BUTT THUNDER
Love in the Time of Flatulence
How my Husband Found His Twin (Blue) Flame
My husband’s journey of love and self-acceptance began at the feet of his youth swim coach.
“You make da bad air, Deeyoh,” Coach Jorgenson would say in his Danish accent, shaking his head with consternation.
Day after day, Coach J sat on the pool deck and predicted that Joe would be unlucky in love. As eight-year-old Joe swam to- and fro-, stopping to breathe at the wall and looking up at his larger-than-life coach of Olympians:
“You will only find a wife who does not smell so good, vahh?”
Coach J had no idea.
Joe was talented — that much was true. He could clear a fifteen-passenger van full of teenaged water polo players with a single sound. As evidenced by the time a high school coach once swerved to the shoulder and everybody ran the hell out.
“The screaming was immediate. It was like an evacuation,” my husband later recalled.
These gas-leak evacuations grew explosive when Joe earned a college scholarship. Being a dual-sport athlete meant that he spent upward of 30 hours a week in the pool. Twenty were for competitive swimming, and 10 for water polo. The more exercise he got, the harder and more stinkily he flamed out.
Joe’s teammates at Michigan State were scandalized.
“You need to chew your food better,” scolded Lars Neubauer, a distance freestyler from Aachen who would occasionally share Joe’s lane. Lars had studied abroad and traveled all over the Western world but steered clear of any kitchen where Joe might be baking brownies. Even “Hot Karl” Sunryd, Joe’s backstroker roommate who delighted in drunkenly showing people his “fruit basket,” couldn’t handle the heat.
Joe even developed a system for pool-farting, a waterlogged heuristic that only an engineering student like him could invent. Here is his list on
How to lose friends and nauseate people:
- Rip a big one. (For best results, eat flank steak in the dorm room cafeteria the night before.)
- Watch as the warm orbs of stink rise up from the groin of your Speedo. Simultaneously, take a deep breath.
- Lower your chin to the water’s surface, aim in your teammate’s general direction, and blow out (with your breath!) just as the biggest bubble bursts.
The system worked! Fellow distance swimmer Deb O’Neil would be at the wall during a hard, aerobic set, breathing in with intention. She suspected nothing. And out of nowhere, Joe would hit her with the hot stink.
“Oh my GAHD, that is terrible!” Deb roared. With anger usually reserved for someone who kidnapped the Lindburgh Baby.
Joe laughed at his skill and enjoyed his notoriety, but deep in the bowels of his psyche he wondered if he would ever find true love.
Against all odds, he met his match in college. Joe would pretend to strike up a conversation while cropdusting his roommates — then laugh when the ruse was up. I pretended never to fart at all. Even after they fixed the soft-serve machine. My benchwarmer’s secret was safe, so long as we weren’t doing abs on the pool deck together.
A clandestine farter is, after all, capable of so much more amazing things.
Joe had already reached peak beef by the time we met. But the following summer, while he was training with Olympic swimmers at USC, I flew out from Michigan to visit and we drove to his parents’ place in San Diego. His dad had a few words to say.
“Something just isn’t right with his gut. I think he may be lactose intolerant,” Dadsplained Dan, Joe’s biggest advocate and enabler. Dan grilled steaks and passed Joe a Pabst Blue Ribbon, oblivious to his complicit role in all of this anal chaos. Introspection was a dead end, too— the Tums, Beano, and Lactaid that were proffered by family and friends were of no help at all.
It wasn’t until much later that Joey came to terms with his enduring — and wildly endearing — bodily quirk.
And I helped heal him, the owner of the lonely farts.
During our six pregnancies, I had gas that could best be described as a human H-bomb. I like to think it was our developing babies’ fault. After all, they had been made from the same DNA as their parents. For once I could revel in being the one who was dishing it out rather than howling in protest from the other side of the bed. It was a real source of joy. Or maybe Schadenfreude.
The brown clouds of fatalism started to part.
“I knew you were my soulmate when you thought farts were funny.”
Joe recently told me this after almost sixteen years of marriage had passed.
I fired up my own bum-sen burner — may its blue flame burn eternal — when I married Joe. I’ve never dialed back my gas since. We’ve laughed harder at Joe’s appalling farts than anything else. Even the juiciest ones by our infants that sounded like someone dropping a cup of Jell-O pudding on a tile floor.
And the prevailing backdraft in our household of six males and two spicy females continues to uplift.
My husband’s journey of self-acceptance and love is complete. And now I must get back to reading Walter the Farting Dog to our six flatulent children.
Feel free to join us. Bring along a lighter and have some fun.
Special thanks to Jennifer McDougall.
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