The first time I saw someone get their arm broken, it was very gross and very thrilling. It was a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon when I was 15, and my dad brought me to the bar that's now called T-Bonz to see an arm-wrestling tournament. Let me tell you something: For a 15-year-old boy, going to a bar with your dad to watch a bunch of 300-pound bikers arm-wrestle is like heaven.

So we're sitting there watching these guys go at it, and like I said, most of them were bikers but there were some barrel-chested bouncer types and here and there you'd see some gnarley, weather-beaten guys who looked as though they chopped wood about 26 hours a day. Anyway, we're sitting there, and suddenly...

...SNAP!

Ugh. Have you ever stepped on a half-rotten stick the same thickness as an arm, and heard it break underfoot? Well, it was exactly like that. The room immediately got silent. The breaker jumped back like someone had lit a match under him, and the breakee just screamed, grabbed his arm, and turned white. Then everything went into an uproar, and the breakee's friends hustled him out to the car and rushed him to the hospital.

The tournament continued.

We watched for about another half-hour, but the blood had been spilled. After we witnessed the worst, the competition seemed anticlimactic. It didn't really matter who won--hell, it never had. I was there to gain life experience and well, I got it.
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