Chapter 41 – Behold the Power of Flatulence
After Schmit had finished telling his story about how he managed to find his way back to Koh Samui in such a drunken state, I went up to our room and grabbed my bag. I then bid my bros adieu, thanked them for showing me a good time at their respective temporary homes and took off for Samui International Airport.
With my bag on my back, I walked to the end of the street and flagged down some dude on a motorcycle. He pulled right up to me and killed the engine.
“Hey, you drive to the airport?”
“Airport, yes.”
“How much?”
After negotiating a price with the gentleman, I removed my backpack, hopped on the back of the bike, lifted my bag up and laid it across my lap.
“Okay go?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
With that, he kick-started the engine and we were on our way.
Upon arriving at the airport with only about an hour to spare before my scheduled departure time, I paid my dude what I’d owed and queued up behind about ten or twelve people who’d been awaiting service at the outdoor check-in counter. Following a fifteen minute wait, I stepped up to the counter and slid my passport over to the guy standing behind the computer. He scanned my shit or typed in my information or whatever they do with it before looking up at me with a frown.
“I am so sorry, sir. The flight you are supposed to be on is overbooked.”
“What? Overbooked? What’s that mean?”
“It means that there are no more available seats on this plane to Hong Kong.”
At the time I was unaware that airlines purposely do this to maximize profits.
“I don’t understand. I booked this flight a month ago. I reserved a seat.”
“Yes sir, I understand. But there are no more seats on this plane. I am very sorry.”
“Uh so…what happens now?”
“Well, the flight you originally booked was routed through Bangkok where you were due to have a long layover and only arrive in Hong Kong around five in the afternoon.”
“Yeah.”
“What I can do for you is put you on an eleven o’clock flight with another airline that flies directly to Hong Kong. You’d end up getting to Hong Kong two hours earlier than originally scheduled. Do you want me to reserve you a seat on the eleven o’clock?”
“Hell yeah. Man, you should’ve started me off with the good news before bummin’ me out with all that ‘overbooking’ stuff.”
“Okay sir, I will do that right away.”
“Great. Thank you.”
By the time I stepped away from the check-in counter it was about five-thirty in the morning. With about four hours to kill before boarding time and my drunk beginning to wear off, I knew that there was no way I could stay awake that long without getting another drink in my system. So, in an effort to avoid passing out somewhere I wasn’t supposed to and accidentally missing my flight to Hong Kong – this is how I rationalized my decision to further feed my addiction – I popped into a little outdoor café that’d been near the check-in desk and bought myself a beer. As it usually tends to, over the next two-and-a-half hours, one beer turned into as many as I could dump into my gullet while chain-smoking half a pack of cigarettes.
Eventually they listed what gate my flight was due to depart from and I decided to go make my way over to security. Since it’s such a small airport and hadn’t been too busy that early on a Sunday morning, only one passage had been in operation with two Thai guards holding it down. One’d been standing near the metal detector and the other’d been sitting behind the x-ray machine. When I approached, there’d been not a single other traveler in the area. Still with me, I had an almost-full beer in my hand as I went to walk through the detector.
“Drink, no. No drink. You leave here.”
“Oh right, right. Yeah. Okay. I’ll actually just finish it here before going through.”
As I stood there sipping my beer, I began talking to the guy behind the x-ray machine. What about, I have no idea. But I do remember having a good laugh or two with him. After about five minutes of chatting, I started to feel comfortable enough with my new friend to step behind the x-ray machine and join him. He didn’t seem to object.
“Whoa, so how’s one of these things work?”
He didn’t really understand the question. Or maybe he did but since he’s not a scientist and his English had been pretty limited, he didn’t know how to respond. He smiled and shrugged. I smiled as well.
It was at this point – at a security checkpoint in an international airport – that I decided to further test my boundaries and light up a cigarette. And shockingly, neither of the guards seemed to take offense to it.
As I stood with a smoke in one hand and a beer in the other, a couple white tourists – a dude and a chick in their thirties – approached the checkpoint. I decided to step up and help my new friends do their job.
“Oh yeah, okay folks,” I said, “put your bags up here on the belt. Please remove all contents from your pockets and then step through the metal detector right over there.”
They gave me a look like, “Yeah, okay drunk guy,” then beamed at the security guards like, “Why are you letting this guy get away with this shit?”
Ultimately, they shrugged it off and passed through.
A minute or two later, a middle-aged white woman approached security. Dressed in flowered swim trunks, a basketball jersey and flip flops, I again began to give my spiel.
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” she cut me off.
“Uh…”
She looked over at my buddy behind the x-ray machine while pointing at me.
“Who is this?”
The guy shrugged.
“This is a major breach of security! There’s no smoking in airports!”
The guy just sat there and stared at her.
“Get him out of here right now! Take him away! He’s drunk! He can’t be sitting here with you!”
The guy reluctantly stood up and approached me.
“Give boarding pass.”
I reached in my pocket and handed over what he’d requested. He gave it a look, got on a CB radio and called some woman from the airlines over. When she arrived, he handed her my boarding pass and said something to her in Thai. She looked over at me.
“Are you too much drunk for flying?” she asked.
“No, I’ll be alright.”
“Okay,” she signaled that I follow her, “come.”
They took away my lighter and beer and threw ‘em in the trash. The girl then ushered me over to the gate and sat me down on a circular couch that had a flowerbox and plants growing out the middle of it.
“Your flight at eleven. Two hour later. No more drunk. Just sit here.”
I nodded in agreement and sat down where I was told to.
Without any more drinks or cigarettes to take my mind off how shitty I felt, the room started to spin around as my stomach began exporting one of the loudest, most repulsive batches of stinkfarts my system had ever produced. Other travelers who’d been awaiting their morning departures while reading newspapers or sipping tea could hear the sounds coming out my ass from across the room and I thought it was the funniest thing in the world. After each one I’d let rip, I’d laugh to myself then look around and wonder why no one else had thought it was as funny as I had.
As kids growing up, my brother and I would always be farting on each other. I mean, what type of kid wouldn’t take advantage of an opportunity to stand up on a chair and blast one in his brother’s face when he’s trying to do homework or eat a meal? Even this most recent Christmas, after we’d been done wrapping presents we had all those three-foot-long cardboard tubes laying around and I couldn’t help but stick one end of ‘em into my anus when I was about to fart and then sneaking up behind my brother or my dad and putting the other end of the tube near their faces while they washed dishes or baked holiday cookies. Even though they pulled away before the stink cloud could travel through the tube and hit ‘em in the face, when I ripped ass into the thing the sound it made was like a fuckin’ didgeridoo right next to their ear drums. It was fan-fuckin’-tastic.
Although “the fart game,” as Eddie Murphy would refer to it as in Delirious, was adored in my house, other people didn’t always think it was quite as funny as we had. One time back in 2002, my dad took my brother and I to the local Cineplex to see a movie called The Rookie. The Rookie is a movie starring Dennis Quaid about a real-life thirty-five-year-old high school science teacher that had a life-long strained relationship with his father who never supported his dreams of becoming a major league baseball player. In the movie, Dennis Quaid is the high school baseball coach and the kids on the team are amazed by the fastball he throws to them at practice. They make a deal with him that says if they make the playoffs that year, he has to try out for a major league team. They make the playoffs and Quaid makes good on his end of the bargain. As it turns out, his ninety-eight mile-per-hour fastball is good enough for the majors and he signs a deal with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Less than a year later he gets called up to the bigs as a relief pitcher. Although he didn’t know it at the time, his old man who never supported his dreams was present in the crowd and cheering him on. When his team’s getting spanked, they call him in to face real-life big leaguer Royce Clayton whom he proceeds to strike out on three pitches. Although it doesn’t mean shit for the team, it’s a big and powerful moment for him, his wife and his kids.
After the game they show a bunch of reporters crowded around Quaid in the locker room asking him how it feels to be the oldest rookie in over forty years and how it felt to strike out Royce Clayton and all that good stuff. This is when Quaid’s father appears. They stare at each other for a moment before embracing in front of the cameras and ultimately repairing their fucked-up relationship. This point of the film had been silent for dramatic effect and in the filled-to-capacity theater, if one were to fall, you could hear a pin drop from across the room.
Since my twelve-year-old brother had been stuffing his face with a bunch of popcorn and candy throughout the entirety of the flick, by the end of it at the most emotional, touching and quiet part of the production, his stomach had been full of gas. As he normally would at home, he proceeded to lift his leg and rip a fuckin’ fart so loud it could be heard from outer space. My brother, my dad and I immediately began laughing our asses off while no one else in the theater seemed to think it funny and shushed us so they could enjoy the father-son reconciliation they’d waited an hour-and-a-half to see.
Since she’d grown up around the fart game, my sister Teresa who’s seven years younger than me also seemed to enjoy taking part in the pastime – at least at age six or seven she had. One night during those developing years, Teresa had her friend Ashley over for a little slumber party. After playing with dollies, watching movies and having fake tea parties or whatever girls do together when they’re kids, my mom sent Teresa and Ashley off to bed. Ashley was to sleep on the floor while Teresa slept in her normal bed.
Sometime after Ashley had begun drifting off to sleep, Teresa developed some gas. After climbing out of her bed, my lil’ sis positioned one foot on each side of Ashley’s head, squatted down just above her sleeping friend’s face and tore a monster-ass fart. Since she hadn’t yet had the chance to fall into a deep sleep, Ashley was jarred awake by the sound. Upon opening her eyes, seeing Teresa’s ass in her face and getting a whiff of the fart that’d just been blown, Ashley started crying, made a call home to her parents and was promptly picked up to go sleep in the fart-free safety of her own bedroom.
The best farter I’ve encountered thus far in my life is my grade school buddy O’Shea who could fart on command. What he would do is lean forward in a position where his butthole would be wide open and he’d suck a whole bunch of air up into his ass. It was like he had a third lung and you could hear the intake as it’d been happening. It’d be a low dull ripple that’d last about five seconds and when I’d hear it in the classroom, I knew what to expect right after.
Whereas hanging out with O’Shea on the weekends and watching him walk past tables and rip farts near strangers who’d been eating in Subway restaurant or seeing him piss teachers off time and time again while they tried to impart their lessons had always brought a smile to my face, my favorite of his performances had been at a place called Covenant Harbor.
Covenant Harbor is a Christian youth camp up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where all members of my class at St. Juliana were required to go on an overnight retreat and participate in teambuilding exercises and a whole lot of other gay spiritual stuff like that before being qualified to make our Holy Confirmation in seventh grade. I’d like to say right from the start that allowing a bunch of grade school kids to have a massive sleepover party in cabins with minimal supervision is a horrible idea. Although we all went to a Catholic grade school, the majority of my peers – myself included – had been the shittiest, nothing-is-holy heathens I’d encountered during my short thirteen years on earth. And it was painfully obvious that nothing about this retreat was gonna be taken seriously by any of us.
I think the plan was for our class to drive up there from Chicago early on one day, spend the whole afternoon getting in touch with Jesus and then driving back the next morning after a farewell breakfast or something like that. One of the first activities I remember doing after we’d gotten up there had been pairing up with a partner and paddling around the northern end of Lake Geneva in rowboats. This I’m guessing was a way of teaching us how to work well together with a partner.
Because it was so long ago I can’t even remember with whom I was paired up, but what I do remember was that one dude named D-Pok and his rowing partner had gotten along great. They had no problem coordinating their rowing and were able to go faster than anybody else on the water. Another pair that’d been out there when I was had been a girl named Maureen who wore glasses and whoever her partner was at the time. They were having a pretty rough go of it, couldn’t really figure out how to get around and ended up just sitting out there on the water, floating around in their boat.
What I didn’t mention in the paragraph previous is that, in addition to being good rowers, D-Pok and his partner had also been total fuckin’ assholes. And from probably about fifty yards away, D and his homey aimed their boat in the direction of Maureen’s and started rowing as fast as they could. Seconds later, as Maureen and her partner had continued to sit idly, having no idea what they were in for, D-Pok and his first mate went smashing right into the side of their boat. Both of the girls’ necks violently jerked from the impact of the crash. Because of this sudden motion, Maureen’s glasses went flying off her face and into Lake Geneva, promptly sinking to the bottom and were never seen again.
The next morning, after the whole day that’d been jam-packed with activities that were supposed to bring us closer to God as well as the night full of farts that followed which I’ll get to in a moment, all the chaperones had been tired and grumpy as all hell. At breakfast, which we’d rushed through to get back on the road and away from that God-forsaken spiritual retreat center, I chugged a bunch of orange juice and milk with my bowl of cereal.
“Okay, let’s go! Everybody outside and on the bus!” one of my underpaid and overworked Catholic grade school teachers had said.
We all stepped outside and hopped on the school bus as we’d been told. Like most asshole kids do, my friends and I took up the seats in the back.
“Okay,” the same teacher shouted from the front of the vehicle, “we will NOT, I repeat NOT be stopping off for any bathroom breaks on the way home, so if you have to go, you go now before we leave.”
The whole bus remained silent.
“Alright then. We’re leaving. Don’t even think of asking us to pull over or stop off if you suddenly have to go.”
At the time, I didn’t have to go. I guess all the milk and OJ I’d just pounded had yet to make its way through my system. As you could’ve predicted however, about forty-five minutes into this hour-and-a-half drive, I really had to piss all of a sudden and as they’d warned, didn’t even think of asking them to pull over for the benefit of my bladder.
“Hey, hey, yo guys,” I said to my chums around me, “I gotta take a piss right now real bad. You got anything I could go in?”
Following a couple offerings that I decided weren’t gonna be big enough on account of how badly I had to go, someone handed me an empty Pringles can that I felt I could work with. I’d been sitting in the aisle seat and my buddy Mickey was in the window seat next to me. After I rolled up the legging of my shorts and stuck my dick into said Pringles can, I let ‘er rip. By the time the last drip emerged, the can’d been filled to the brim without a centimeter to spare.
“Here Mickey, take this,” I said. “Throw it out the window. We gotta get rid of the evidence.”
“Wait, no cap?” he said.
“Nah, I don’t have the cap, just fuckin’ toss it.”
Mickey stuck his arm out the window and tossed the can of piss out onto the Edens Expressway. After doing so, he let out one of his typical hyena laughs as it sprayed in the breeze and misted back in the windows onto those of my buddies unfortunate enough to have been sitting behind us.
“Hey!” the driver shouted while looking back at us in the rearview mirror. “No throwin’ things out the bus!”
“What!?” one of the teachers stood up. “Who’s throwing things out the bus windows!?”
“Them guys in the back there. I saw ‘em throw a bottle.”
The teacher approached.
“Which one of you is throwing things out the bus window?”
None of us said anything.
“Well, whichever one of you did this, don’t expect to get away with it.”
Once the teacher walked away, we all started laughing.
“How the fuck’s she gonna find out who tossed the piss? That’s ridiculous. No way.”
Well, you’d be surprised how many private eyes the teachers have amongst your classmates. Some morally obligated tattle-tale twerp in class – we never figured out who – ratted on us guys in the Rosa Parks seats. Upon exiting the bus back at the school parking lot, my buddy Mickey was handed a detention that read “Michael urinated in a bottle and tossed it into oncoming traffic” and was informed that his parents were going to receive a call. Mick took the whole wrap and I never got in trouble. I guess something was learned from Covenant Harbor after all. Mick learned how to be a man for others – a selfless modern-day piss-tossing martyr who was crucified for my sins.
Okay, now we gotta backtrack a little. So, the night after the boat had been rammed and the night before the piss had been tossed, it was declared by the chaperones that it was time for all us youngsters to go to bed. Each room in the cabins had about twelve beds – ten for the students and two for the parent chaperones. I don’t know for what reason exactly, but the parents that volunteered were assigned to sleep in rooms separate from the ones where their own kids had been staying. The two supervisors in the room with me, O’Shea and the rest of our jag-off buddies had been two dads who we’ll call Leo the Lion and Big Glen. Leo had been an older hard-ass dad that commanded respect whereas Big Glen was one of those 70s-porn-star lookin’ mustache dads of whom no one really feared the wrath.
Sometime after dinner, some of our classmates who’d been staying in separate cabins distributed water balloons that we were to fill up and have ready for an inter-cabin waterballoon fight sometime that evening. Of the bunch that’d been handed to us, I personally got two waterballons, filled them up and stowed them away for later. Not ten minutes after Glen and Leo declared lights-out, the outer walls of our cabin began getting pelted by enemy fire.
BOOM BOOM BOOM!
“What the hell was that!?” gasped Leo the Lion.
We ignored him, kicked open the door and chased after the kids who just attacked our home base. I fired the first of my two balloons and missed as their crew retreated back into their cabin. By then the majority of them had made it to safety but two or three of ‘em had yet to get back inside their sleeping quarters – a kid named Dah Huber who’d worn a plastic back brace at the time had been one of the stragglers. Out for blood, I took a massive crow hop and fired my last balloon as the kids tried to pack into the front door. It’d been a hell of a whip and nailed Dah Huber right on his lower back, exploding on impact and making an awesomely loud sound when striking his scoliosis brace.
After we scurried back into our cabin in fear of any counterattacks, Leo shut and locked the door.
“Okay guys. You had your fun, but that’s the end of that,” he said while shutting the lights back off. “Now it’s time to get some sleep.”
“Yeah,” Big Glen added, “no more messin’ around guys. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“Yeah, okay, good night. We’ll see you tomorrow,” we humored the two dads and kept on jabbering.
After about half an hour of us all talking and laughing with each other, Leo got up out of bed, walked over to the light switch and began to flip it on and off to get our attention.
“This is not playtime guys,” he said. “It’s time for you to go to sleep.”
“Yeah guys,” Big Glen sat up in his bed, “we really mean it. No more horsin’ around. Everyone needs to shut their mouths and go to sleep.”
Nobody had anything to say while the light was still on but once he’d flipped it off, it was a different story.
“These guys for real?” someone whispered.
“Horsin’ around? Did you hear that,” someone else laughed. “Horsin’ around!”
About two minutes after Leo the Lion had laid down the law, I could hear O’Shea’s infamous anal intake from across the room and couldn’t wait for the payoff. A few seconds later, he cut their desired silence by aiming his ass up in the air and blasting off like a cannon. We all burst out laughing for a solid minute.
“That was a good one,” Big Glen said once we’d all calmed down again, “but uh, let’s all try and act like we’ve heard a fart before and not get so excited about it. Okay?”
This caused us to laugh even harder but we eventually calmed down again without intervention. The room stayed silent for a good five minutes until I could hear O’Shea’s butthole puckering up as he sucked a second batch of air into his rectum. Seconds later he fired off another one. We all laughed again and neither of the dads said anything, hoping not to instigate any further misbehavior. About ten minutes later, O’Shea did it again. And it was even funnier than the time before.
Leo the Lion had given up on us but Big Glen became infuriated.
“No guys, you know what? That’s it,” he yelled. “No more of this. You all need to shut up and go to sleep. I need to get some rest. I have to work tomorrow. No more talking and no more laughing. I want silence until the morning.”
Everybody was taken aback by how serious the mood had just gotten. No one said a peep. It looked like Big Glen and Leo the Lion had finally gotten what they wanted.
As I laid there, I couldn’t fall asleep. I was too jacked up from being around all my friends to be the least bit tired. All I wanted to do was laugh and have a good time but was hesitant to do so after being given such a stern talking-to by Big Glen.
Following about fifteen minutes I’d spent staring at the ceiling, the silence was broken from across the room. I looked over and could see O’Shea curled in a ball on his bed, again sucking air up into his butthole. When the sucking had stopped, I watched him as he stealthily climbed out of his bed, tiptoed over to that belonging to Big Glen and positioned his asshole about a foot away from the guy’s face. O’Shea then pulled the trigger and I swear the man could not have been more enraged. I couldn’t control myself and nearly pissed myself laughing – as did the rest of our juvenile bunkmates.
Upon waking up the next morning and gathering all our shit together for the bus ride home, it was plain to see that neither Big Glen nor Leo the Lion seemed as if they’d been the least bit invigorated by the holy spirit at this particular retreat center. The dad chaperones hadn’t taken the bus with us and as such, didn’t need to wait around for breakfast to be made, served and eaten. So, once we’d had all our bags packed, Big Glen stepped out of the cabin without lending any final remarks as Leo the Lion stood in the doorway looking around the room at each and every one of us.
“Well guys,” he said, “I wish I could say it was a slice…but, it wasn’t.”
He then slammed the door on us, hopped in his car and never looked back after peeling away from Covenant Harbor.