Arnold lived next door to use when I was growing up, and was highly skilled at torturing anything that did not have a pulse. He was a very kind kid to anything living, especially animals, but if you were a screwdriver, you better run for cover.
Arnold’s earliest influence was his hero, “Jody Dade”, who lived a few doors down. Jody once took a saucepan out back and shot it full of holes with a 9mm pistol because “it burnt his beans”.
Here are a handful of stories and events about Arnold and his skills.
When around 16, he was driving his grandfathers 1960 pickup and it died at a stop sign and would not start. He jumped out and grabbed the jumper cables. Did he proceed to jump start the truck? HA! He took the cables and begin slinging them on the hood in a violent whipping action while shouting “SHIT TRUCK! SHIT TRUCK! SHIT TRUCK!” as loud as he possibly could. He family still has this truck, the scars of it’s past can still be seen on the hood.
He got a “new” truck soon after, a 70s model, and was quite happy with it until one day it stalled at the red light when he pressed on the gas pedal. “Oh, you want to be a city truck, huh?”. From then on, at each light, he would hold the brake and when the light turned green, he would floor it while holding the brake and then release the brake launching it hard. He would run it wide open until the next light when he would wait until the last minute and then stand on the brakes as hard as he could.
In addition, in the mornings, he would would start the motor and immediately put it in gear and floor it, giving the engine no time to warm up.
Small objects that misbehaved, such as nails that bent when hammered, little things that hid from him, and so on, were sentenced to his torture chamber. This special place was an area on the exhaust manifold on his truck engine, the part that gets very, very hot. These objects were taught a lesson by spending various length sentences being burned hot. The severity of the crime committed would dictate the length of the sentence. There were several objects that were “in for life”, but most items got a pardon after a few months or so.
“Abrasion” was a very popular torture method at started up later in his life, maybe in his mid 30s. If you say, drop a screwdriver while working on something, when you lean down to pick it up, you drag the tip on the concrete for a couple of seconds before going back to work. This teaches the tool to not make the mistake again of “jumping out of your hand”.
Once I came home from work and Arnold was out on the patio with some small can with a fire blazing away in it. I walked up in a way that he was not aware that I was watching. I heard him talking to the can. “I’m sorry picante sauce, but if you would not have jumped off the table, I would not be having to set you on fire”.
ANYTHING that ARnold knocked over and made a mess was tortured mercilessly.
Once Arnold got sick with a sore throat. “I’m gonna teach this baby throat of mine a lesson” he announced. He went out back and started gargling with lemon juice and Tabasco, hoping that the acid would damage his throat. But it did not end there. He would gargle, and then start screaming as loud as humanly possible to further damage his throat.
Many objects were destroyed, but if it was essential that it “stay alive”, like a tool, Arnold would use a bit of abrasion or hammer damage, but keep it alive because “It has a job to do”.
Arnold’s “city truck” like all pickups, tended to not handle so well because the back of the truck would bounce quite a bit if the bed were not loaded. This is typical of any truck. Well, Arnold did not think this bouncing was acceptable, so he filled these 3 steel pipes with 300 pounds of concrete and welded them on the rear of the bed to “make it behave”.
Arnold had kind of wavy curly hair, and when it would get a bit long, his bangs would start to hang down around his eyes, so he would get his mom’s sewing scissors out and cut off his “fag curls”. His mom of course would kick his ass for using her sewing scissors.
The lawnmower that arnold used was an old beat up thing. Arnold used to say that lawnmowers were worth no respect and should be worked hard with never an oil change or spark plug cleaning or a wash-down. This mower of his of course started running not too well, and on occasion, the engine would die if you hit high grass. It did this one too many times and Arnold announced "I have had enough of you!". He drained the oil out of the engine and started it up. He then put the throttle at maximum so the engine was just screaming away.
He calmly went inside and enjoyed a sandwich while listening to the sound of agony coming from the tortured mower. After a couple of minutes, the engine go so hot (remember there was no oil in the crankcase), that it seized up and ground to an immediate halt. The next morning it started up fine and has been running ever since.
One time Arnold’s mom set him down on the kitchen counter when he was like, a year old, and while she was talking on the phone, he ate a whole stick of butter. to this day, he still likes to eat butter and also raw meat.
Me and Arnold played golf a few times together when we were in our mid teens, and arnold, as you can guess, did not show the best sportsmanship if things went wrong.
Once, on a par 4 hole, Arnold hauls off and whacks one, big hitter, long. He sent it into the bottom of a 10,000 foot glacier. Oh wait, that’s from CaddyShack. in reality, the ball dropped in a muddy ditch halfway to the green. In normal golf, this is called “casual water”, and you can take your ball out with a 1 stroke penalty. Well, Arnold starts whacking away at the ball, and I stop him and explain the concept of casual water. “NO! I AM GOING TO PLAY FAIR!! He keeps burying his club deeper and deeper in the mude “SEVEN, EIGHT, NINE....”. I walked back to the other guys at the green. “...SIXTEEN! SEVENTEEN! EIGHTEEN!”.
We made him stop at 22 so we could move on. He had successfully dug a pretty nice little pond.
Tennis was similar. With each bad shot, Arnold would whack the ground with the side of his racquet. After a while, the raquet was pretty much square, I am not kidding. And the edges were beat beyond recognition.
When Pizza Hut first came out with their pan pizza (thick) back in the 70s, Arnold started calling them "Dough Hut" and refused to eat there ever again.
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