It was a warm spring evening in the blue-collar city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the year of our Lord 1983. The factories had shut their doors, and the saloons had opened theirs. The paychecks had been passed out and soon the drunks would be, too. On East Reservoir Avenue, in the neighborhood of Brewer’s Hill, at a run-down McDonald’s franchise, literary history was about to be made.
Sitting in a booth by the door, three classmates from nearby Shorty Barr High School throw verbal jabs at a fourth. His clothes are shabby, his greasy hair combed across a greasier scalp, his breath reeking lightly of cheap beer. The only thing that would physically distinguish him from any other male adolescent American of the time is that, although he is few years older than his peers, he is also notably shorter.
Sixteen year-old Barry O’Neill, flush with cash from a part-time job at Donkey Cong[1], bets his diminutive classmate that he can’t eat fifteen dollars’ worth of Big Mac hamburg…
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