A student asked another about the grossest thing she’d ever seen.
Her response:
“What a dumb question.”
True, given we were solving math problems, but I liked the question a lot, so here is my list:
I saw the backfire from the 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 the moment of the backfire.
I 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 car accident in 1988.
Those Lamisil commercials are horrifying.
I saw a man bleed to death in about three minutes after being stabbed on Main Street in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1993.
I attended a party in 1991 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 of 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 barrel full of Hawaiian punch and vodka. The goal was to drink the barrel of spiked punch before the ice melted down to the red ice of the road kill.
We succeeded.
But it was disgusting.
But the winner for me was something I saw at the Showcase Cinemas in Berlin, Connecticut, about two decades ago. Upon entering the restroom, I saw an enormous man in tight leather pants and a mesh half-shirt using a urinal while eating a hot dog.
That was the worst.
