Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

Hey, guess what? It's time for a re-telling of the asparagus fart story. It's been eight years since I've told it and seventeen years since it happened. This is for Adam.

Follow up:

When I first moved to Massachusetts, I was poor. I'd left New York with nothing but lint and a looming student loan, and after a weird summer spent in my parents' nuthouse, I was living with my first boyfriend in the basement apartment of a squat brick building in Reading, Massachusetts. The apartment wasn't a dump -- it was clean and warm and everything worked -- but it was small and dark. The only natural light came from a sliding door that opened onto a tiny concrete area that the portly property manager had called the "patio." That descriptor was a bit of a stretch, and being 22 years old and therefore constantly turning the sarcasm dial up to eleven, we spoke the implied apostrophes whenever we referred to our, um, "patio." Sub-level, our view from the "patio" was the commuter rail train track, just in front of that sat the building's blue gape-mouthed dumpster, and butted up against the "patio" wall, we faced off with the bumpers and grills of the cars parked against the building. There on the cement "patio" we could enjoy eau de dumpster, the massive purple-line trains rumbling to-and-fro hourly, and the clangorous comings and goings of our neighbors. But only up to crotch-level.

Hub, who was good with tools and armed with a handy knowledge of basic construction principles, crafted us a kitchen island out of particle board, and he also made our "couch" from a plank of plywood set on four cinder blocks and topped with the lumpy old futon cushion from my college apartment. The couch was also our only bed for awhile until we bought an air mattress. We didn't have a real TV, but we did have one of those radio/TV combo things, with the antennae and a little four-inch black and white screen. This we'd hooked up to a Nintendo we'd inherited from somewhere so that we could play very tiny games of The Legend of Zelda with our noses three inches from the screen. I want to say that we were 22 and in love and didn't care where we lived, but we were 22 and in love and we couldn't wait to trade up to a place that didn't make us suicidal in the mornings.

Such was the setting for our post-college lives.

We needed to get out of there. For that, we needed money. I had a job in retail and Hub was temping, but we needed more if we were going to pull ahead.

Poring through the want ads, we applied for the only part-time job that seemed easy to fit into our work schedules. We got a paper route. We were gonna deliver the Boston Globe in Hub's earwax-colored 1988 Toyota Corolla.

Aside from the fact that you have to show up at 3am, and that it's relentlessly there every single day, including weekends and holidays, a paper route is a pretty good deal. At the time you could pull in an extra $600 a month, which is huge when you're looking for another nickel so that you'll have two of them to rub together.

We charmed the boss and got the job easily, and then there we were, suddenly part of this whole paper carrier sub-culture. We didn't fit in at all. Say "paper route" and you think of some eleven year old tossing papers onto front porches from a bag strapped to the handle bars of a bike. This isn't THAT kind of paper route. This is different. In the middle of the night a silent contingent of gray people in pilled gray sweatsuits and flannel, squashed fingers in fingerless gray gloves, converge upon the main newspaper distro centers. They come in station wagons, they come in vans. Exhaust fumes in the pre-dawn mix with their cigarette smoke. They don't say much but they work steadily, piling load after load of newspapers into their vehicles, then they drive away in a cloud smelling of Dunkin Donuts, old sneakers and smoke. They regarded us as interlopers, two young, pink newcomers, this tall, skinny long-haired dude and his little paper bitch. Driving away from the gray stares, Hub said, "I'm driving and you're working back there. They think you're my paper bitch!"

"They all wish THEY had a paper bitch!" I cried.

This is like, serious paper delivery, whole stacks to apartment building lobbies, hotels, and businesses. The way we'd work was, Hub would drive and I would sit in the back seat prepping the papers, which towered in a stack beside me. I'd fold each one into thirds and secure with a rubber band. In heavy snow or rain I'd also sheaf each one in a plastic bag. On a route like ours, it was mostly bringing single papers to individual homes, and smaller stacks of ten or fifteen to some kid's house, which is where the eleven year old comes in -- we were the ones bringing the papers TO the kid who could later be seen tossing papers onto front porches from a bag strapped to the handle bars of a bike. Or more often what we witnessed, being driven around by exhausted, puffy moms in the family minivan.

I could usually prep a good number of papers in the time it took Hub to drive us from the distro center to the route's beginning. Then we'd split the job of exiting the car and running up to the drop site. We did this every single day, covering several routes in Reading and Wakefield. It was hard being at a job in the middle of the night, but like most humans with eyes on the prize, we adapted. Hub had it harder, because he had to come home, shower off newspaper-reek and go to his temp jobs. Being in retail, I could catch some sleep for a few hours before the store opened at ten.

Aside from the pitiful little radio/TV combo, the cinder block couch/bed and the depressing sub-level apartment, another side effect of being poor was that the supplies in our kitchen were pretty much limited to pasta, pretzels, and peanut butter.

As soon as we got more nickels to rub together from all our hard work, we started buying better, more nutritious food. Hub and I both liked to eat a lot of vegetables, and I particularly had an unfortunate penchant for the vegetables that are on the expensive side. I'm okay with a green bell pepper, a bargain at fifty cents. But my heart soars for a red bell pepper at two bucks - if you've never lived below the poverty level, I'm here to explain that a buck fifty makes a big difference.

One night in deepest winter, I went wild and bought asparagus, out of season. I could have gotten about five pounds of carrots for less than that few forkfuls of asparagus. But I LOVE asparagus, I saw it, and I splurged. That night I steamed it and served it up with some roast turkey.

Now, it's a well known fact that men fart more often than women. I did some research on farting (nothing I can show you, just trust me) and my research results show that women fart about half as often as men do, and it's never as putrid nor as forceful.

Wanna know what levels the playing field? Asparagus and turkey. Both at the same time.

For all the months that Hub and I did that paper route, we have few specific memories of it, but neither of us will ever forget a day we called Fishbowling with Asparagus and Turkey Farts.

It's Massachusetts, so it was icy, unforgivably cold in the wee hours of the morning after the asparagus and turkey dinner. We were driving all over hell and gone delivering those Boston Globes. The whole time, I was farting like a football team after a chili cook-off.

I farted so much that there was no oxygen left in the car. My gut gasses had replaced every molecule of breathable air, leaving only a stench so foul I cannot even put strong enough words together to explain it. My farts were so thick and heavy that they just hung there like air biscuits, each one barely getting a chance to dissipate just the slightest bit before another one would let go with a voluminous whoosh. They were forceful, too. I wouldn't have been surprised to turn around to find actual visible green clouds coming out of my ass like they do in cartoons to represent poison odors. I had never smelled such a smell coming out of me before. It was rancid.

I didn't expect sympathy from Hub, which was good, because I didn't get it. "Evil!" Hub was yelling, trying to steer the car on the icy roads while simultaneously pulling his sweatshirt up over his nose and mouth. He was doing everything possible to avoid breathing it in, but it wasn't avoidable. "OH GOD, FOUL!"

It was relentless. I couldn't stand to be around myself, but there was nowhere I could go. It was also FREEZING out, we tried but it was too cold to even open the windows. To make matters worse, this was when the Toyota was having exhaust problems, so we couldn't even turn on a fan.

"Ugh--GOD! What the---holy HELL!" Normally, Hub and I would be arguing about whose turn it was to exit the car to bring the papers up to the houses. On that frigid morning, we argued about who had to stay in the car fishbowling with my death stench.

Eventually the turkey/asparagus methane frappe I'd created in my digestive system worked itself out. In the coming months and years, once we were solvent enough to afford plenty of vegetables on a regular basis, our digestive systems learned how to process asparagus. Needless to say, we never again did combine asparagus with turkey on the same day, and I haven't done it in all the years since that day. It may have been seventeen years ago, but I am quite certain that Hub is telling his version of the same story to his lovely wife and her family whenever the topic of "turkey farts" comes up in conversation. (You'd have to know Hub to realize that it's not unlikely that such a topic would come up in conversation. He's got kids now but that hasn't changed his sense of humor, and farts will never not be funny.)

Looking back, the paper route was a genius idea. We did earn enough to move to a better apartment, got a new car, one with exhaust fans that worked, and we got better jobs. When we quit the paper route, our boss was sad to see us go. "Youz was good carriaz." Carriers.

You know what, we WERE good carriers. I was an excellent little paper bitch, farts and all.