When I was around eight or ten years old, I lived in an apartment house in the Bronx. My four closest friends lived in the same building. Their names were Harvey, Lumpy, Tony, and Willie. Of the four, Willie was my best friend. Willie was a fantastic kid. He was smart, he was strong, he was fast, he was good in sports, and he was very, very handsome. In other words, Willie was exactly like me.
Like a lot of best friends, we did just about everything together, and also like a lot of best friends, we were extremely competitive, and always trying to outdo each other. Willie and I often had contests: running, jumping, wrestling, shooting hoops, that sort of thing. We were just about the same size and shape, so we were very evenly matched. Sometimes he won, and sometimes I won, but it was always close. If we got mad at each other and had a real fight, neither of us won, and we both usually wound up with bloody noses and black eyes. As soon as the fight was over, we were best friends again.
Willie and I had an agreement that if either us ever did something new that we hadn’t done before, the other guy had to do it too, and that meant right away, no backing down. It didn’t matter what it was. It could have been weird or stupid or silly or strange or dangerous—or incredibly gross. If I did it, Willie had to do it, and if Willie did it, I had to do it—no excuses, and right there and then on the spot.
Of course this led to some interesting situations. For example, one day the rest of us—Harvey, Lumpy, Tony, and I—were hanging around in the street, just shooting the breeze. Nothing much was going on. That’s when Willie walked out of the building and happened to look down at the street. “Hey! Look at that,” he said, pointing to the sidewalk. Actually, what Willie said sounded more like “Look at dat!” Dat is the way we all pronounced that back then in the Bronx. I’ll tell the rest of this story in my old Bronx accent. So Harvey, Lumpy, Tony, and I all took a look at where Willie was pointing. There was a worm on the sidewalk. Well, we’d all seen worms before, and even though this one was bigger than most, not one of those little, pinkie-size worms, we didn’t think about it too much one way or the other, and I said something to Willie like “Yeah, dat’s a fine-lookin’ woim. Waddabout it?”
Willie grinned and said, “Y’know, dat looks good!”
I did not like what I was hearing. “Waddya mean, dat looks good?” I asked.
“Dat looks dillishus,” said Willie, and without another word, he bent down, picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it—just like that.
The rest of us could not believe what we were seeing. We all started screaming at him, stuff like “Oh, man! Wattsa matta wit choo? Are you nuts? Dat’s a woim! Ah, jeez! Dat’s a woim! Giddada here!” Willie just looked at us, grinned again, and belched a couple of times. Willie was always a good belcher.
As soon as Willie finished swallowing that worm, a terrible thought entered my tiny mind. Oh, no! I thought. Oh, no no no no no! And then I thought some more. Oh, yeah! You see, I knew because of our agreement that when Willie was done doing what he just did, I had to do it too. Not only that, but I had to try to outdo him. I hunted around the neighborhood till I found an even bigger worm, and with all my friends watching, I ate it as fast as I could. I didn’t enjoy eating it one bit, but I did it. I’ve never eaten another worm.