There was nothing else to do in Hobart, Indiana. Zacharias Holmes had already tried to get the world record for most cinder blocks broken with a sledgehammer on top of his balls. He’d already done the thing where he held a roman candle a few inches from his mouth and lit the fuse. He’d outlined various ideas to try to break his nose, which devolved into his friends throwing mousetraps onto his face while he lay writhing on the kitchen floor. He’d been the Human Dartboard. And something like a tube-light piñata. Near the cornfields, in her lawn chair, his Meemaw pleaded with him not to do any of it, but Zach still spread his legs above the low end of a teeter-totter as his friend Will pushed an old washing machine off a barn and onto the high end.

Zach was infamous in the town where he grew up. For getting impaled by giant fish hooks baited with worms. For blood pooling in his belly button and soaking his clothes. For his mischievous little giggle through the empty spots for teeth that had been smashed out of his grin. For dumping a two-liter of piss on himself like it was Midwestern champagne. For daring his friend Meggan to let him take a piece of lawn equipment to her bikini bottom, for a stunt called “Weedwacked in the Ass!,” and for her parents dragging him to Chicago afterward to appear in an episode of a daytime talk show called “Our Daughter Is Out of Control.”

[Read Justin Heckert's profile of Zacharias Holmes, the most self-destructive man in America.]