A
little after six in the morning, while I was putting in my daily four miles on
the elliptical machine at the New York Sports Club near my apartment, I smelled
a fart that made me contemplate death and its inevitability.
As
I’m sure the reader is aware, there are many different kinds of farts. There are loud baritones and there are brazen
trumpets. Sometimes, there are squeaky ones.
I didn’t hear this one at all; if it announced itself in any way, the
sound was lost amidst the whirring and clattering of the cardio machines. But what the fart lacked in fanfare, it made
up in foulness. It smelled like a
dumpster behind a Chinatown fish market.
I
put a hand against my face to mask the ass-stench with the stink of my own
sweat, and I looked around for the culprit.
I was on the elliptical at the end of the row. The machine next to me was vacant; it was
broken, in fact. There was a woman two
machines over. I wouldn’t say she was a
big woman, exactly, but she wasn’t skinny either, and she was tall. Like, five-feet
ten; a strapping specimen. Had she the
capacity to unleash such an abomination?
I wouldn’t put it past her.
I
tried to gauge the expression on her face, to see if she seemed guilty, but I
could only steal glances, because I didn’t want her to catch me looking at
her. I always try to avoid looking at
people at the gym. I don’t want anyone
to think I am a pervert.
Behind
the ellipticals, there was a row of treadmills.
Most of them weren’t in use this early, but there was a guy on one,
behind and to the left of me. He looked
ethnic. I thought the fart smelled
ethnic. I wondered if this was racist of
me. I realized it probably was, since I
had no empirical basis for my belief that farts had ethnicities.
Off
to my right, a man was working with free weights. If you’re looking for somebody to blame a
fart on, the guy lifting free weights is generally a pretty good suspect, since
science has proven squatting against resistance has the same effect on the
human colon that rolling up the bottom of the tube has on toothpaste. But the tall woman and the ethnic man were closer
to me than the weightlifter. I wondered
how far a fart could travel; it seemed like it would dissipate pretty quickly
in an open, high-ceilinged health club.
In
college, I read a book about the atomic bomb that was dropped on
Hiroshima. People within a certain
distance of the blast were instantly incinerated, while victims further away
died slowly from radiation poisoning.
This information was in no way applicable to my fart problem. I decided to let the whole matter slide, so I
switched on my iPod and listened to Lady Gaga sing about Nebraska for a while.
But
ten minutes later, somebody released a bigger, more bombastic, more pungent
sequel; the “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” of farts.
The
free-weight guy was gone, so I could cross him off the list. I looked back and forth between the tall
woman and the ethnic guy. She caught me
looking, and she scowled at me. He had a Forbes magazine draped over the
console of his treadmill, and he was oblivious.
I
leaned back on my elliptical, and tried to take a broader look around the
room. Maybe there was some sort of
ass-ventriloquist who had mastered the art of throwing farts across great
distances. But I didn’t spot any such
trickster. And then I realized there was
a suspect I hadn’t considered.
Me.
If
you’ve seen movies, you are probably familiar with this moment. This is the part where they realize the
serial killer’s phone calls are coming from inside the house. This is the moment when Bruce Willis learns
he’s already dead. This is the bit when
Edward Norton figures out that he and Brad Pitt are actually the same guy. This is the plot twist. This is the part where the story about farts
becomes a story about death.
Now
for the expository flashback: four days before the events described herein, I
had decided to try a three-day crash diet called a “juice cleanse.” The
purveyors of this product argue that a super-low calorie diet of raw vegetable
juice can cleanse the body of certain unspecified “toxins” and “rest” the
digestive system.
Most
doctors respond to these dubious claims about the same way one might respond to
a fart in the gym. But people on the
Internet claimed to have lost six pounds in seventy-two hours. If there’s one
thing I’ve learned from the Amazon.com customer reviews for self-published
books, it’s that I can always trust people on the Internet.
Also,
the people claiming to have lost all the juice-weight seemed to mostly be
marathon runners and yoga instructors, so if they could find six pounds to lose
from their waifish, birdlike bodies, I could probably expect to drop even more
from my own keg-shaped, fat-sheathed torso.
I
ordered the juice. By lunchtime on the
first day of the cleanse, my nose was running like a snot faucet. The website
claims that this is a common result of the purging of toxins, but since toxins
do not exist, it was probably an allergic reaction. Or else, the unpasteurized juice was full of
bacteria. But it didn’t matter; the
juice people already had my money, and, being both stubborn and stupid, I
decided to see the thing out.
So,
the morning of the gym fart, I had just eaten my first breakfast after
completing the cleanse: a container of Greek yogurt and a couple of kiwifruit.
With
this data taken into consideration, I had to put myself right on top of my list
of potential fart culprits. And that was
scary, because I was a reasonably healthy thirty-year old man, or at least I
had been one, prior to my juice cleanse.
If I farted, I was usually the first person to know about it. The idea that something so singularly noxious
could make a frictionless escape from my bowel was one I found extremely
disquieting. It meant that I’d done some
serious damage to my body.
I
had a great aunt who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. She lived, during her last years, in the
dementia ward of an assisted-living complex.
I remember going to visit her, and sometimes seeing one of the other
residents, a man who had suffered a stroke.
He’d lost motor control over half of his body, so the lid of his left
eye and the left side of his mouth always drooped, slack and loose.
Maybe
that was what my asshole looked like after the juice cleanse.
I
imagined myself lying face-down on a hospital bed. A doctor entered the room, trailing a group
of medical students, like a mother duck with a string of ducklings.
“Mr.
Friedman presents with some interesting symptoms,” he said. “Can anyone
identify this?”
A
young, attractive woman, a dead ringer for Katherine Heigl, jumped up and down
on the balls of her Croc-shod feet and raised her hand: “He’s had a
butt-stroke,” she shouted.
Still
jogging on the elliptical, my heart rate had begun to speed up, even though my
pace was steady. I was thinking that I
should cut my workout short and go to the drugstore. What would I ask them for, though? Some kind
of ointment? A hand mirror? Maybe I should go to the emergency room. I was three miles into my run, with only one
to go, so I decided to finish. But I
promised myself that, if I experienced any more farts I couldn’t feel, I’d find
myself a gastroenterologist, or something.
I
didn’t, though. My ass turned out to be
undamaged, which means that I was not responsible for the gym farts, after all.
The real culprit got away. I think it
was the ethnic guy. All I did was spend
a lot of time sniffing at a stranger’s butt-gas, and thinking about it.
So,
yay for me.
