school alone, he would try to corner me and interrogate me into revealing that I was only pretending to not be retarded.² Random adults or visiting parents also had the habit of bothering me because of my size and I tried not to go out too much without other around. And for whatever reason I didn’t think it was okay to walk into a bathroom, fart, and then immediately leave. These aversions were so powerful in my young mind that from kindergarten to high school graduation, I literally never used a public bathroom.

Lots of bargaining happened. Lots of planning. I looked up at the clock at some point and realized I wasn’t going to make it to recess. I looked at the faces of everyone next to me. In my cluster of four desks, I knew everyone intimately.

Eric, who was for sure going to say something if he heard or smelled a fart. Tiffany, who was so nice that it seemed like a shameful crime to fart next to her. Jesse, who had been with me in Chapter One and once let me touch the soft parts of his skull, would probably not even notice. Chapter One had a bit of a complicated schedule, but they tried to keep those kids integrated with the rest of their peer group as much as possible.

The conclusions were inescapable.

I couldn’t possibly fart in front of them all.

I couldn’t possibly not fart in front of them all.

At some point, the pain became so bad I didn’t really have a choice.

At that age, my flatulence tended to be odorless. Or so I told myself. That meant the primary concern would be the sound. Our school used those chairs that had a press-molded butt shape in every seat. I didn’t know much about acoustics but I knew this would be bad. I also incorrectly believed that most of the sound that came from a fart was caused by the butt-cheeks flapping together as the gas escaped. And again, I was having a massive panic attack.

The closest feeling I’ve ever read in literature to the feeling I had then comes from Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov plots to commit murder for personal gain. Those feelings overwhelmed me. Guilt, the sweet temptation of relief, the idea that such relief would be fleeting, more guilt, lying to myself but knowing it was all a lie, so that I found my self-deception only half-convincing. Lots of telling myself that if I could only bend the exact right way I could emit an odorless and completely silent fart.

I shifted in my chair. Sweating. Guilt. Pain. So much pain. So much guilt.

Surely, I was in the right position? Surely this was the one magical position that I could shift into where my butt cheeks would not flap together and the gas would not be amplified by the press-molded butt-shape of my chair. In my private hell, there was no one to ask.

I don’t know exactly for how long I held that position, pretending to read but only despairing. But I do remember the sound because of course there was a sound.

BraAaaap! Braaaap! BruuUuup! Brap! Brap! Brap!

In the quiet of Silent Reading Time the fart was as loud as thunder. It seemed to strike with such force that all the loose papers in the room should have been thrown into disarray, and it was only some kind of magic spell that kept everything in place. A fart for the ages. A fart from the old Norse gods.

I could no more pull it back than I could stop. I felt surely that I would die.

Then, the worst part, which I have tried to spell for years, but have only recently found the right combination of letters.

SchmloooOOOooo?

An interrogative of flatulence, rising at the end so that it seemed to ask a question. And in a third grade classroom that question could only be, “Is this the funniest thing that has ever happened?”

And, of course, it was.

Everyone laughed all at once, except for me and Jesse. I could not laugh because I knew that consequences would surely follow, and I think Jesse was struggling to understand. I knew it was bad because even Ms. McGee, the teacher, threw her head back and roared, trying in vain to hold it in with one hand but unable to stop herself. Nobody could speak and then the smell wafted throughout the room.

The smell.

Had I really believed all of that nonsense about odorless farts only moments ago?

It struck our small cluster of desks first before striking others nearby, but it seemed by far the worst smell I’d ever emitted until that age. I might as well have pooped in the middle of the classroom.

And while the smell was disgusting, and in other circumstances would have been only disgusting, somehow accompanied by the sound and in that situation where it was so wholly inappropriate, the smell only made the whole thing funnier. A whole minute ticked by where no one could stop laughing for long enough to say anything. Even while pressing their noses into their sleeves, people could not stop laughing. To this day, I have never, in my whole life, said anything even close to funny enough to get a laugh like I got that day by farting.

I did not laugh at the time. It was not at all funny to me. It was death. I awaited accusation like Raskolnikov, and when it came what could I possibly say? There was no excuse for what I had done. I sat silently while the room laughed on, like a man doomed to die awaiting the first bullet of the firing squad.

All I could think about was a boy named David who had his pants pulled down during recess in the second grade, and how even while writing this more than thirty years later, I still think of him as “David, who has his pants pulled down during recess in the second grade.” Except, I would be “Some Guy, who farted during Silent Reading Time in the third grade.” Forever.

And that is when Eric, who assumed no cognitively normal person would have farted that loud in a quiet classroom and knew by the volume that the source had been close, said, ‘Man Jesse, what have you been eating?”

The laughter renewed, this time with direction. The farter had been named!

Jesse the retarded kid farted! Jesse the weird kid! Jesse the farter!

And Jesse wilted, as a flower wilts when separated from its roots.

Not quite understanding, except in the way an animal might sense eyes upon it, Jesse drew in upon himself and blushed. Embarrassed, slowly catching up to why everyone was laughing, I think he mumbled, “It wasn’t me” but his heart wasn’t in it. He knew he wouldn’t be believed. Nobody would believe the retarded kid hadn’t been the one to stink up the whole classroom. Only someone really weird would do something like that, and while they were correct, that weirdo had been me.

I should have stood up then. I should have stood up like Kirk Douglas in Spartacus and shouted into the face of danger, “It was me! I farted! I’m the one that farted!” But my understanding of courage was unsophisticated. I only understood fake courage, of the kind where badger lords fought armies of weasels, and not the real courage where you take accountability for really embarrassing and unflattering things that you did and everyone but God hates you for it.

I did not have a mental model where standing up and shouting “I farted!” was a morally upstanding thing to do.

I did not know, then, how I would return to the memory. For my children, I did not understand how easy it could be to betray someone. Yet I often return to the sight of Jesse sitting there, sinking down into his chair, fighting back tears as everyone laughed at him for something he hadn’t done. Knowing, although it was hard for him to know anything, that nobody would believe he hadn’t done it.

I most often think about how welcoming Jesse had been to me when I had first been sent to Chapter One. I think about how Jesse knew his only way through life was to trust in the goodness of other people to take care of him. I remember how ashamed I had been to be in the remedial learner’s classroom, and how Jesse had once upon a time taken my nervous hands and let me touch the soft parts of his skull that had never fused together. How all of that had been a way of saying “I trust you. You can hurt me and I can’t do anything to stop you. You’re part of us. I accept you. So, I’m trusting you to protect me.”

And I think about a boy who had been so brave and so vulnerable as to trust me, and I think about how utterly I broke that trust and betrayed him. All in one unthinking moment to spare myself a moment of humiliation.

It was me, Jesse.

I’m the one that farted.

1. I feel like this is a neutral word and if you look back through history we’ve just gone through a whole cycle of words that mean this but every generation makes up a new one. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being retarded. Or developmentally delayed, or whatever you want to call it.

2. One time I had some mild trouble getting some paper towels from the dispenser when a teacher requested I go get some to clean up a mess. Mr. Wiseman cornered me in the bathroom and got weirdly intense about making sure I could reset the paper towel dispenser and had me blubbering as he watched me more or less dispense the entire roll. He was only stopped by the heroic Jerry the Janitor, who was like “Why do you think he needs a whole roll of paper towels?” Looking back, I think Mr. Wiseman was mostly concerned that I would spill the beans that he didn’t really do a lot in class, and mostly used the other retarded kids as sentries to look out for the principal so he could red the newspaper and chew tobacco.