I am amazed at Bruce’s tolerance for pain. This story highlights a few times he has displayed this for us. We watched and laughed at him.

One summer, my family went to Guam because my mother had a job teaching there for the summer term. I was young, had recently acquired a new girlfriend, and had not yet realized the greatness of free travel, so I didn’t go with them. However, we had struck a deal: If I got an internship (or some kind of career oriented job), I could stay at their house rent-free for the summer. I applied everywhere until I finally got a job as a Student Assistant to the Chief Engineer working on the Taylor St. Bridge spanning over Highway 87. It counted as an engineering-type job, so I got the house to myself for the summer.

They said, “no parties.” But I figured small gatherings couldn’t hurt, so I took to the ‘little bit, often’ strategy, and had people over all the time. Nothing ever got out of hand, and the loudest we ever got was yelling at each other while playing Conker’s Bad Fur Day.

During one such gathering, Harrison found the shock collar my dad used to train his dog. He pulled it out, and proceeded to find out the highest setting he could handle on his arm. Then he got other people into it, making chains of people touching fingers to close the circuit and shock everyone. They seemed to be just having fun and bothering no one, until Bruce became interested in the commotion.

Bruce wanted to know just how much electricity could be put through the collar, so he turned it up to eleven and strapped it to his leg. Someone hit the button, and I think he said, “whatever dude. That was nothing. I’ve been tazed before, and it wasn’t really that bad.” We all thought he was full of shit, citing the videos we’d seen online of people being tazed and how much it seemed to hurt. Someone revealed that they had seen someone taze their balls in one such video, to which Bruce retorted, “I’ll shock my nuts.” And before anyone could stop him, he had his back to us. He turned back around to reveal his junk hanging out of his pants with the shock collar strapped on.

The collar sent electricity between the two electrodes when the button was pushed on a remote device that looked kind of like and old military radio. Somehow, this device happened to be in my hands when Bruce showed his shock-ready package to us all. I didn’t really want to be the one to push the button, and I looked at Jack and said quietly, “I don’t think I can do this.” He yelled back at me, “Just fucking press it!” And before I took any more time to think, I said, “okay,” and made sure the button got to the bottom of it’s travel before letting up.

The look on Bruce’s face was priceless. He was a little drunk, so he had that grin like something funny was going to happen, and his eyes were half closed, like anyone who riding a good happy-beer-buzz. Then I hit the button, and he stopped smiling, and his eyes got really big for about a half second. Then he went right back to his lazy-eyed grin like something funny just happened. He didn’t make a sound. I laughed so hard that I fell over and couldn’t talk for about two minutes.

A week later (maybe two), another small gathering was underway. A.P., Bruce, myself, and a few others were sitting on the back deck when infamous Bruce-Ball-Shocking story came up. Everyone laughed except for A.P., who calmly waited until the laughter had died down a bit, then intently asked, “Have you ever put Tabasco on your balls?”

Most of us knew already that the ‘heat’ in hot sauce is actually a sensation, not a flavor. And we explained to Bruce, who may have known already, that hot sauce on the scrotum could result in a burning similar to that in the mouth… but it’s on your nuts, and that could suck ass.

Bruce, always down for experimentation, tried it anyway. He put a little Tabasco on his finger, reached down his pants, and asked how long he’d need to wait before he knew if it worked or not. We went back to our usual banter, each of us paying close attention to Bruce, waiting for him reveal something funny about his new ball pain. We waited, he waited, and there was no comedy to be had. So he reapplied, this time with a full coat.

We were skeptical of this decision, yet fully supported it. At some point we should have chalked this up to a waste of Tabasco, but we were curious. Every so often someone would check in with him, “anything yet?” to which he would answer, “I think it’s a bust.” We kept this up until, “How you feelin’ Bruce?” was responded to with, “It’s like sitting too close to a campfire.”

Success! We had confirmed that Tabasco on the nuts would make them warm, according to Bruce. But others like myself, or those who had witnessed the previous incident, were fully aware of Bruce’s amazing tolerance for pain. A.P. on the other hand, was not aware.

“I’m trying it,” A.P. stated confidently. He had been curious about the hot sauce ball trick, and now that someone had tried it, he wanted to make sure it was real. “I’m gonna coat them too.” Once the laughter and cheers died down a bit, Bruce could be heard quietly asking A.P. “are you sure you wanna do this, man? ‘cause this really sucks.”

As stated above, a few of us, myself included, were aware of Bruce’s pain threshold. So when he says something is warm, it means it’s fucking hot. And if he calmly says that some type of pain sucks, it probably means that it’s close to unbearable for the rest of us. A.P. was not aware of this then, but he is definitely aware of it now.

About ten minutes after “the coating,” A.P. was sweating, then he was doing the pee-pee dance, but a more painful looking pee-pee dance. He kind of dance-walked around the back yard, then dance-walked through the house to the front room, then back out to the deck. He never stopped moving, even when he stopped to talk to someone, he kept shifting from one leg to the other. This lasted about twenty minutes until he finally whipped out his nuts and washed them in the kitchen sink. Not in the bathroom, where five to twelve people wouldn’t inadvertently see him watering down his red burning scrote, but in the kitchen where five to twelve people did. He even took a shower with some aloe lotion I found. He was able to talk without moving after that, but he said it still hurt for another hour or so.

Seven years later, my mom was heading up north to a specialty meat shop, and she asked if I wanted anything. I knew this particular butcher had it’s own brand of horseradish sauce, which is delicious, so I figured they would have their own brand of hot sauce as well and asked her to pick some up. She came back with the news that they did not have their own hot sauce, but they did sell a few other types, one of which she picked up for me. I picked it up at her house, took it home, and made some frozen pizza to try it on. It tasted good, but it was easily the hottest thing I had ever eaten. If I inhaled while chewing, my throat and lungs would hurt a little. And I never had the foresight to stop eating it, thus producing some of the spiciest dumps in my career.

Bruce was over one night, and this particular bottle of pain had not been put away after dinner that evening. He noticed it an asked if it was any good. I told him about the painful breath and the fire poos, then jokingly suggested that he put some on his nuts like he did so many years ago. Before I knew it, he had his nuts out and was pouring the death sauce into his hand. I thought about stopping him, and I almost tried to keep his handful of red heat away from his sack, but that would mean getting closer to his sack, and I did kinda want to see if he could handle it.

It only took about eight minutes for him to admit that this particular stunt was a bad idea. He didn’t dance like A.P., but he did complain a lot, and anytime he went outside to smoke, he’d whip his nuts out to cool them off in the night air. As the pain increased, he would find cold things to put them on, like the sliding glass door or the metal filing cabinet. So be warned: if you ever come over, you will probably come in direct contact with something that Bruce touched with his balls. At one point he described the pain as being, “years beyond Tabasco.”

The bastardistic asshole side of me really wanted to call up A.P. and try to get him to follow Bruce’s lead, but I don’t think I could get him to do it. And I would feel terrible if I was responsible for him being in that much pain. It would make for a hilarious short film though.