Blame It on the Dog (6 page)

O
n Thanksgiving night, 1995, after a huge turkey dinner, Chester “Buck” Weimer was drifting off to sleep when his wife, Arlene, “let go a bomb” that was certainly nothing to be thankful for. Weaker men might have fled the room and filed for divorce the next day, but Buck, a Pueblo, Colorado, resident in his late fifties, was made of sterner stuff. Besides, his wife had been letting off stink bombs for years. She suffered from Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disorder that creates Richter scale-level farts, and Buck—like a man who lived beside the railroad tracks—no longer paid much attention to the nightly rumblings. But on that fateful Thanksgiving night, her gastritis was particularly bad—and under the covers to boot. “I’m laying in bed with her, sort of suffering silently,” Weimer remembered with a wince. Something had to be done.

“That’s when I came up with my invention for the world’s first fart-proof underwear!”

Three years later he patented his own fart-knocker knickers.

The trickiest part was finding a filter that wasn’t bulky, but could capture foul-smelling particles while allowing the non-smelling elements of a fart—mostly hydrogen and oxygen—to slip through. The perfect solution turned out to be a coal miner’s gas mask filter. After Weimer did a little tweaking in his garage workshop, he was ready to take on the world of unfettered flatulence.

He called his hermetically sealed skivvies Under-Ease. Designed in both men’s boxer and women’s panty styles, they’re made from airtight, polyurethane-coated nylon, with elastic gaskets around the waist and thighs. Gas can only exit from one small, triangular egress in the rump, where Weimer strategically placed his removable filter made of spun-glass material and activated charcoal sandwiched between layers of Australian sheep’s wool. (Its exact makeup is a trade secret, because Buck doesn’t want any counterfeiters to start making fart-knocker knicker knockoffs, but it’s a sure bet that the wool doesn’t touch the buttocks.)

Weimer ordered the first run of Under-Ease—750 pairs—from a Denver apparel contractor in early 2001, and within a few months he had to reorder. “Now we’re selling approximately eight thousand pair per year,” Buck said in early 2006. “The ratio between the briefs and the boxers is approximately 60/40, with the briefs getting the majority.” They sell for $24.95; two replacement filters cost $9.95. Under-Ease are washable and last about a year, depending on the frequency of use and laundering. Filters last from several weeks to several months, depending on the noxiousness of the wearer’s farts.

From the beginning, the Weimers have had to rely on the anonymity of the Internet (
http://under-tec.com
). According to Buck, “When we started out with a booth at a health fair here in Pueblo, our brochures flew off the table, but nobody was brave enough to purchase anything in person. Nobody wants to admit to having that problem because of the shame. That’s why we do most of our business online.”

One elderly lady wrote to say that her recently purchased pairs of Under-Ease had literally been her salvation. She hadn’t been to church for two years previously because of her chronic, ungodly flatulence, which had made folks who shared her pew say “P-ew!” They thought she had sold her ass to the Devil.

“We’re really trying to help people,” says Arlene Weimer, a psychologist when she’s not an Under-Ease saleslady. But mostly the product has helped her personally. Her most embarrassing pre-Under-Ease moment, she says, was when a client complained that her office smelled like a sewer and asked if she had plumbing problems. Since trust in a psychologist-client relationship goes both ways, Arlene
owned up to her
sang-froidian
slip. (How’s that for a visual pun? It only works on paper.)

In October 2001, the Weimers were called to Boston to receive Harvard University’s Ig Nobel Prize, which honors imaginative and goofy achievements in science, medicine, and technology. Buck and Arlene also stopped in New York City to appear on the
Howard Stern
show, home of Fartman. “We were kind of skeptical at first,” says Buck, “but Howard was sincerely interested in what we were doing. He was funny, but he was respectful, too.” In other words, Stern wasn’t being a smarty pants.

SUPERMAN = SUPERFART!

I
n Swedish,
fart
is the word for “action,” which makes Superman on the cover of Swedish comic books look like not just the Man of Steel, but also the Man of Steel Bowels. (I’ve got my own copy of a Swedish Superman mag with
Super-Fart!
and
Super-Tuff!
emblazoned above the superhero’s head.

According to Swedish speaker Noel Benson,
fart
can also be “speed,” or “start”—as in
ta fart
, meaning “to get a start”—or force, energy, or activity. “Every parking garage in Sweden is full of
utfarts
and
infarts
,” says Benson. “A traffic obstruction or barrier is called a
farthinder
and a speed trap is called a
fartkontroll.”
In German,
fahrt
means and sounds roughly the same as the Swedish
fart
, but visually it’s not as funny with the
h
in there.

The Swedes’ word for an actual fart is
fis
, which is also their name for the musical note F-sharp. It’s especially effective when played on a tuba.

IT WAS A DARK AND STINKY NIGHT

W
riters who create nightmares are often impelled by horrific incidents from their childhoods. Charles Dickens’s early deprivations drove him to write self-expiating novels about orphans surviving in the poverty-grimed bowels of industrial England. Edgar Allan Poe, wounded by the early death of his consumptive mother, found comfort and catharsis in pining evermore over wraithlike women lying in, or escaping from, their tombs. And Stephen King, the modern king of horror, well, he has a boyhood tale that’s almost too scary to contemplate.

His babysitter, a big fat woman, sat on his face and farted!

We’re lucky he didn’t grow up to be a pervert who went around in a hockey mask on Halloween, farting on the heads of little children.

In his only nonfiction publication,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(2000)—a cross between an autobiography and a how-to book—Stephen King dredged up this childhood memory: “Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marsh gas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary
criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell ‘Pow!’—
The Village Voice
holds few terrors.”

Don’t be fooled by the fact that he’s making light of it. Boys, or men revisiting the traumas of their boyhoods, like to light their farts—if only to illuminate the spectral darkness around them.

Beyond inoculating him against literary critics, the experience with Eula or Beulah (he’s even suppressed her rightful name, unless her parents actually named her Eula-Beulah) prepared him to write about more than just flammable prom queens, furious Plymouth Furys, and haunted hotels. His fevered imagination also came up with Tommyknockers (which sound suspiciously like fartknockers) and, most tellingly, byrums, or “shit weasels”—the alien creatures in his 2001 novel
Dreamcatcher
that crawl into the lower intestine, create rumbling attacks of explosive gas, and then chew their way out through the asshole in a spray of blood. Tell me the shit weasel isn’t a deeply repressed, haunted fart trying to escape from King’s pysche, if not from his puckered pooter.

THE EARTH FARTS BACK

C
ould a colossal blast of flatulence from gazillions of tiny, unseen critters suffocate civilization as we know it? According to
Discover
magazine, it’s possible. “Scientists have discovered that nearly a third of all life on this planet consists of microbes living under the seafloor in a dark world without oxygen,” veteran science writer Robert Kunzig observed in 2004. “These tiny creatures make so much methane gas that if even a small proportion of it is released, we might be overwhelmed by tsunamis, runaway global warming and extinctions!”

As researchers probe deeper into the earth, they’ve found a nether region of primordial, one-celled microbes living as far down as a half-mile beneath the bottoms of the oceans, in what Kunzig calls “astonishing numbers.” Relics of an ancient earth where oxygen was rare, they feed upon the muck created by aeons of decaying fauna and flora, and then they expel methane. “These microbes are forming enormous amounts of gas,” said Gerald Dickens, a marine geochemist at Rice University. As their micro-farts mix with water and sediment in the deep cold, they form frozen methane hydrate, a semisolid substance that, despite the low temperatures, seethes like a bubbling pot. Scientists claim that this methane hydrate is probably greater than all known reserves of coal, gas, and oil combined. One of the world’s most massive deposits, called Hydrate Ridge, lies just off the Oregon coast.

If this gaseous material were disturbed by geological forces and sent toward the ocean’s surface, the sea-level pressure would melt the water molecules and release the methane as a huge greenhouse gas bubble or cloud that could possibly create not just havoc, but rapid changes in the climate. “[Methane belches from the depths] may have helped pull the planet out of recent ice ages,” claims Kunzig, “and they almost certainly helped end the Paleocene epoch fifty-five million years ago with an intense burst of global warming.”

Gregory Ryskin, associate professor of chemical engineering at Northwestern University, believes these methane depth-charges-in-reverse changed the earth much earlier. Writing in the September 2003 issue of the journal
Geology
, Ryskin suggested that huge methane clouds suddenly liberated from deep stagnation could have killed off the majority of marine life and land animals and plants at the end of the Permian era—long before the age of dinosaurs.

By Ryskin’s calculation, there are possibly 10,000 gigatons of dissolved methane near the ocean floor under high pressure. If released by an earthquake, a bubble would need only a 5- to 15-percent mixture of oxygen-methane concentration to become explosive, with a force 10,000 times greater than the world’s entire stockpile of nuclear weapons. “That amount of energy is absolutely staggering,” said Ryskin. “As soon as one accepts this mechanism, it becomes clear that if it happened once it could happen again. I have little doubt there will be another methane-driven eruption—though not on the same scale as 251 million years ago—unless humans intervene.” Ryskin believes that dissolved methane, along with dissolved carbon dioxide (which alone killed 1,700 people and livestock near Cameroon’s Lake Nyos in a 1986 eruption) and hydrogen sulfide, could create enough dust and vaporized sulfur smog to make the earth uninhabitable.