Blame It on the Dog (8 page)

So how does one create a stinky, gassy best seller for preschoolers? In the case of
Walter the Farting
Dog, it helps if one half of the writing team is William Kotzwinkle, whose previous books include the novelizations of
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
and
Superman III
. The other half is a Canadian educator named Glenn Murray. Audrey Colman’s clever, surreal illustrations also contributed mightily to the book’s success. Still, getting
Walter
published was a struggle that took nearly ten years. “We were surprised by the strength of the resistance,” Murray told writer Heidi Henneman. Publishers, though amused, thought the subject was too controversial for the children’s market. But Murray, the father of two sons, knew his book would be a great educational tool. “Little boys love trucks, dinosaurs, and farts,” he said. “It’s so important to hook them [on reading] very early.”

Now, with a movie deal in the works and an “action figure” on the market, one thing is certain: we haven’t smelled the last of Walter.

IT’S STINKY, IT’S YUCKY, IT’S ICKY, IT’S YOU!

N
ow that
Walter the Farting Dog
has set the bar high, teachers, librarians, and museum curators are grossing out little children with butt boom-booms and other bodily functions, much to the delight of parents.

It’s all part of a new “kid science” called Grossology, the study of effluvium and effluents created by our bodies. In the words of writer and former science teacher Sylvia Carol Branzei-Velasquez, “Sometimes it’s stinky. Sometimes it’s crusty. Sometimes it’s slimy. But hey, it’s your body.”

In May of 2004, at the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California, a stage show called
Gross Me Out!
—designed to teach kids about “the grossest thing in the world: our bodies”—drew 1,200 people over the weekend and became the center’s most popular draw since it opened six years earlier. The mistress of ceremonies, who called herself Sally Snot, asked everyone about such things as the cause of flatulence. “The kids love it,” center spokeswoman Lisa Segrist told the
Los Angeles Times
. “Especially the little ones.”

At the same time, Branzei-Velasquez assured critics that Grossology “has nothing to do with being gross. It’s a hook to draw [kids] into science and reading.” She trademarked the term to market the lesson plans and exhibits (including “Y U Stink”) she first put together in 1993, but in the dozen years since, Grossology has grown to include a new genre of children’s books, including those
in which turds and wads of snot are the main characters. Her own book,
Grossology
, originally released in 1995 and reprinted by a larger company seven years later, has spawned several sequels.

Branzei-Velasquez says kids vote constantly for their favorite gross-out topics on her website (
http://grossology.org
). Flatulence has been a longtime favorite, but in 2004 diarrhea (“the worst of number two”) replaced it at number one. “I want to get [kids] feeling good about science,” she says.

I certainly support her efforts. After all, her kids will eventually graduate to
Who Cut the Cheese?
and
Blame It on the Dog
.

HERE I SIT ALL BROKENHEARTED

I
t sounded like a bad joke. In fact, it sounded like the West Virginia joke I told in
Who Cut the Cheese?
about nobody in the family telling Granny that they were going to dynamite the old, rotting outhouse in back and replace it with a new one. “Whooo-eee!” Granny shouted right after the blast, straightening her wig as she sat in a puddle of shit twenty feet away from where the outhouse once stood. “I’m glad I didn’t let
that
one in the house.”

But this time it was real—and in West Virginia, no less, not far from my old Morgantown stomping grounds. On July 13, 2004, John Jenkins, a fifty-three-year-old employee of North West Fuels Development in Blacksville, eased himself down on the seat of a portable toilet. Ah, nothing like a respite from the toils and cares of the day. He put a cigarette between his lips and pulled out his trusty Zippo. “When I struck the lighter,” Jenkins later told the Associated Press, “the whole thing just detonated—the whole top blew off. I can’t tell you if it blew me out the door or if I jumped out.”

The flame had ignited methane gas leaking from a pipeline beneath the toilet that had been damaged by heavy equipment running over it.

Jenkins sued everybody—including the contractor that operated the heavy equipment and the coal company that owned the property—for $10 million. He had spent over a week at the burn unit of Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown, getting skin grafts
on his forearms. But perhaps the greatest injury was to his pride when the Associated Press beamed the story around the world: “Man Injured in Toilet Blast Files Suit!”

I’m not privy to all the facts, but the respondents have so far refrained from suggesting to the court that maybe the plaintiff just happened to let one hell of a fart.

What makes Mr. Jenkins’s story even more fantastic than it seems is that the exploding toilet has been a running joke for many years now, as well as an urban legend. Normally these shithouse shenanigans feature a wife throwing or spritzing a flammable liquid into the toilet, followed by the unsuspecting husband sitting down, lighting a cigarette, and creating a pyrotechnic finale that’s detrimental to the health of his butt cheeks. According to the urban myth debunkers at the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society (
http://snopes.com
), the liquid can be paint thinner (toxic waste disposal), pesticide (to kill a scary bug), a powerful cleaning solvent (gasoline or worse), hairspray, or cheap perfume, just as long as it’s highly combustible. The writers of the NBC television series
L.A. Law
even recycled the joke into an episode called “Smoke Gets in Your Thighs,” which aired originally on November 15, 1990. Douglas Brackman (Alan Rachins), head of the show’s law firm, went to the men’s room right after someone had painted the walls and dumped the used turpentine into the toilet. Brackman sat down and lit a cigarette, and explosive drama ensued.

Dr. Jan Harold Brunvand, a folklorist who’s written several books on urban legends, as well as the introduction for a children’s book by Catherine Daly-Weir called
The Exploding Toilet: Tales Too Funny to Be True
, says the story was originally a rural gag about outhouses before indoor plumbing came along, and even then the victim was usually a husband or grandfather who sat down on the wooden oval, gazed contentedly out the small half-moon window in the door, and lit his corncob pipe, not realizing that one of the womenfolk had just finished cleaning the walls with some old gasoline and then dumped the remainder down the hole.

The joke was in fact enshrined by poet Robert Service, the Scottish roustabout who chronicled the American West. In “The Three Bares” (1949), he wrote that Ma disposed of some used benzene
down the middle hole of the outhouse. The next morning, after a hearty breakfast, Grandpa “sniffed the air and said: ‘By Gosh! how full of beans I feel.’ ” He hurried down the path to the crapper, sat down inside with the full intention of meditating, lit his pipe, and dropped the match down into the fumes. Hearing the explosion, Ma immediately realized what had happened:

What initially arouses skepticism about poor John Jenkins’s misfortune is that the media ran a similar story in the past that turned out to be false. In 1988, the wire services Reuters and United Press International picked up a specious item from the
Jerusalem Post
about a bug-phobic Israeli housewife scooping up a big, nasty-looking cockroach, tossing it into the shitter, and, to make sure the critter was dead, spraying it with a full can of insecticide. We all know what happened when her husband came home. Tossing his cigarette down between his legs, he “seriously burned his sensitive parts,” according to the newspaper, and oy! the
schmutz
was everywhere! Only later, after the story ran all over the globe, did the truth come out. “The [Jerusalem]
Post
was not the victim of a deliberate hoax,” the editor said in a statement. “Rather, a good tale got so tangled in the telling that it assumed a newsworthiness it should never have had.”

More recently, in April 1998, several news agencies picked up an item about a German camper who died just outside Montabaur, near Bonn, when an outhouse exploded as he lit a cigarette and propelled him through a closed window. The cause was either gas leaking from the septic tank or a defective natural gas pipe. Was this story true, or a hoax like the report from Israel? Either way, it sounds like John Jenkins’s real-life gas attack in West Virginia.

GOOD OLD HOLLYWOOD RAZZMATAZZ

F
irst they moved (1895)!

“Then they talked (1927)!
      “Now they smell!”

So said the ad for Michael Todd Jr.’s 1960 whodunit
Scent of Mystery
, which introduced Smell-O-Vision, a process of releasing atomized fragrances into a movie theater to match what was happening up on the screen.

But the blurb could also describe the hundreds of stinkers that Hollywood pumps out every year.

No wonder an aficionado of bad movies named John Wilson decided back in 1980 that it was time to honor Hollywood’s most execrable crap in the only way the film industry knows how: with an awards show. He called it the Golden Raspberry Awards, or the Razzies for short.

In
Who Cut the Cheese?
I talked about the
raspberry
, an orally mimicked fart created by sputtering air with the tongue and lower lip. The term comes from London cockney slang, in which words were rhymed and then their sources hidden. For example, the word
dick
(penis) was known as
hampton
—or
’ampton
, as the cockneys would say it. The original rhyme was
hampton wick
(for a borough in London), but by dropping the
wick
(as in “So I pulls out me ’ampton”), they effectively severed
hampton’s
connection to
dick
for any eavesdropping outsider.

In the same way, as early as the 1870s, cockneys turned farts into
raspberry tarts
, and then dropped the
tarts
. When Americans got hold of the cockney
raspberry
, they changed the spelling to
razzberry
and sometimes broke it in half. You could give someone either “the razz” or “the berry”—both were fart imitations—and
razz
was also extended to mean teasing or heckling, since people generally used the razz to show displeasure or contempt. A fart-sounding toy with a wooden mouthpiece attached to a flat rubber tube is called a razzer. It was used on a 1942 million-selling Spike Jones recording called “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an anti-Hitler novelty whose chorus was “And we’ll [razz! razz!] right in der Fuehrer’s face.”