JUST A LITTLE FART-A-LINA - 1975

Okay, so we were driving in the car, having just turned off Route 4 onto Route 208, towards Oakland, the Oakland in New Jersey, not the one in California, the little rural town-one that I think of when you say Oakland, and my dad’s farting, the way my dad did— a lot— whenever we were trapped in a car with him, but this time he’s not even trying to hide that it’s him and blame my mom or me or my brother, he’s right out there, proud as a rooster of each and every fart – announcing them with gusto, “Just a little fart-a-lena,” he says and then he laughs in that baritone of his that could have made him a radio announcer if he wasn’t so shy outside our family.

And in-between the farts he’s singing camp songs, or at least his version of camp songs, like “Miss Lucy had a baby, she named him Tiny Tim, she put him in the toilet bowl to see if he could swim…”

“Shhhhfffffwwwwwiiiiiitttttzzzzzz….,” the sound was horrific. “Just a little fart-a-lena,” my dad said again. My mom turned up the radio as if that would help get rid of the smell. “School bells ring and children sing, it’s back to Robert Hall again… Mother knows for better clothes, go back to Robert Hall again…, Robert Hall, all stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

My dad was farting his way to our weekly picnic. My family picnicked the greater parks of Bergen County, Passaic County, Rockland County and Westchester County. We toured these parks the way jetsetters toured the cities of Europe. We did it all for my mom who loved eating outdoors. We had charcoal and lighter fluid, paper plates and Dixie Cups and brand new cans of Hi-C and Hawaiian Punch on the rear floor of our car.

On the radio, the newest mall from my hometown (we already had the Garden State Plaza, Bergen Mall and Paramus Fashion Center) sang, “Have a picnic in park, have a picnic in Paramus Park, you’ll find shopping fun again, once again, when you head on down to Paramus Park…”

Given his druthers my dad would have just stayed in our house in Paramus. The town was reticent and withdrawn like him. Paramus would never do anything as garish as other towns like say have a city hall, or a town hall, or even a borough hall. We had a municipal building in a municipal complex. Built around 1970, it was and is an amorphous cinderblock structure. When you stood on any side of it, it looked like you were standing in back of it. Let’s be very clear. On all four sides, wherever you were standing you were in the back of it. It was as if the whole building was hiding behind its mother’s skirt.

Wait a minute, I’m sorry, I got distracted; we were in the car, going up Route 208.

“Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad said as we passed Fair Lawn. What a grin that man could have when something amused him. I mean Jack Benny, the Smothers Brothers and farts were the absolute troika of comedic entertainment to my father.

He opened the little triangle window on his door to try and clear some of the air. Many years ago he had named this window the Spritzer extractor. Yes, like that old urban legend that the Inuits had 400 words for snow, my dad had thirty words for fart. While most are lost to the ages, I do remember fromunda cheese, which came fromunda you.

“Pwwwffffftttttttzzzzz….,” was heard from the front seat. “Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad announced as we turned into Wyckoff. Remember, we were on our way to eat. Again, my mom hit the radio dial, like the AM static might cleanse the air. “At the Gap now, fall into the Gap, we’ve got four tons of Levis waiting for you, at the Gap now, fall into the Gap. All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

“Just a little fart-a-lena…” my dad said, switching the radio off.

He tried to soothe us with another of his camp songs, “Passengers will please refrain from flushing toilets while the train is standing in the station, I love you, Every night just after dark I goose the statues in the park, if Sherman’s horse can take it so can you.”

So, why did the man fart so much?

One Saturday, I set out to observe—to try and figure out what could be done to end this scourge on our existence. He began, like every morning, mixing Savarin and Sanka in his stove top percolator. He drank a cup and put the rest in the refrigerator in an empty soda bottle for later. He cooked himself a bowl of Wheatena, a hot cereal that smelled like wet rags. He chewed this mush even though there wasn’t anything in it that required chewing. Then he made orange juice from frozen concentrate, putting it in another empty soda bottle. After that, he mowed the lawn while I sat on the red couch we kept on our porch, smelling the greatest cliché of all clichés, the fresh cut grass. Every once in a while a fart escaped my dad, loud enough to be heard above the mower.

The sounds of lawn mowers reverberated up and down Paramus, as a half dozen other dads mowed their lawns too. But, my dad was unique, in his special lawn mowing outfit–old Oxford lace up shoes, black socks, Bermuda shorts and… and nothing else. He was topless. His only concession to fashion was that he made sure his socks matched.

His pet peeve was getting a single sock returned to him in his drawer when he had put two matching socks in the hamper. This was an unforgivable sin. He’d squat in front of the dryer, turning the drum with his hand, searching for a sock, believing that somehow, if he turned the drum slow enough, his missing sock would magically appear and tumble from one of the Bakelite flaps attached. Clump, clump, clump down the hall he charged, screaming, “Mary! Where’s my black sock?” Finally, when he just couldn’t stand the sock loss anymore; he announced that my mom was not allowed to ever do the laundry again.

Anyway, I got side-tracked, I was telling you about a picnic and how our car was so filled with stink that none of us knew if we would live to reach the actual picnic grounds. We were on Route 208. My mom turned the radio up to drown out my dad’s flatulence, “When you think you’re ready, head down to Crazy Eddie… Crazy Eddie…All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

“Kwishhhhhfffwwah…Just a little fart-a-lena …” my dad exclaimed as we turned up towards Franklin Lakes. “Just a little fart-a-lena…” he began to say as we hit Skyline Drive, but this time the words caught in his throat. With shear horror and dread, he stammered, “Oh Shit, I did a wet one.”

And in that moment, that one moment of time, for the first time that I can remember in my life, the Freericks family came together as a single entity—facing a horror greater than any of us had ever known before.

For the truth of the matter is, none of us knew what to do, but we knew that whatever we did, we had to do it together, as a family.

Now, should we turn back? Should we go on to our picnic? Should we move to another state? Enter the Witness Protection Program? How does one recover from such an incident?

My dad’s neck turned red. His ears turned red. There were tears in his eyes. There was sweat on the top of his head. My mom, my brother and I all scoured the landscape, looking for an open gas station. Amazing thing about gas stations—look out the window of a moving car when you don’t need one. There are thousands of them. Now, look out the window of a moving car when you do need one. There are none. Why is that?

Anyway that didn’t matter then. All that mattered was my dad’s horror, because his horror was a shared horror. His shame was the family shame. Because, when you fart, you fart alone. But when you soil yourself, you soil your entire family and your loved ones are your crutches and your support. I tell you – Who knew?

It was in those minutes, those dreadful, horrific minutes that followed that the Freericks family came together as a family in a way that I don’t know that I ever knew we were capable of. We were united, like a pack of wolves with a single goal—to restore our Alpha Male to his full human dignity again and to do so as quickly and quietly as humanly possible.

We forgave him his tasteless songs, his Wheatena, his topless lawn mowing, his sock tirades, his everlasting farting. None of that mattered anymore. All that mattered was steering this man, this leader of our family, back to his greatness, back to his unsoiled pulpit of supremacy – and so we all scoured the landscape, until together, we saw a Sunoco, and pointed it out, screaming “There, there ,THERE, there’s a gas station, there it is. Hurry, hurry, quick. You can make it. You can do it. Go, go, go, GO!”

My dad pulled in to the Sunoco near Oakland, and went into the men’s room while we all waited silently in the car. Ten long minutes later, he came out and assured us that everything was taken care of. None of us asked for details. None of us needed to know more. My mom, my brother and I all took our individual sighs of relief.

We went on to our picnic, somehow changed, somehow better, somehow stronger. To this day, if you meet a member of my family and utter to them the words, “Just a little fart-a-lena” they will respond, without hesitation the response that warms my heart and brings a tear to my eye, “Oh Shit, I did a wet one.”

These words are as deeply ingrained in who I am and what it means to be me and what it means to be one of the Freerickses of Paramus, New Jersey as is the line, “All stores open on Sunday, except Paramus.”

This is who I am— just a little fart-a-lena.

THE DISHWASHER - 1971



When I was nine our only television was still a black & white 1956 21” General Electric Pacer with faux mahogany finish. It didn’t get UHF, only the VHF channels of 2 through 13. You pulled a button out to turn it on, and pushed the button in to turn it off. When the GE broke, television repair men with arms as thick as my dad’s legs came to the house and carried it away, one on each side of the set. A week later, the television returned, in working order.

But, one day when the GE once again refused to turn on, and the frighteningly large television repair men took it away, we received a phone call from their shop, telling us that the television was gone. It was not worth repairing. The GE had been the only television I had ever known. (I mean, in my house. My Uncle Alex, who had a huge house on a third of an acre in Yonkers, had a Magnavox Far Eastern Classic Model 4-MV416, with Imperial Sound System, Series 200 Radio with stereo FM, Total Remote Control, finished in natural walnut, and with concealed castors for easy mobility. The television was a piece of furniture like you saw in a house museum. The remote was thick, like a cigarette pack, with two buttons; one to change the channel and one to adjust the volume. Air escaped from the remote when you pushed a button. And on the front of the remote there was a grill, making the remote look like a little hand-held Oldsmobile – obviously, Uncle Alex was rich.)

My hopes ran high that we might also get a Magnavox Far Eastern Classic Model 4-MV416 with Imperial Sound System, or a Zenith Space Command, maybe even an Admiral with the exclusive Admiral Tilt-Out Control Center, or if one might dream, a Quasar by Motorola (Featuring Space Age Solid State Reliability). Unfortunately, we didn’t get anything. And as the clock radio in our kitchen had also recently had some sort of catastrophic event that resulted in it becoming… a clock, there was no entertainment left in our house whatsoever.

Well, there was my dad’s Westinghouse portable record player. It came in an orange and white suitcase, and was made of hard grey plastic. For the first few days, I played my family’s collection of 45s, all five records – which my mom had bought for a dime at the First Presbyterian Church on Palisade Avenue’s rummage sale, Problem was that I had to change the spindle collar from one 45 to another, so that they would fit on the 33 spindle and every time I put the spindle collar in I was running about a 50/50 chance of snapping the record in two. Soon we had no 45s left.

I moved on to my dad’s 78s. I had a blast. Even though they were scratched and missing pieces that had broken off, they spun so fast that the concentric motion of the grooves slapping up against themselves and then bouncing away was a sort of shellac hypnotist’s spinning wheel. As the record played, I would enter a trance, my eyes glued to the groves dancing with the labels of Decca, Victor and Capital. But the 78s were my dad’s records, and there was just so many times I could listen to WOULD YOU LIKE TO SWING ON A STAR… 247 times to be exact.

So I moved on to my old Show’nTell. This was a children’s toy from the 1960s that looked like a television with a record player on top. It came with small storybook records and cardboard sleeved film strips, which were projected onto a faux television screen. Problem was I was nine and the Show’nTell programs I had were Winnie-The-Pooh, Babes in Toyland and Walt Disney’s It’s a Small World presented live from the New York World’s Fair.

And so, desperate for entertainment, electronic entertainment that is, I turned to the washing machine. Ours was a white Kenmore. The drum was dark grey and the agitator was black, with years of encrusted laundry soap cemented to it like periwinkles. I could turn it on with the lid open for the entire wash cycle, from the water filling the drum, floating the dirty clothes and making their colors so vibrant, through the soap bubble lapping water of the agitation, right up to the drum draining again. The smell of the clean water hitting the metal drum and the Cold Power detergent was intoxicating. Sadly though, I had to close the lid when it got to the spin-cycle. There was a safety switch that wouldn’t allow the machine to spin when open.

My mom was delighted with my new interest. All I did was laundry. But, my inability to witness the spin cycle burned inside me. Oh, sure, I could lift the lid in the middle of the spin cycle, and see the clothes spin for a little. But it was only momentum. The motor shut off the moment the lid came up, and the clothes soon fell down the drum wall, into the agitator, as the drum slowed to a halt. I’d have to wait for the rinse cycle to see anything again.

Then, I had a revelation. I found a pencil, and I jammed it into the safety switch, where the little prong on the lid was supposed to go. The tub filled, the agitation went beautifully, the tub drained. This was the moment. The dial clicked over to spin…and…and…and…the drum began to turn…faster…and faster…and faster still. The clothes began to climb up the walls. Every minute or two water sprayed from nowhere, like the fountain under the grand staircase to the parking lot at the Paramus Fashion Center Mall. It was marvelous.

Enlightened, I determined I would take my new found knowledge to the next level. I removed the clothes from the washing machine and placed them in the dryer. The dryer’s mysteries had yet to be revealed to me, as it didn’t run with the door open. But, I had broken the major appliance code of safety and no one could stop now. I stabbed the pencil into the dryer’s safety switch, and I sat there, watching it tumble dry…for the next hour. Occasionally a sock or a pair of underwear spilled to the floor, but mostly the clothes were held inside by the tumbling itself. Not only was it entertainment, but it was a lesson in the properties of gravity too. I felt complete.

It was then that my thoughts turned to the dishwasher. Now, I knew I couldn’t try it with people around. Unlike the washer and dryer, which were hidden in the garage, the dishwasher was in the kitchen.

No, I had to wait. So I bided my time. Soon the days turned into weeks as I stewed in waves of desperate curiosity. I needed a plan. Luckily, I was nine, so I came up with a brilliant one.

The next morning I told my mom that I felt like I had to throw up and couldn’t go to school. She gave me a salmon-color mop pail to carry wherever I went…in case. As I snuggled on the couch with a big pillow, my blanket, and the salmon-color mop pail, I heard my mom call in to work that she had to stay home and watch me.

I was screwed. She sat with me for a an hour of sheer Hell. Finally, she checked my forehead for fever, placed the salmon-color mop pail within my easy reach, in case, and went out the backyard to garden. I was alone. I had my chance. I loaded the dishwasher quietly, hoping she wouldn’t hear it from the outside. I poured detergent into both trays, the roofless one and the one with the little cover you slide in place, even though they were on the door, which I realized would be of no use if I kept it open. Unbowed, I took my trusty pencil and looked for the dishwasher’s safety switch.

But it wasn’t there. Where could it be? I scoured with my eyes. I scoured with my fingers, but nowhere on that dishwasher was there a safety switch. So I tried to turn it on… but… nothing happened.

I was baffled. What could be keeping it from turning on? I played with it for about ten-minutes, trying to latch the lock with door open and constantly checking on my mom to make sure she was still busy. But it latch wouldn’t go more than half way… that is…until, I saw, from the corner of my eye and within the latch mechanism itself, a small metal tongue that would be pushed to the side if the door was closed. I pushed against the metal tongue, and swung the lock to the right. It went all the way and the dishwasher clicked metallically.

Suddenly, a wave of water…no, let me rephrase that, a wall of boiling water, shot from the dishwasher, through the kitchen, over the table and against the wall on the other side of the dining room. The water was wild, blistering and desperate to get out of the house. It was like watching a water freight train roar over the grade crossing in Bergenfield on the way to my grandmother’s in Englewood. It soaked the Persian rug, and filled the floor with water. It peeled the paint off the wall.

I somehow, in my shock, managed to pull the dishwasher lock back, killing the evil machine. I stared out in awe at the damage I had caused.

When my mom returned and found my dabbing at our new dining room swimming pool with paper towel, she screamed at me. But, I swore that I had no idea where the water came from. She was stunned; it was beyond anything she could imagine. She wanted to catch me in a lie. She knew I had done it, but there was no possible way she could figure out how I had gotten that much water, that much boiling water, mind you, into the dining room.

I offered to help figure it out where it had come from, because clearly it wasn’t a good thing and we needed to find the source to stop it from happening again. She agreed with this thought, and we went into the attic to search for a leak in the roof. There was none. We searched the basement to see if water had jumped up through the floor from one of the pipes. It hadn’t. She called a plumber, who told her that someone must have taken a garden hose into the dining room. My mom explained to him that she’d had the hose outside. He theorized that while watering the garden, she must have looked away with the hose on full blast, and accidentally sprayed the dining room window, turning the dining room into a swimming pool herself. He couldn’t explain how the water had become hot, however.

She looked at me again, knowing I must have done it. Amazingly, I didn’t crack though. I just denied… and as the hours and days passed, I never fessed up. Eventually, the rug dried, the wall was repainted and everyone forgot about the dining room mysteriously morphing into a lake. I’m thinking that one day; I might finally tell my mom what really happened. I’m just waiting until a good moment, one when I’m sure she won’t get mad.