Chapter 4: Big Brother Torture Devices

Read Chapter 4 here FREE

                              This picture was taken right before they farted on me.

Having two older brothers, it goes without saying that I was subjected to my fair amount of teasing. A typical day in my 5-year-old world would be me innocently sitting on a chair enjoying “The Donny and Marie Show,” only to have one of my brothers casually walk by, stop, put his butt in front of my face, fart, then walk away.

Long road trips were especially challenging. Try sitting in between two long-legged boys in the back seat of a Chrysler New Yorker all the way from Marinette, Wisconsin, to Orlando, Florida, and you’ll know what I mean. I think they invented the manspread. When things would escalate to elbowing and punching, and then subsequent yelling by my parents, things would settle down for about five minutes. By that point, Dan couldn’t take the silence any more, so he would start up a rousing game of “I-Will-Come-as-Close-as-Possible-to-Touching-You-Without-Actually-Touching-You-Just-to-Drive-You-Crazy.” A few minutes later I would inevitably end up in the front seat with my Strawberry Shortcake pillow, gleefully sandwiched between my parents.

During most road trips, my brothers would get bored and break out into song. No, it wasn’t a good old-fashioned family sing-a-long or even the songs they learned from Boy Scouts. They preferred to torture me in song, and it went a little something like this:

Travelin’ down the highway, Highway 64

Annie let a fart

And blew me out the door.

The wheels couldn’t take it

The car fell apart

All because Annie let a supersonic fart.

For years I had actually believed that they had invented that song. (I was kicking myself: Did I really think that they could be so clever, much less use a fancy adjective, like “supersonic”? And that was before J.J. Fad used it.) It turned out there were several variations of the same song, sometimes mentioning a van or a different highway, but all to the same melody and always involving a supersonic fart. But at the time I was so naïve and gullible that I actually thought that my brothers were talented and musically inclined enough to have created both the lyrics and the melody.

So maybe they weren’t clever enough to invent an original tune about farting, but they were creative enough to invent a new game (?) in our household called “Free Chair.” The concept was really quite simple. One of my brothers would sit very stiffly on a chair, with his arms out in front of him, as if his body was a chair. He would then proceed to yell out, “Free chair! Free chair!” as I walked by. Being the 5-year-old sucker that I was, I sat down on the “free chair,” where I was told to “press a button.” I pressed a make-believe button on the “chair,” and it would start to do something. Sometimes the chair would give me noogies on my head; other times it would give me snakebites on my arms. To get the chair to stop/switch functions, I would only have to keep pressing the button. (And, yes, you guessed it – sometimes the button had a bit of a delay while changing functions.) Every once in a (very) great while, the chair would do something nice, like massage my shoulders or scratch my back. At the point where I was just starting to settle in for a relaxing massage, the chair would suddenly malfunction or a voice would tell me that that feature was out of order. Miraculously, though, the feature that gave me slaps upside the head would always work without any mechanical failures.

Farting, of course, could easily be worked into the chair’s repertoire. Any time the chair had had enough of me it would magically produce a horrible smell that would catapult me across the living room while I screamed bloody murder. Sometimes, if the timing was just right, it would be worked in as an actual feature, right when I pressed a button. (How do boys do that, anyway? The power to fart and burp on cue has always mystified me.)

But for all of the torture that the free chair gave, I never once passed it up. In fact, I started offering my own free chair, and my brothers never passed it up, either. Why did we do this? Did we enjoy being hassled?

Personally, I think it came down to two things: 1) We all wanted to be the most creative person with the chair treatments, and 2) We were so desperate to have a little massage or back scratch or head rub that we’d do anything – even endure a little pain or some silent-but-deadly farts.

What can I say? We were dumb little Polish kids.