Scenes From a Men's Room or, Farting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

My big brother (well, half-brother, by my mother's first marriage) is now more than 50 years old and still thinks that pretending to fart at the dinner table is High Humour; my 13-year niece has as her email address a riff on the idea of passing gas.

My father does - and always has (or, at least, so long as I have known him) hated fart jokes or similar "gross" humour (as do I, most of the time).

He paid me a surprise visit yesterday, blowing into town to pay court to an old flame, among other things. Though he doesn't drink as once he did ("I'm just not interested anymore," he said half-way through his second and final beer), we had a good time and he spent the night, then drove me to work this morning.

Nevertheless ...

The January issue of Harper's clutched tight in my left hand, I unzipped my pants with my right and took my cock in hand, unclenched my bladder and let fly a spray, returning to when it had come the better part of several pints.

The Men's Room at Mezzro's is small: one sink, one urinal, one toilet and stall.

When I heard the door open behind me, I thrust myself towards the porcelain fount, and the door barely nudged my buttocks. Urine begining to spatter the drain, the door to the stall on my right opened, then closed.

All out once, like a slow bolt of lightning, a strong, manly expectoration of various gasses, an admixture of beans and beer, let rip (I burped).

From the stall on my left came a chuckle, as his his stream began to harmonize with my own.

"Hey!" I called out, in my best imitation of a basso profundo, "no smart remarks from the peanut gallery!"

My unseen compatriot laughed again. "That's what I'm here for," he said as his stream clattered like hard rain into the pool between his equally invisible legs.

I was about to reply - my mouth opening, a witty retort (no doubt) on the tip of my tongue - when to my surprise (and his), my anus spoke first. A guttural, inarticulate burst of noise, methane and other sundry greenhouse gasses.

Beyond the walls of the stall, my unsee compatriot laughed again, and so did I.

I shook myself dry and zipped myself up. "My father would hate this," I said, "He always said scatology was the lowest form of humour."

And with that I hied myself from our tiny sanctuary and surprised myself by ordering a fourth pint of Steamwhistle.

On a day like this, I have no doubt that those among you fervently praying
that global warming is real will thank me.

Why I Read Harper's, Part 673

A year or two after I moved to Toronto, I got to two sisters, who lived across the street. I was 16, Dina 15, Maria 14. I lived with my father, a left-wing activist who had been thrown out of the Communist Party of Canada when he had been 16 or 17 because he was an "independent thinking"; in other words, he preferred to think for himself, rather than tote the Party line.

Long story short, Dina and Maria also came from Communist Backgrounds, though very different ones. Where my father was the son of a Russian immigrant who had fought on the winning side of the Russian Revolution, Dina and Maria's parents had come to Canada on the run from the victorious Greek "colonels", the US-supported, right-wing, military junta that overthrew a democratic socialist Greek government in (if memory serves) the 1950s.

In any case, not only were all three of us young, and bright, and feeling our sexual oats, we had politics in common. We became not only tools of mutual sexual exploration and discovery, but friends.

But I digress.

Dina and Maria's parents were "left-wing", but they were also puritans.

Long story short: Mum and Dad tell the girls, "We're going home to Greece for the summer!" It's a holiday. Very cool.

Once there, however, the sisters' find that their passports have been taken away from them, and they are told they are "back" in Greece to stay. Back in the ancestral village, in fact.

By virtue of courage, imagination and a little help from friends back in Toronto, the sisters managed to escape their fate, slipping like a pair of revolutionary Jill Bonds through their parents' reactionary grasp.

But they were lucky ...

( Read more... )

As I may have mentioned in an earlier post tonight, my father blew into town on the weekend, and paid me a visit last night.

We talked of life and death, of living wills (he is 70 now, and thinking of such things), of love and sex, of politics and literature, of family and friends, of past and of present and future.

We agreed on much, puzzled over a little, and barked arguments about a few things.

And presently, we retired to our rest. I, noble host that I am, took the couch, leaving my bed to the old man (and to both of us, too little sleep).

It was with that memory that I read the piece I just quote from Harper's and it brought forth a wellspring of memory and gratitude.

Not only did my parents never try to kill me, nor kidnap me, they loved me and did their best to help me become a free man, unencumbered by guilt.

They did, I think (though I am, of course, a biased commentator) a pretty damned good job.

(As I grew up, one of my father's re-curring jokes was that, in order to rebel, one of his sons would grow up to be a businessman, the other a priest.)

How can we speed the building of a world in which it would be impossible for a man to murder his daughter because she chose a path different from the one he wanted for her?