My father was prone to fits of laughter so strong he’d turn fire engine red as he howled and struggled for breath, wiping tears from his eyes.  These fits didn’t come over him very often, but he was susceptible to them for his whole life.  Some of the things that made him laugh this way didn’t have that effect on the people around him, but some of the things that cracked him up made my sister and me laugh too, and our mother.  

I have inherited this proneness to the laughing fits.  Sometimes I will try to explain why I am laughing so hard to someone, but it’s almost always impossible and it often makes things worse for me.  For one thing, my voice goes up a couple of octaves and I gasp to speak in a voice that sounds like I’ve just gulped helium.  For another, it’s a struggle to breathe, laugh that hard and make a subtle point at the same time.  I just have to ride them out, as my father generally did.  

One of the features of his fits was the breathless repetition of a partial phrase, repeated a few times, a fragment of an explanation of what was so funny that he was powerless to convey as the laughing fit gripped him.

One of the things my father was known for, around the dinner table especially, was an unfortunate ability to fart seemingly at will.   He’d often announce the imminent threat with the phrase: “prepare for … gassing!”  We’d brace ourselves.

“Irv, don’t you dare!  I’ll divorce you!” my mother would threaten, pointing at him with a serious look on her face to show she wasn’t kidding.   My sister and I would protest angrily too, but our indignation only egged him on.  

The tension wouldn’t last long, my father would smile and let out a loud blast. We’d all recoil, my sister, who sat next to him at the table, would move limply out of the way and my father would head down to the bathroom, chuckling.  

He’d sometimes tell us to prepare for gassing from the door in the kitchen that opened to the stairs to his basement bathroom.  After he said this he’d wait at the top of the stairs, poised, regarding us over his shoulder, shooting us an ominous look before impishly delivering his payload and heading down to the bathroom, smiling. These were the times, in the tense moment before my father made good on his threat, when my mother would call him a pig and snarl about divorce.

“Do you do this with your friends at work?” my mother asked him disgustedly once.

He started to laugh.  As a matter of fact, just the other day he’d been riding out to a high school in the ass end of Brooklyn with Phil Trombino.  I think he may even have warned Phil what was about to happen and Phil probably told him it was nature and what the hell, make yourself comfortable.  

“It was a cold day, so the windows were up, the heat and the defroster were on, and Phil was driving, and I let out a hot one.  It was a pretty bad one.  And Phil almost crashed the car into an oncoming truck.  He began pawing at his eyes,” my father started laughing, began to lose it, and with difficulty he said “he was… he was… pawing at his eyes, and Phil said…. Phil said….’man, Irv… you’re powerful!”  And he dissolved in a fit of laughter that lasted a while.  The rest of us laughed too, as much at his helplessness in the face of the story as at the story itself.

I still have the image of poor Phil Trombino pawing at his eyes.  “He was pawing at his eyes,” my father kept bawling as he hopelessly tried to pull himself together.