Charlie saw a bug on the window of the car and said, “That’s the grossest thing I’ve ever seen!”
“Grossest ever?” I asked. “Seriously?”
“Yes,” he said. “Seriously. What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen?”
I have a great many contenders for grossest thing ever. I mentioned none of them to Charlie.
I once saw the backfire from a school bus blow a hole the size of a grapefruit in the leg of a 14-year old boy who had been leaning against the exhaust pipe at band camp.
I once saw my own femur and kneecap exposed to the world as I pried my leg from the air conditioning unit of my Datsun B-210 following a head-on collision in 1988.
I once saw a man bleed to death in about three minutes after being stabbed on the corner of Main and South Street in Brockton, Massachusetts.
In 1991 I attended a party at North Adams College where the punch was spiked with vodka and road kill. The frat boys had shoveled up a dead animal off the side of the road a couple days before the party and had frozen it into a block of ice that they had dyed red. They then froze the block of red ice containing the road kill into a larger block of ice and dropped it onto a trash barrel filled with gallons of Hawaiian punch and vodka.
The goal was to drink the barrel of spiked punch before the ice melted down to the road kill.
We succeeded.
But the winner for me was something I saw at a movie theater in Berlin, CT about two decades ago. Upon entering the restroom, I saw an enormous, sweating man in red leather pants standing beside a urinal. He was using his right hand to aim, but in his left hand was a hotdog, covered in mustard, that he was eating while urinating.
I nearly retched on the spot.
