Dropping the F Bomb

Have you ever done a Pilates class? It’s not really like yoga at all, other than you need a mat to do it. Yoga is more a total body thing, involving balance, strength, control, breathing, and the powers of the mind. Pilates has similar elements, but with more of a concentration on core strengthening and the elongating of muscles. It can be done on a mat or on a special piece of equipment called a reformer that is reminiscent of that bad Mariel Hemingway movie, Star 8, sort of part torture device, part sadistic sexual prop. Pilates has long been a popular form of exercise with dancers, which is funny because the majority of people who do Pilates in a class have the grace of an elephant, me included.

In the Pilates class I take, the instructor spends a lot of time, and I mean a lot, on making sure our form is good. We squeeze our butt cheeks. We contract our lower abdominal muscles. We keep our spines in neutral alignment. We turn on our cores. We don’t allow our rib cages to boink or our shoulder blades to wing. And we do all of this through all the exercises, because in Pilates, form is everything.

Well, last week, amidst all that control, one poor lady lost hers a bit. Well, more than a bit. This sad sack, somebody’s grandmother, farted during an exercise where you wouldn’t think a fart was possible. And I am not talking a demure dainty lady fart. I am talking loud chili dog eating truck driver cheek flapper flatulence. It escaped her control and bounced off the walls in an amazing demonstration of the room’s acoustics. And after it was released, floating around the room, it was accompanied by an odor that made me think she didn’t just fart, she crapped herself. Now, I ask you, do you think you could have held all your muscles contracted and breathed into your rib cage while mustard gas was descending upon you like a WWI fox hole attack? In an act of defiance, she didn’t get up and sprint out of the room in tears. Instead, she went right on with her rolling like a ball and bridges, like nothing just happened, like people emit loud gas publicly as a routine thing, as if the gym were no different than a Thanksgiving table. I didn’t know if she needed to check her hearing along with her underwear.

Well, I might not have been able to control my lower abdominal muscles, but I did, in an act of considerable self containment, control my laughter. I come from a long line of people who think gas is funny in most of its horribly embarrassing forms. I am sure way back when, during the pogroms, there were, among my ancestors, a couple of old Jews who were being beaten by Cossacks that had to laugh if one of them farted during a pounding. From generation to generation, members of my family have enjoyed a good laugh at the expense of someone else’s accidental anal emission. It was in my DNA to laugh at that lady’s fart. But I didn’t, and not just because I could barely breathe.

In a rare show of human empathy, I felt badly for her. How mortifying. Even if she didn’t stand up and say, “Excuse me, fellow Pilates students, but I am the one responsible for the air bomb that descended upon you all, and for that I offer my most humble apologies,” everyone near her knew it was her. Perhaps the majority of us were each thinking, thank G-d that wasn’t me. But surprisingly, no one even snickered or chortled, or even hung around after the class to laugh about it. We all pretended like it didn’t happen, and continued with the torture that was the abdominal series known as “the fives.”

Now, I have seen or experienced some pretty funny and weird shit at my gym. I have seen instructors fall in step class, and I too have tumbled in the most ungraceful fashion on my ass on a step bench. I've seen the occasional person go flying off the back of a treadmill, which is good for a laugh from a distance, but if it happens near you, you have to stifle it and offer assistance. There is a man who looks exactly like Fidel Castro, before he got all sick and skinny, who works out most mornings. Another guy is growing and molding his beard into what resembles the inside of a rhinoceros horn, hanging like a freaky hair stalactite from his chin. One time, I walked in on a man doing what I hope was peeing in the unisex bathroom, although I can’t be certain since the door was left unlocked and he didn’t seem all that surprised to have been discovered. Once, when I was in a spin class, a woman spun so fast her boob popped right out of her little tank top. I noticed it but couldn’t tell her since I didn’t think I would be able to talk without cackling, but someone finally pointed her nipple out to her and she tucked it away. If that happened to me, I would have had to cancel my gym membership.

And definitely, I have heard someone fart in Pilates. It happens quite frequently, in fact. But usually someone acknowledges it, giggles about it, or at the very least, confesses to it, and we all move beyond it. This fart was unique in that the entire room denied its very existence. I don’t know if that was the kind of control Joseph Pilates had in mind, but it was pretty fucking impressive.