The Battle of the Frozen Farts

I met Joey mid-way through Mrs. Smithson's 6th grade.

The class was hunched over some math pop quiz one morning, churning through long division, adding decimal places, computing fractions or something else equally horrible, when Mr. Starr, our chubby principal, waddled into the room with this strange-looking kid in tow.

Mr. Starr was well-liked by the kids because he was known to tell the most disgusting jokes of the frog-caught-in-a-blender variety, so we looked up from our dreadful quiz, relieved to be momentarily freed from the drudgery, hoping that we would hear a new joke or even to just catch that certain jovial twinkle in Mr. Starr's eye.

But Mr. Starr was here on business.

He walked up to Mrs. Smithson without so much as a glance at us, and in hushed tones briefly spoke to our teacher. He glanced at the wierd-looking new boy, then at us, handed Mrs. Smithson a thick manila folder, then turned and waddled out.

Mrs. Smithson was in every way our principal's opposite. Tall, thin, and imperious, you could smell her coffee and cigarette-breath when she leaned over your shoulder to help you with a math problem. When she smiled, which was seldom, you could see the brown coffee stains on her teeth.

We hated her.

She seized the new boy by the shoulder and guided him in front of her desk and faced him towards the class.

Mrs. Smithson tried to clear her throat, but broke down in a mini coughing fit, the smoke-induced phlegm rattling in her chest.

"Class, <cough> seeing as you are thourougly distracted from your quiz, I would like you to introduce Joseph Kilgore <cough, cough>. He's new to our community and I would like you to welcome him to our classroom. He will be joining us for the remainder of the year <cough, cough, cough>. Please introduce yourself, Josesph."

He was a slight and small-boned with a huge beak of a nose, made even more prominent by tiny ice-blue eyes that darted around the room with a mix of fear and what seemed like bemusement. A thatch of pale blonde hair stood straight up from his head. He kept trying to smooth it down with his hand but it kept popping back up.

"My name is Joey," he said, contradicting Mrs. Smithson with a voice louder than I expected. "Nobody ever calls me Joseph."

"<Cough, cough>" Mrs. Smithson hadn't fully pulled it together yet. She ignored the new kid's words completely. "I would like to ask for one of you boys to volunteer to be Joseph's guide. I am sure he would appreciate a friend to show him around the school and help him get adjusted. Will anybody volunteer?"

Nobody raised a hand. The kid shifted his weight from foot to foot. Mrs. Smithson's shoulders straightened like a soldier coming to attention.

"Will nobody volunteer?"

I felt a bit sorry for Joey, but still didn't want to raise my hand. I had learned that to call attention to one's self in Mrs. Smithson's classroom was to jeopardize your classroom standing.

Mrs. Smithson had created a system in which she issued you one grade a day based upon your demeanor and performance as a "Classroom Citizen."

Essentially, you started out with an 'A' and could only go down from there. If she had to reprimand you for any reason: talking in class, passing notes, pencil fighting, making a comment that she didn't like, she'd drop your grade in relation to the offense.

Things got more complicated when she asked you to do something personal for her such as cleaning the erasers or putting away the stacks of workbooks we used for math. Then she wielded the Classroom Citizenship grade like a fascist.

The erasers wouldn't be clean enough.

The workbooks wouldn't be stacked neatly enough.

It didn't matter how hard you tried, how perfect you made those stacks, how immaculate you left those erasers, she'd always find a reason to criticize. One of the books was sticking out too far, you left a clump of eraser dust on the blackboard ledge; you didn't do the job with enough joy de vivre.

Any of these offenses could lower your grade by one, maybe two letters. You didn't know for sure. The penalty was completely arbitrary. In was unsettling.

How could a kid know how to behave?

How do you clean erasers without getting chalk dust everywhere?

What the hell was joy de vivre?

Don't those workbooks look straight to you?

So now, with her appeal for volunteers to show this new kid around, I was scared to so much as breathe, as must have been all the other kids.

"Will nobody volunteer?" She repeated.

If this were a cartoon, you'd hear crickets.

"Well if nobody is going to speak up, I will have to lower the Classroom Citizenship grade for everybody."

Still, nobody.

"Consider all your grades lowered by two points," Mrs. Smithson held two fingers out at us like a threat and the thick metal bracelets around her wrist clanked together.

We held our breath and remained motionless.

"If nobody will volunteer than I will have to select somebody myself."

Mrs. Smithson moved her two fingers to her lips, pretended to consider the classroom a minute, and then—of course—pointed at me. "Henry Garfield," she said. "Would you be so kind as to show Joseph around this week?"

What else was there to say?

"Yes ma'am," I managed to stammer. "I'd be happy to."

*****

So Joey was assigned to me, a Classroom Citizenship deduction, not another kid.

It was unnatural.

He was a responsibility...a liability. How was I supposed to relate to him?

*****

At morning recess, I walked around the playground, dully pointing out the obvious. "There's the swing set…that's the handball court…here's the boy's bathroom." I showed him the border between the big kid's side of the playground and the little kid's side, a painted green line that divided the grades 1 through 3 from 4 through 6. I explained how though the two sides had their recess and lunch at different times, we were not allowed to cross the line at any time.

"Why not? Why can't we go over there?" Joey asked.

"I dunno. It's the little kid's side."

"If I want to go over there why can't I? When the big kid swings are full, why can't I go over to those swings?"

He pointed at the swing set on the little kids side, a slightly smaller version of the one on ours.

"I dunno. You get yelled at if you do."

"That's stupid."

We stood there in silence for a few minutes looking over at the empty half of the playground.

"Y'wanna play teather ball?" I asked him, changing the subject. "There's a court open."

*****

Later, I showed Joey the ropes in the cafeteria.

We each picked up an orange plastic tray from the one end of the counter and eased down the line towards the window where the cook handed over two packages: one aluminum and covered with foil for the hot portion of your lunch, and one plastic for the cold.

I felt stupid going over all this with him, talking about stuff that anybody with half a brain could have figured out for himself. But Joey didn't seem to mind and kept asking questions that would have never occurred to me.

"Why don't we get a choice for lunch? In my last school we could pick between three different things."

"I don't know, that's just the way it is here. We get this calendar at the beginning of the month and it tells us what the lunch is going to be each day."

"What if I don't like it?"

"Then you can bring your lunch. My mom puts the calendar up on the fridge and I get to circle the days I want to buy and the days I want to bring."

"That's stupid. There should be extra choices. It wasn't like this at my old school."

"Well, that's the way it is here."

When we came to the end of the line, I dug my lunch money out of my pocket and handed it over to the lunch lady. "This is where you order your milk. You can get plain or chocolate. I always get chocolate, unless they're out."

Joey watched as the lunch lady put my money in a gray metal strong box. "I want chocolate, but I don't have any money," he said to the lunch lady.

"That's okay, honey," she said, handing him a carton of chocolate milk. "You're on the plan."

*****

Back at our table we peeled back the foil of the hot lunch to reveal something like a divided TV-tray containing a pressed meat patty swimming in watery grease and some soggy gray/brown fried-and-reheated potato fingers that passed for tater tots. The bun was wrapped in the cold tray along with some crappy-looking coleslaw and a rounded scoop of brown mush studded with peanuts.

"What's this?" Joey asked poking at the brown, peanut-studded lump with his plastic spork.

"They say it's a chocolate brownie, but I don't know. I don't think they even cook it. It looks raw to me. I wouldn't touch it."

Joey picked at the thing some more, digging his spork into the soft brown mush. "It looks like a frozen fart," he said, scooping the thing up with his spork and holding out for my inspection.

I broke out in convulsive laughter. At this point in my life the word 'fart' was one of the funniest word in the English language.

*****

"Watch this." Joey bent back his plastic spork, the plastic distending beyond its intended use, and let go.

The fart took flight, catapulting across the room, arcing upward, a brown turd against the white acoustic tiled ceiling of the cafeteria.

It was a slow-motion moment, perfect and irreducible comedy, destined to be copied in sit-coms and frat-boy movies for the rest of time.

As the fart reached its peak and descended, we looked for its destination, half-hoping that it would hit someone, a lunch lady, a teacher...maybe Mrs. Smithson smack in the forehead...even Mr. Starr would be acceptable...only an authority figure would make the joke complete.

But this fart was not fated for a human target. The angle of its flight was taking it over the cafeteria floor, over the heads of the oblivious kids who munched on their greasy school lunches, the ineffectual lunch ladies who berated the kids to settle down, and towards the stage where a white movie screen had been lowered from the ceiling for an after-lunch assembly, an educational movie of some kind, some dull film that wouldn't be entertaining in any other context but because it would break up the school day we were anticipating it as we did the next Star Wars movie.

The fart came down, silent and deadly, not hitting the screen head-on, but skimming down its length, leaving a 3 foot brown skid mark on its immaculately white surface before dropping to the wooden stage with a dull, unnoticed, thump.

Only Joey and I had seen it, and we cracked up, laughing so hard it hurt, pounding our fists on the table and trying to get the attention of the other kids. Do you see that? Somebody threw a frozen fart at the screen! We pointed and laughed until the others saw it and laughed too.

Somebody said that it looked like the screen had shit its pants, and we laughed harder, partly because no kid said a word like 'shit' without accompanying guffaws, and, indeed, they were right, it did look like shit.

And then there were the other kids, taking their own frozen farts from their plastic packages and heaving them at the screen, winding up with full bore baseball-style pitches, underhand throws, lobs, bean-balls, the lunch ladies had lost total control now, waving their arms and screaming at the kids to stop.

But it was too late, the idea had been planted, taken root, the farts were flying through the air, striking the screen, splatting on the walls, raining out of the sky, until somebody inevitably hit a lunch lady in the back of the head with one of those soft chocolate balls—and that was it.

A couple of anonymous kids, boys, sacrifices for the cause, kid martyrs, all sandy hair and striped pullover shirts, were pulled off their benches, limbs flying like rag dolls, and hauled off to Mr. Starr's office, a place most of us feared, a place where Mr. Starr was anything but jovial, no joke-at-the-ready here, but a legendary paddle rumored to be drilled with air holes to reduce friction, a object that none but the worst-of-us had seen.

But Joey and I, the real instigators, were never caught. For my volunteering to show Joey around, Mrs. Smithson deducted only one letter from my Classroom Citizenship grade, this for forgetting to explain the manner in which we checked out our reading books from the classroom library.

By that time, however, I could hardly care less—Joey and I were comerades-in-arms. We had fought the Battle of the Frozen Farts and lived to tell about it. We were friends.

Sorry, but this is Copyrighted 2006, a novel in progress. Don't steal. If you want to reprint, let me know.