The Single Best Farting In Church Thing That Has Ever Happened

Okay, to be fair here, it wasn’t technically me, it was my brother. Also this was years ago. However, this remains one of the most incredible fuckups I have ever personally witnessed and I figured you guys might get a kick out of it.

To set the stage a bit: We’re in Rhode Island in the 90s, and myself and my two younger brothers are the children of the children of Italian immigrants. We are descended from the kind of Stoic Catholicism you read about. Church is a solemn, Gothic affair with a lot of silence in between the call and response that makes up a normal Sunday service. Church is a Big Deal™ to my parents at the time, and you are not to fuck around during it.

Knowing that, I have to wonder what got into my folks’ heads when we went out to breakfast prior to Church and wound up at this small eatery in Wakefield called the Bluebird Cafe.

Going out for breakfast pre-church was rare, but for some reason the decision was made to have breakfast as a family and eschew our normal 9AM service for the one at 11AM instead. On top of that, this place has really good food, but it’s also very heavy depending on what you order. The portions are also gargantuan, which our server warned us about when all three of us boys tried to individually order huevos rancheros, but we protested that we were *totally* old enough to eat an entire plate of this ourselves (bearing in mind I was thirteen, middle son was eleven, youngest was nine). Our parents acquiesced and we all got our individual plates of food.

The huevos rancheros at this place isn’t, like, a tortilla with an egg on it, mind you. Oh no. It is a giant fuck-off dinner-plate-sized flour patty with about three pounds of black beans on it, plus onions, a huge helping of grits, something like four eggs, an alarming amount of melted cheese, and copious hot sauce. One plate is enough to comfortably feed an average human for a day and a half.

I couldn’t finish mine. Believe me I tried. Youngest son didn’t even get halfway through.

Middle son ate the entire thing in about 45 seconds. He hoovered it up like it was going to get up and run away from him after a couple minutes. I’m sure, somewhere in the back of their heads, my parents could sense the brewing storm, but they said nothing at this point.

They did say something about an hour later as we were driving to church and my brother nonchalantly coughed a few times and then trumpet-blasted out an ungodly long fart in the back seat of the car. It had to have lifted him a foot in the air. I’m pretty sure his seatbelt locked because of it. It sounded like a dying goose put through a megaphone and ended with a pretty bad gurgling noise. He may well have shit his pants at this point.

Naturally myself and the youngest brother instantly lose our minds and are howling with laughter while my increasingly-pissed dad is trying to find a parking spot. By that point the smell had ballooned into the entire cabin of the car and my mom was making gagging noises and frantically trying to get all the windows rolled down while the middle kid sat there grinning like an idiot and the other two of us were gasping for air because of fart smell/uncontrollable laughter. It smelled like a carcass in there for days afterwards. It was bad.

So we finally find a parking spot and my poor dad is trying to get us to take this whole church thing semi-seriously and all three of us have the worst case of the giggles we’ve had in years. He scolds my brother to not “be disgusting” in church or he’s going to be “really angry” and it’s “not funny” and finally he just gives up because this is falling on obviously deaf ears for the most part, so he just kind of grabs us all and collectively frog-marches us inside.

Okay so Catholics/Church goers out there: You guys all know that bit in the Lord’s Prayer where it goes “the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever and ever” and the entire congregation goes “Amen”?

So my brother needed to fart again. He’d been holding this in for the better part of an hour long service at this point, and clearly by about the 45-minute mark he’d come to the realization that *I need to fart* had become *I’m going to fart*. He was cognizant of my dad’s dire  warning to not do this, so in his head he concocted the brilliant plan to time his fart for the “Amen” part, hoping the sound of an entire packed room of people chanting a single syllable would be enough to mask the sound, if maybe not the smell.

So he went for it.

Problem is, he mistimed it by about a second and a half.

It wound up going like this:

Father: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever.”
Everyone: “Amen”

*beat of absolute, total silence*

*Ear-splitting, subwoofer-grade, bucket-of-chum-being-emptied-into-the-ocean five second long fart blast which echoed off the walls in the pindrop-silent room.*

It was bad, you guys. It was *bad*. The smell hit an old lady behind us a few seconds later and she actually gave a sort of panicked grunt and clutched at her face, so there was this horrid fart sound then this poor old lady going “uuuggggh!” and reeling backwards into the pew as the smell of rotting kid fart assaulted her and everyone around her.

My brother is trying to pinch it off pretty desperately, which just makes it worse because it goes from this massive boom to sort of squeaking out like a duck before he finally manages to clench enough to keep it in.

As this is going on, picture three young boys all standing there 100% straight up with looks of absolute neutrality on their faces, because that was us trying unbelievably hard not to totally lose our shit and laugh for the next six straight hours uncontrollably. While we were doing an admirable job of this, all our faces were beet red.

Worse, because my brother had pinched off a bit of fart, he was concentrating so hard on not launching into riotous laughter that his concentration would slip and a little squeak of a fart would slip out. This went on for the next thirty seconds or so, interrupting our poor priest as he tried to continue the sermon.

Every time he tried to finish a sentence you’d hear this little *frrt* and then a sort of quiet *hrrnnng* as we tried so, so hard not to laugh. All the while the swamp stench of digested egg was drifting around our pew, and entire families were trying to discretely shuffle away from us.

To my dad’s credit, he didn’t go ballistic on us when it was over. He just looked disappointed/relieved to be out of there. The three of us did not stop laughing until around dinner, and my dad just kind of gave up on the idea of having some kind of punishment and just decided we weren’t going to go back to that church for a while.

It remains the single best farting-in-church thing that has ever happened.

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