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Bee Farts

& Other Stories

 

 

There is a moment in Benjamin MacDowell’s play, The Deposi­tor, in which the character Boy says: “Bee farts?”

        Boy said that because Manager had just said that he thought women were “no more significant than bee farts.”

Benjamin put those words in Manager’s mouth because Mana­ger reminded him of one of his tenth-grade teachers who had said: “Bee farts? You wrote a paper on bee farts?”

And in the teachers’ lounge, that same teacher said: “Bee farts! He wrote a paper on bee farts!”

It was the talk of the lounge for weeks.

In fact, Benjamin’s entire high school career was the talk of the teachers’ lounge. This was in the late fifties, and back then teachers’ lounges weren’t quite the hub of controversy they are to­day. The teachers didn’t have the vast array of aberrations to dis­cuss—like teenage alcoholism, drug addiction and abortion, or narcs on campus, or nursery school porn and molestation, and so on. Some of these problems existed, to be sure, but they were nei­ther epidemic nor daily headlines.

The average middle-class high school students were fairly na­ive by today’s standards, they were carefree, and submissive to au­thority—their primary perversion being an animal attraction to the primitive lusts of that infant phenomenon called rock and roll mu­sic. The result was that the teachers’ room was a much calmer, if not boring, place to be.

So, when Benjamin came along with his creative solution to the academic question, he seemed radical in this placid atmosphere, and he easily captured the spotlight.

That however, was never his intention. His goal was quite the opposite: He wanted to be “average.” He desperately—neurotical­ly, perhaps—needed to be a C student. The problem was his intelli­gence, which if left unchecked, garnered A’s without effort. So, he devised formulas, calculating just how badly he would have to do on finals and term papers to offset the A’s he couldn’t control during the course of the year.

They counseled him. Boy, did they counsel him! From the principal to the Dean of Boys, the Dean of Girls, every teacher he had, a few teachers he didn’t have, all the way down to the janitor and the few students who ever spoke to him. Their comments ranged from “How can we help you?” to something akin to “Are you nuts?”

The school secretary said: “Dear, I can’t be there for you the rest of your life.”

“I know, Mom,” Benjamin said.

The school secretary was coincidentally Benjamin’s mother. She had held both positions in his life as far back as he could re­member, which was second grade. She had been the secretary at the elementary school, then went on to junior high with him, and finally on to high school.

And it was in high school that Benjamin got obsessed with be­ing average, and it was those teachers who were embarrassed when Benjamin’s mother walked into the lounge and caught them telling Benjamin stories. But she soon put them at ease by relating a few of her own anecdotes about her son, and by joining them in their laughter and amazement at his latest efforts. In fact, she did the decorations for the party the faculty held to celebrate Benjamin’s graduation. It was a real blowout, with cheap white wine, chips and dips, the works. They swapped tales of Benjamin’s creative fail­ures, and they assembled a tribute book of their favorites:

“Why I Can’t Blow My Nose In The Dark” was the paper that had started it all, back in sophomore English (hence his choice of a sophomoric title—he had considered “Blood on the Sheets,” but rejected it). The paper was supposed to be a true account of some event of historical importance, reported in current journalistic style. Well, he had his style anyway. The story told of an event from Benjamin’s childhood in which he had awakened in the middle of the night with a runny nose:

 

It was too cold to get out of bed to look for a handkerchief, and I knew Mother would be do­ing laundry the next day, so I just used the back of my hand, then wiped it off on the sheets.

 

And he went on to describe in detail the number of times he had to repeat the sequence (It wouldn’t stop running!”) and the number of different things he found to wipe his snot on in the dark. He then resumed the story on the following morning when he woke up:

 

There was blood everywhere! My face and neck, hands and forearms were smeared in dried or drying blood. The sheets, blankets, bedspread, pillowcase and pillow were caked with blood. My T-shirt was drenched with blood, still damp from the blood that had con­tinued to flow during my fitful sleep.

 

Then, because the story was true up to that point, and he was afraid the teacher might actually accept it, he began to embellish the climax:

 

Suddenly my mother was standing next to my bed. She was sobbing heavily.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Why, you have blood all over you, dar­ling,” she said.

“I can wash it all off, nice and clean, Mom. Please don’t worry,” I said to her.

But as I tried to get out of bed, as I tried in vain to lift my head from the blood-stained pillow, I found that I was too weak to move. It startled me.

“Mommy,” I cried, “I can’t move.”

“I know, dear,” she said, beginning once again to cry.

“Why can’t I move, Mommy?” I asked.

“It’s your blood, sweetheart,” she replied. “You’ve lost all your blood. See? It’s all over your bed.”

In the hospital, they said I was lucky to be alive, having lost all my blood like that. They had this long tube with a large needle on the end of it, which was stuck into my arm. The tube was coming from a huge tank of blood over the bed, and they were filling me up again.

To this day, I can’t blow my nose in the dark for fear that it might be blood coming out of my nose rather than mucus. At the slightest trickle of wetness, I leap from my bed, turn on the light, and find a handkerchief.

 

The teacher wrote her own little essay about students who treat im­portant assignments in a facetious manner, and gave him the grade he had hoped for.

On objective tests—the true versus false and multiple choic­es-he answered in code, neglecting to provide the code to the teacher. But he never did this with teachers he suspected would enjoy the puzzle, ones who might take the time to decode his an­swers and give him a good grade; for them, he simply answered in­correctly or left blanks.

He did math problems out of order; always the correct answer, but never with the proper question; guaranteed to piss off a math teacher.

On lab exercises, he jumped to conclusions that weren’t pos­sible from the experiment.

“The Effects of Apian Flatulence on the Taste and Texture of Honey” was the research paper that started all the “Bee farts!” non­sense. Although his biology teacher enjoyed it, and even saw some merit in its conclusions, he was forced to give the paper an F be­cause of its predominant fictional nature: Benjamin was careful not to include a single footnote—not even a fictional one—for fear the teacher might go for it. What are the effects? Good, according to Benjamin.

Benjamin was particularly fond of injecting humor and style into his work. In discussing Lady Macbeth, he suggested she was probably anal retentive. And he answered what may well have been the longest and most eloquent word problem ever devised by a high school teacher with: “I can well imagine!” He padded simple essay answers with multiple-page sections of dialogue, ranging from an­gry fights to torrid love scenes to herds of elephant jokes.

And how he loved to punctuate! He could not have been more overpunctuative: “Couldn’t’ve??!!” He especially liked ellipses, but parentheses (parenthetical expressions) were his all-time favorites:

 

…the great difficulty of accepting one’s own genius (not that I consider myself to be a genius [although that may still present itself (but surely it is best left for another time and place [after all, a term paper must not approach the “personal” (we wouldn’t want to lose our academic focus, now, would we? )})]).

 

To which the teacher replied: “No, we would not! F!”

Benjamin’s essay, “The Church of the Body Oneness,” almost got him suspended because the teacher was inconsolable. He pro­posed a biological model for human existence: purpose: destiny, and managed to insult and infuriate his teacher in the process. He wrote that humans were like cells of the body:

 

Different types of cells are communities unto themselves. In the beginning, they were of one belief: that all cells were of one Body, the Body was God, God the Body. And, more importantly, the cells accepted their fate in life, Liver cells, for example, knew they needn’t struggle to be liver cells—they just were; likewise, they didn’t aspire to become thyroid cells, brain cells, or any other kind of cells—they were, and always would be, liver cells.

But a combination of charismatic and/or cancerous individualistic cells factionalized the cell communities, so that the Body was di­vided, with each sect claiming to be close to, favored by, or even chosen by, the Body One­ness. Thus were formed the many Churches, leaving the Body in confusion, without Unity. The disastrous result was that the majority of cells were then not happy with the way the cards were dealt, and those cells began to as­pire to better positions. It was the beginning of the end.

 

Page after page, Benjamin described, in detail, the great wars and crusades, the propaganda campaigns and espionage rings, the saviours and the evangelists, the despots and the patriots, that marred the course of history, concluding with:

 

The Last Great War pitted the Pituitarians against the Thyroidists, the Pancreans against the Lymphos, and the nomadic Haemopath­ians against all the others. After five genera­tions of these hostilities, the Body was no lon­ger able to function. And the Body died.

 

The teacher for whom Benjamin wrote this paper was very reli­gious. Benjamin knew this. He also knew which was her chosen religion, and to make sure that she couldn’t possibly be amused by his paper, he gave extra impetus to her Church: The Queendom Hall of Rectal Witnesses. She got angry, insulted, inconsolable; he got the grade he wanted.

Benjamin took a no-nonsense approach to what he considered to be the Truth. In American History, the instructor barely made it up to WWI by the end of the year, but included WWII on the final, which Benjamin commented on at length (five pages) rather than answer the questions. One teacher set up a word problem which, if answered correctly, would have revealed that the mother was only twelve when the first child was born. Benjamin pointed out that:

 

The father would be in prison for statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. The child would likely wind up on drugs and on the street selling his or her body at a fairly low price. The mother, if she were smart, would seek comfort and security in a lesbian relationship, probably with her social worker. If one had relevant need of their ages, the Wel­fare Office could probably help you. If they won’t (civil servants will be civil servants), you might try the father’s files at the Depart­ment of Corrections. Good luck!

 

Benjamin’s crowning glory was the paper he did in his senior year, the paper he turned in for every one of his classes, whether or not it was relevant to the class, and whether or not a paper was even assigned. It was titled “In Outer/Inner Space Without An Acro­nym,” and it was a bit of a metaphysical mixed metaphor, offering up Benjamin’s own Grand Unified Theory. It was the paper that was voted (along about the seventh bottle of cheap white wine) as “Best Overall” by the teachers at their little celebration; it was given the place of honor in the tribute book they put together at the party.

The teachers were all feeling the effects of the wine. Frankly, they were drunk.

“I really got the little bugger this time,” Mr. Physics slurred. “1 gave him an A. Boy, was he pissed off.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Miss Latin, tugging uncon­sciously at her girdle, “is why he gave the paper to all of us.”

“Has he ever done anything that makes sense?” Mrs. Civics sneered, still bitter from the Rectal Witness episode.

“What I don’t understand,” Miss English said, demurely, “is the paper.”

The handsome, young Mr. Physics moved closer to her, puffed on his pipe, then puffed himself up for the pretty young lady, “It’s like this, Engie: He’s saying that we can’t see the force that unifies everything because we’re it.”

“We’re what, Physie?” she asked, gently resting her hand on his forearm.

He smiled, then led her to the small sofa in the corner, where they sat, knees touching, as he tried to explain Benjamin’s theory: “Oh, the ultimate energy, I guess you could say.”

“But what is? I mean, what about us is?” Her eyelashes flut­tered involuntarily, and she was mildly embarrassed at her inability to control them.

“Our spirit, soul, our capital-B Being, I think was the point he was trying to make,” Physie said, mesmerized by Engie’s flashing eyes.

“But how?” she asked, closing her eyes and turning her head slightly away and downward.

He scooted closer to her, then reached out with his hand to­ward her. Her heart leapt with excitement as she waited breathless­ly for his hand to touch her. But it continued on to the nearby table, where it picked up a copy of Benjamin’s paper.

“Here, let me read parts of it to you, dear,” he said, flipping through the pages, as her heart did its own flipping.

 

“As the universe (the physical world) ex­pands away from the Big Bang, the unifying force (the spiritual world) converges toward the Big Bang in the form of megabillions of needles of Clear Light. . . . the combined energy of these needles of Clear Light (our souls, if you like) when they meet is the Big Bang. . . . It is continuous as well as simultaneous: there is no time. That which we like to call time is merely an illusion of our perception as we move in toward the Big Bang, and the universe whiz­zes by on its way out. . . .”

 

“Oh my,” Engie cried, “Is that true?”

“Time will tell, sweetheart,” Physic quipped with a little chuckle.

Engie giggled, putting a hand to her lips, as Physie flipped ahead a few pages and then read:

 

“. . . what some perceive as reincarnation is a manifestation of the fact that we are not alone on our needles of Clear Light; we are but a single point on the line. The affinity we often feel towards other people, other things, other times, is a result of our being skewered on the same needle.”

 

“That’s funny,” Engie giggled again.

“He even had the audacity,” Physie went on, “to suggest that he is skewered on the same needle with the likes of Fitzgerald, Rimbaud, Gogol, Voltaire and Moliere!”

“Is that possible, honey?” she asked, blushing at her use of the endearment.

“Darling!” he cried, unable to restrain his ardor or answer the question.

They embraced.

Benjamin summarized his paper (as well as his tenure in high school) with what he described as an age-old and possibly unan­swerable question: “Does an angstrom feel angst?”

 

 

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