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Gas Attack

Leonard Henry Scott

    It was a particular morning long, long ago, a Tuesday I think. The sky was gun metal gray with splotches and streaks of washed out blue, and lazy indifferent clouds; just an ordinary day. But those are the kind that can sometimes bite you in the butt.
    When I entered the building where I worked (as a newly minted adult on my first real job), an empty elevator was there waiting in the lobby. I got on and pushed 22. The doors closed and the elevator started up. But then it stopped almost immediately at the second floor.
    A man entered the car. He was an ordinary, everyday man nothing special. He was wearing a crisp light blue dress shirt and a pair of tan khaki pants. He nodded cordially and turned to face the front of the car. Then, just as the doors closed, he promptly cut a loud fart which seemed possess considerable aromatic promise. It bubbled and popped with a certain anxious immediacy and appeared to offer the possibility of becoming more than just gas. The emission could have resulted from the angry death throes of a still percolating Mexican dinner, or perhaps something else more exotic, overfilled and seething with unfriendly spices. While he farted, the man’s stomach growled and whined audibly like a tortured cat. And his symphony of flatulence slowly grew in aromatic intensity. The man continued to stand impassively on the other side of the car. He stared at the closed elevator door. Now, all at once the rumbling and grumbling stopped. And just beyond that brief swell of silence a long unbroken hiss began to filter through the back of his khaki pants. I suppose objectively it wasn’t a loud noise, but in the sudden, uncomfortable silence it seemed to pierce the air like the powerful emptying of a great circus balloon.
    The elevator stopped on the fifth floor. The doors opened and the man departed without the slightest acknowledgement, glance or change of expression. Perhaps he was embarrassed or maybe he was just anxious to find a restroom to check the condition of his underpants. The doors closed, and there I was alone on the elevator; engulfed and surrounded in and by a stifling invisible cloud of unpleasantness. I was, trapped.
    I was just a hapless victim. Yet, I recognized the situation for what it was and the great immense entirety of what it had the potential to become. I only hoped as the elevator slowly ascended, that the unthinkable would not happen. Then, just like that, the unthinkable happened when the elevator stopped at seven. The doors opened and two nicely dressed young women got on.
    “Oooh.” One said immediately, placing a protective hand of her mouth and nose. The other woman smiled that painful, grimaced smile of a difficult bowel movement as she hastily attempted to fan away the smell (as if that ever works).
    I stood momentarily at ground zero trying to mentally formulate some notion of an explanation that would make sense them. Finally, I just retracted my head into my shoulder blades and slunk to the back of the car. I tried to shrug it all off inwardly and blasé it out. By now it seemed that the fart had reached its maximum level of odoriferous intensity. And it was not just a memorable smelliness. It was making me dizzy.
    One woman nudged the other, who nudged her back. They leaned against the side railings and stared at me with unremitting disgust as if I was a statute of Hitler realistically fashioned out of dried dog vomit. Oh how I wanted to explain and vent my (no our shared) indignation! But instead, I quietly examined my shoe tops as the hairs on my skin burned from the hot rivets of their stare. I understood completely. All they knew was that when they got on the elevator, there was one person and one fart already there. End of story.
    We stood in silence marinating together in a foul soupy odor of such near palpable intensity that it seemed almost thick enough to touch. The elevator rose at glacial speed. The women were bound for 16. I was headed for 22. But when the car stopped at 14, I immediately fled through the open door. I was fast, yet not fast enough to outrun the disapproval of the newest passenger, a white-haired gentleman with a briefcase, who glanced at me quickly as he entered the elevator, then loudly exclaimed, “Oh My God!”
     I walked up the next eight floors. By the time I got to 22, my heaving chest was ready to implode and my calves felt like they had swollen to the size of grapefruits.
    Out of necessity I did timidly return to the elevator for subsequent trips. However, for the next several days, I furtively scrutinized every sudden face fearing that I might run into one of those three people. But I never saw any of them again, not the three indignant elevator passengers or the man in the khaki pants. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I was fired from that job at the end of the week for forgetting to pick up photo paper for our Apeco Uni-Matic Photocopy Machine. When I told my dad, he laughed and said, “When I was your age, I was fired from more jobs than I could ever possibly count.” I thought, “Wow, what an inspiring story.” I still do think that because those words helped me to keep things in perspective over the years.
    That long ago gas attack confirmed for me something that I, as a newly certified wet eared adult had suspected but did not want to believe; namely that life in fact is not fair. At this very moment (probably) across some foreign sea, an unrepentant evil dictator is dying peacefully in bed after many years of unpunished criminal self-indulgence. Yet other good people throughout the world are unmercifully whipped black and blue by the vagaries of chance for miss-attributed foibles and farts not of their making.
    At some point on the sometimes colorful, but mostly bland-painted unrolling carpet of my life, I could have become almost anything (with the possible exception of jockey or underwear model). But no matter how great or soaring my achievements in life might have been, to a circle of three certain people, I suspect that until the end of time, I would only be recognized as, “That asshole who farted on the elevator.” Although we often have no clue how we are being perceived in life, sometimes (deservedly or not) we can make a pretty good guess.

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