Pizza Comedy

I don’t know how you’ve done it so long, ladies, but the let me tell you something, I’m on to your lies. For these first 25 years of my life, I’ve toyed with the notion that “women don’t poop” and “girls don’t fart.” It’s a rumor that you hear often as a man, women preach it as truth. Clearly, the laws of physics and nature make this statement an obvious dud, but I entertained the thought because, much like Santa Claus, I wanted to believe.

But no more. I won’t buy into this white lie any more. I won’t fuel the subjective fires of nonsense any longer. Because I now know one thing for absolute certain….

FACT. Women, the jig is up. I know you fart.

I was seated next to a small Asian woman on my 5 hour plane ride from Los Angeles to NYC. It was a red eye — departing LAX around midnight and arriving in New York early in the AM — so obviously the plan du juor was for me to sleep the entire time. So this woman (an Asian girl around 28 years old, didn’t speak English, petite frame — lets call her “Angel”) sits next to me in a full winter coat, hood up, and closes her eyes. She’s a sleeper.

This is a great sign. I’m not a big fan of Airplane Talkers, so the fact that she was ready for bed (or a North Pole excursion) was music to my ears. The plane takes off, I start to doze a little, she’s asleep-looking, and then something happens.

I get this whiff of a foul smell. Nothing too overpowering, but uncomfortable enough to force my weary eyelids open to see if a moose carcass had been laid in the emergency exit. There was no dead animal (despite the fact I smelled one), so I did what any male in this situation would do — I asked myself a serious question: “Did I just fart?”

I didn’t think so, but who can be sure. Not me. I figured maybe I let one slip in my mid-sleep state, even though the fumes seemed a bit foriegn. So I pushed the scent from my nostrils and closed my eyes. About 10 minutes later, I get another breezy blow of this fart smell. Did I just fart again? No, i couldn’t have. I would have felt it. I would have noticed. But it IS the same smell, so there’s consistency in the air. Someone was dropping bombs.

Another 10 minutes pass, now I can’t sleep. Eventually, I close my eyes, start to nod off…and there it is again. That smell. Something between egg yolks and wonton soup. It lingered. And this time, I knew it wasn’t me. I was paying attention.

My eyes dart over to Angel, who’s “asleep” in her winter coat next to me (I put “asleep” in quotes because I hypothesize that she may not have been sleeping at all, just closing her eyes and farting. The “sleep” may have been a cover up). I look her up and down, disgusted. It’s got to be her. The scent was pungent, yet not vomit-inducing. Consistent, almost dignified. The scent of a woman? WHOO-AHHH! You betcha. I’m hypothesizing that this was the very scent that made Al Pacino blind.

“OK,” I say to myself, “So she’s farting. Must be a digestive thing.” But let me tell you something, that little girl sprayed farts every 15 minutes for the first 3 hours of that flight. It was almost like it was timed, every 15 minutes. Just when you’d forget about it and start nodding off, psssstttt. You’d get sprayed. It was like on of the bathroom air fresheners that dispenses a burst of air freshener every 15 minutes. Only I was getting fresh squeezed wonton butt, right onto my left sleeve.

So what do you do in a situation like this? She was pretend sleeping (or maybe real sleeping). But the sleeping was awful fidgety — almost as if she shifted every time she let one loose. So I did the best thing I could. Any time she made a movement during her sleep, I’d be at attention — both wait for the next onslaught of nasal raping, and also waiting to see if she would “wake up” to go to the bathroom. If she wanted to, I was ready to hop up and let her out.

Hours passed, at this point I was saturated in farts. My sweatshirt felt heavier. I was convinced that sometime, anytime, she would HAVE to get up to use the bathroom. This fake sleep nonsense wasn’t fooling anyone. At least not me. I wished that, for once, I could fart on command. Give this chick a taste of her own medicine.

So I did what I could. I started fake coughing. AAHH-HhEMM!! Jolting my seat as I fake coughed, she started moving around, fumes shifting with her body. Her hood was still over her face, so I kept coughing and moving around until she as definitely awake (I must pause to pat myself on the back here, as the polite thing to do would be to let this stranger sleep. Oh no. Not a chance, Angel). And now, I just played the waiting game. Waiting until she asked me to get up to use the bathroom.

It didn’t take long. And I can’t even tell you the silent joy that went off in my brain when this chick took her hood off, and made the broken-English mention for me to move aside so she could use the bathroom. I was up in a heartbeat. I jumped up like Christmas morning.

She was in there for a solid 15-20 minutes, unleashing whatever demons were trapped within her bowels (please note that this also disproves rumor number 2, that girls don’t poop. They do, and from my experience here, they probably should more often). Well, Angel gave that toilet a run for its money. Angel proceeded to exorcise her demons through a series of space-injected airplane flushes, at least 3 or 4, not that I was counting. At this point, it was far too late for them to be courtesy flushes. There was no courtesy involved with this story.

But thankfully, the horror was over.

The rest of the flight was as blissful and crisp as a winter’s morning. The musk was gone, sucked away into the septic void of an American Airlines 767 port-o-john. And I, finally, deservingly, was able to sleep.

So I think the biggest lesson to be learned from my olfactory adventure is this: Girls do fart. Girls do poop. And it’s not nearly as funny as when guys do it.