We lined the dance floor like so many middle school boys building the nerve to ask Sally Barkin to dance, only now with longneck Buds in hand. The turnout was light. This was a drinking crowd, not a dancing crowd. Laurie promised a dance party and honestly, I think that kept people away. A few people gamely hopped around to late-seventies new wave hits by the Cars and Blondie and the Romantics in the barren living room. The end tables, couches and chairs stacked against the far wall threatened to avalanche whenever the dancing got rowdy. The rest of us watched and drank and shouted to one another over the music.
Joe smelled it first—acrid flatulence, as if decaying bark and rotting broccoli and a six-day-dead opossum fermented in someone’s gut—his face curdled. “Jesus!” He escaped into the kitchen. A dozen of us followed. Whiskey! Tango! Foxtrot! An unprecedented breach of party etiquette. A few childish jokes, a lot of finger-pointing, then we got on with our partying. Until… Four or five more times across the course of the night—which likely lasted until three a.m. and ended with hook-ups, pass-outs or overpriced cab rides home—the gas bombs dropped. Rooms cleared. Eyes watered. Shirts flipped up over noses and mouths. The culprit understood stealth. No one was able to place guilt. Joe came up with the moniker: A Mad Farter crop-dusted the party. A night to remember, this had never happened before, hopefully, it would never happen again.
Months later, slurping shots of Jägermeister between beers, I fessed up. “Joe, I was the Mad Farter that night at Laurie’s.”
Are you disgusted? Disappointed? I am. I went through a rough time. I asked my doctor for advice, but he had no idea. My stomach was a cauldron. I had gas all the time, too much that night to be contained by my repeated visits to the bathroom. I blamed it on baked potatoes. I ate them nightly, microwaved and dressed with barbecue sauce. Eventually, I cut them from my diet, but the problem persisted. The daily bowls of cereal with milk, the slices of pizza I ate for lunch, the pint of Ben and Jerry’s I scarfed nightly after my run, none of these raised my suspicion. I wouldn’t hear the phrase lactose Intolerance for another year or two.
~ ~ ~
The streets in my neighborhood exist only to harbor homes. They lead nowhere except driveway after driveway. Three big loops adjoin one another, and the residents arriving and leaving create the only traffic. The roads are flat except one long, mild hill in the farthest loop. Seniors drive to my neighborhood to take walks. The YWCA, a half mile away, supplies an endless stream of runners warming up before whatever workout they plan for the day. Kids scoot and bike and skate up and down the road in front of my house. Dog walkers abound. The street is minefield of poop.
It's not all the dog walkers, just one. For the past two years, I blamed Dan, a middle-aged guy who lives in his mother’s house down the street. I’d would have said he lives with his mother, but I’m not sure she’s still alive. His father died several years ago, and I can’t remember when I last saw his mother. I see Dan though, all the time. He doesn’t drive. Possibly he’s epileptic or has some other disqualifying condition, but most likely, he lost his license to alcohol somewhere along the way.
I see him on his daily beer run. He hikes out to the beer store a mile away to buy a twelve pack. When I happen to be there at the same time, I offer him a ride home. It would be awkward not to. And I’ll stop for him on the road if the weather sucks, otherwise, I let him walk. He doesn’t have a job, and I suspect his beer run is the only time he gets out of his house. So how did I decide which dog walker is criminal enough to let his dog poop in the street and then leave it there? It started around the same time Dan got his dog. Plus, he had a big dog, a huge, beefy mutt, and let me tell you, these are some ursine portions of poop.
About eight months ago, the poop piles disappeared, and Dan’s dog did too. Further proof that Dan was the perp, and it saved me from the difficult conversation I kept putting off: “Dude, you can’t leave dog poop all over the street.” But as of last week, the piles are back, and Dan’s dog isn’t. As a tribute to my friend Joe, who died from depression 4 years ago, I walked in the house last week and shouted “Hey Susan, the Mad Pooper has returned.”
We have five or six piles of poop smeared around my block, strung out in broken tracks because cars drive through them. They sit in varying stages of drying or decay, an obstacle course to navigate when I head out for my run, when the seniors walk, when the children scoot. I wait for a strong rain to come and wash it all away, to clear the slate for the next round of defecation.
I want to hate this guy (gotta be a guy, right?), but since I named him after myself during my gassy phase, I realize there could be extenuating circumstances leaving the situation out of his control. Maybe he’s a nice guy with a problem, physical or mental. Maybe he’s mortified that he can’t clean up after his dog. Maybe he walks his dog in the middle of the night because he can’t bear the thought of his neighbors knowing he’s the offender.
Or maybe he’s a selfish asshole. Assuming Joe took my Mad Farter confession to his grave, no one in the world knows this until now. I offer this embarrassment as a cautionary tale. If someone in your orbit has abhorrent behavior, offer them some grace. You don’t know their whole story. You don’t know what it’s like to be them.
