The first man to sit on a whoopie cushion may have been the Roman emperor Helioflatulus. The last man to sit on a whoopie cushion was Greg Patterson, about thirty minutes ago.

But the moment of rupture is brief, and the journey is so much more significant than the sitting.

On a cold January day, I set out for Hibbs Hall, the English department’s building on VCU campus. I knew that Greg was working, and that the building would be mostly empty. This had upsides and downsides. The upside was, as classes weren’t in session, it would be very easy to lure Greg out of the building.

Jamie was at that very moment tempting Greg to play hooky from work and go bowling.

The downside, however, was that without classes being in session, Greg’s eventual humiliation wouldn’t spread organically through the rest of the English department. I expected to plant the whoopie cushion, record the rupture on the NannyCam in Greg’s office, and upload the video to TikTok.

I thought it could be good for our MFA program if it went viral, and if the flatulence and Greg’s subsequent shriek got sampled in a rap song or something.

(The NannyCam peers down at Greg from behind a cartoon of Herman Melville. When I’m spying on Greg, I’m spying on him through Herman’s eye, and that makes it feel a bit more benign, as I’m sure you can understand.)

Meanwhile, as I made my way up the sidewalk, a tall gentleman pedaled his bicycle over to me and caught my eye. I could tell that he wanted to ask me for money.

This is always a tricky moment. You know there’s a good long pitch coming, and after a good long pitch, it’s twice as hard to deny a donation. That’s the sunk-cost fallacy at work.

I commend the strategy. It must be tough to ask people for cash. If I were doing it, I would also rehearse a good long pitch and hope thereby to armor myself against the rough treatment of the world.

This guy on the bike seemed nice. He told me plenty of details about his life that I’m not going to share with you, reader (sorry!), and I let him go on talking even though it was very cold, and the inflated whoopie cushion was softly farting every so often in my jacket pocket.

The cold air can reduce the intra-cushion PSI, much the same way cold air can reduce the PSI of a tire. If your whoopie cushion gets very cold, it won’t give you a satisfying strawberry unless you reinflate it. That’s probably why the whoopie cushion never really caught on among the Inuit and others dwelling above the arctic circle.

I was conscious of this as the guy on the bike gave me his pitch, but again, he just seemed so nice, I had made up my mind to give him a buck or two before he ever opened his mouth, and so I let him talk.

“Do you have venmo?” I finally asked.

“I’m fifty years old,” was his reply. He didn’t have CashApp either, but he knew exactly where an ATM was. So, I followed him over to the campus bookstore, a Barnes and Noble on Broad Street where there was a Wells Fargo.

He pedaled his bike slowly down the brick sidewalk as I followed.

“What do you do?” he said.

“I’m a teacher,” I said.

“That’s an amazing thing,” he said. The whoopie cushion sighed in agreement.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re making the world a better place.”

I didn’t feel compelled to explain that I was only a teacher of creative writing. No need to ruin the moment. We continued to the bookstore and the ATM. That was when my phone rang.

“Hi, honey,” I said. It was Jamie.

“Where are you?” she said. “Greg and I are already back from the bowling alley and there’s no… you know… in his seat.”

I cursed. Jamie’s a very good bowler. Ten frames don’t take very long when you’re throwing strikes.

“I’ll be right there,” I said. “We’ll have to go with Plan B.”

CONTINUED IN PART 3