by Ryan Nerz
Say what you will about Don’s commitment to the sport, but you can’t question his sincerity. In a world of filthy rich athletes who seem put-upon when asked to show up for a practice or charity event, his attitude is refreshing. “This is my sport,” Don says. “Some people are good at baseball or golf, or they play the piano. This is what I do well. And I believe in it. I want to pursue it. I want to nurture it every day. I wish I could be the heavyweight champion of the world in boxing. Or Olympic decathlon. But I can’t. This is what I do well. I practice, and I take it real serious.”
Don keeps checking the toaster. Every time he gets up from the table, he mentions something about “checking on the dogs,” and at first I’m not sure what this means. I know for a fact that one dog need not be checked upon—Cammie is beneath the table, scratching my legs if I stop petting her for even a moment. Then suddenly, midinterview and with no segue, Don gets up, grabs a plate from the kitchen, and leads me outside to the back deck. It’s sunny out and crickets are chirping.
Now I realize what we’re up to. When I’d set up the interview, I vaguely recall having mentioned wanting to watch him train for the Nathan’s Fourth of July contest. Judging from the oversized digital timer on the table, I’m about to be involved in a training session, and I must admit I’m pumped. It occurs to me that we’re outside in the June heat to simulate game-day conditions. Don explains that, in fact, he often puts the dogs in the shower for a steaming effect that approximates the mugginess down on Coney Island. I’m tempted to ask what he does to simulate that distinctive boardwalk stench, but it’s no time for jokes. Don’s got his game face on—I don’t want to snap him out of the Zone. He neatly folds each dog into its bun with the care a mother uses to diaper an infant. Then he stacks them on a paper plate in a pyramid formation. “I’ve got nine dogs here. And I’m gonna time it.”
Don is instantly poised over the mound of weenies, bent forward with his hands in the ready position. I figure this is my cue to start the countdown. When I say “Eat!” he’s off like a rocket. He gobbles down a dog, dunks the bun, and downs it. There’s minimal chewing involved—it’s just dog, dunk, bun, dog, dunk, bun, in rapid succession, his hands churning from plate to mouth like a windmill. Don claims he’s got “the fastest hands in competitive eating,” and this is apparently no idle boast. Forty seconds in and he’s on his fifth dog. I’m so caught up in the moment, swept away by the momentum of Don’s passion, that it seems suddenly natural and right to be sitting on a grown man’s porch on a Monday afternoon watching him speed-eat hot dogs. I find myself even slightly envious, convinced that I could train for a decade and never maintain this pace.
“Wow!” I say. “Wow. Nice work…wow!” I want to say something more inspiring, but the repetitiveness of stuffing and chewing defies any attempt at eloquence. He finishes the last dog and I stop the clock—nine in just under two minutes. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he confides that he’s not satisfied. “I felt I coulda went a little fastuh,” he says.
“What do you think slowed you down?” I ask. “Was it the swallowing?”
It’s the rhythm, he says. This is becoming a pervading theme. Badlands mentioned rhythm as an essential component, as did Kobayashi. In The Doughnut Dropout, a now out-of-print children’s book about competitive eating that Jed Donahue suggested to me as an essential read, the following was dispensed as crucial advice for an aspiring eater: “The great art in eating…is in using every muscle, head to toe, to establish the rhythms.” Don explains that he didn’t have the right chewing/swallowing rhythm at first, and it took him several seconds to adjust.
“Well, I was impressed.” I pat Don on the back. “Nine dogs and buns in two minutes…that’s a Kobayashi pace! So then, explain to me, what happens in the second half of a contest that limits your total consumption?”
Don doesn’t hesitate. “When it gets hot, you get what they call the meat sweats. The protein and the fat starts gettin’ to ya. The fat turns to lactic acid, and you just get tired. It just puts you to sleep.”
Aha! The meat sweats. I’ve heard this term before, even used it myself, but I’d always assumed it was some BS that George and Richard made up to amuse themselves. (Actually the Sheas claim that their friend Dave Kreizman, the headwriter for the soap opera Guiding Light, coined the term after watching eaters sweat profusely after sucking down Rocky Mountain oysters at the Glutton Bowl.) An online search reveals that there’s no official definition, but the term is posted on www.urbandictionary.com as a slang word, defined as follows: “To consume an obsene [sic] amount of meat resulting in perfuse sweating.” “Perfuse” meaning, of course, “to force a fluid through an organ or tissue by way of the blood vessels.” (The Meat Sweats, unsurprisingly, is also the name of a lesser-known indie rock band.) When I press Don about what the meat sweats feel like, he says, “The fat and the grease and the protein from the meat gets to ya, and it just knocks you out. You get so tired and disgusted you can’t wait for them to ring the bell.”
After the hot dog demonstration, Don leads me to a shiny, well-kept room in his basement. The trophy room is twelve feet by twelve feet and stuffed to the brim with Lerman’s competitive-eating memorabilia. Along the wall and sitting on top of a large TV are myriad trophies and belts—five Nathan’s Famous qualifier trophies, second place in the Philly Wing Bowl, the bean trophy, the pelmeni trophy, the jalapeño trophies. Don glows with pride as he recounts each contest. Interestingly, I have found that many competitive eaters seem almost as excited about trophies as prize money. This phenomenon, I believe, helps confirm my theory that many gurgitators compete mainly for the fundamental human desire to receive a pat on the back. Money comes and goes, while trophies remain as lasting reminders of a hard-won accomplishment. Don seems particularly proud of the Cloud Burger Belt, which he says is worth $800 and is now on display in a $400 Plexiglas shadow box.
There are as many pictures as trophies, and the pictures give a thorough account of one man’s fifteen minutes of fame. Here’s Don with Mayor Giuliani; here he is with Bloomberg. Here’s a shot from the news show 20/20. Here he is with Sally Jessy Raphael, and there with Drew Bledsoe. There’s a shot from the set of GutBusters, and one from The Glutton Bowl. Here is the infinitely jolly Al Roker, post-gastric-bypass, and a bearded man that looks like a genetic hybrid of Don Lerman and the pre-bypass Roker.
“Look at me,” Don says, noticing the picture I’m fixating on. “You can see how heavy I was.”
“That’s you?” I say, unable to hide my shock.
Don explains that his weight fluctuates so severely that it’s sometimes difficult to recognize him from one sighting to the next. He admits this freely and speaks of his weight as if it’s being controlled by some external source. At the Glutton Bowl, he weighed 172. During our interview, he weighs 206. But not so long ago, during the time of the Al Roker picture, he was up to 230. These fluctuations, which can be gauged by the puffiness of his cheeks and the roundness of his paunch, are so extreme that I cannot help but feel that he’s got shape-shifting abilities.
This shape-shifting metaphor can be extended to other areas of Don’s eating persona. Like Dale Boone and Badlands Booker, Don has alter egos that he likes to assume for eating contests. His most common identity, naturally, is Moses. The official IFOCE line is that Don earned the nickname for his ability to part the buffet line, but the actual story is more prosaic. In 1979, Don’s aunt gave him the nickname because of his beard, or “beeahd,” as he says it.
Don “Moses” Lerman, wearing a personalized Don Lerman T-shirt, points at the commissioned portrait of himself as Moses in his competitive eating trophy room.
Unmoved by the fact that the biblical Moses was more renowned for his holiness than his appetite, “Moses” is a competitive-eating identity Don has wholly embraced. The centerpiece of his trophy room is a framed portrait he had commissioned of himself as Moses. A Moses action figure, which he intends to sell on his Web site, is displayed nearby. Don’s favo
rite movie is The Ten Commandments, and he has fashioned two tablets into exact replicas of Charlton Heston’s from the movie.
Beyond the Moses obsession, Don has a clear affinity for costumes. At the corned beef and cabbage contest, he showed up in a boxer’s robe. At the jalapeño contest in Laredo, he dressed up as a gun-slinging cowboy. He once showed up to a matzo-ball-eating contest dressed as a Prohibition-era gangster, complete with vest, hat, and pencil-thin mustache. Next to the Moses painting in his trophy room is a picture of Don as the king of Prussia. In the back room of the IFOCE, there’s a framed picture of Don dressed up as a grayhaired old man. In the caption beneath is Don’s joke about eating competitively until he’s ninety years old: “If the PoliGrip holds…I’ll have a good day.”
Don is similarly obsessive about using embroidery to personalize his stuff. His car has DON “MOSES” LERMAN embroidered into all the seats. The towels in the bathroom are embroidered likewise, except for the one that says FOR GUEST USE ONLY. His closet is packed with embroidered jackets. They all feature his name, along with slogans like EL PRESIDENTE: THE JALAPEÑO EATING CHAMP and THE JIM THORPE OF COMPETITIVE EATING. Another one reads DON LERMAN: FASTEST HANDS IN COMPETITIVE EATING, next to a logo of a hand holding a lightning bolt. “I’ve got that one patented,” he explains. He has nearly a dozen of them total, all of which he plans to auction off and give the proceeds to charity.
After checking out his jackets, the last thing Don and I do is watch a videotaped segment from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The episode is called “What So Proudly We Inhaled.” It begins with an appeal to America to embrace our best competitive eaters: “In this time of crisis, Americans appreciate the heroes amongst us. Not just America’s finest, America’s greatest, but America’s fullest.” The reporter, Stephen Colbert, casts Don as a patriotic hero who is “as American as fifty apple pies.”
“Don…,” Colbert asks earnestly. “How about the vomit? What do you say back to your body when it says, ‘I’m gonna throw up.’ ”
“I do it for America,” Don answers. “I fight the vomit for America.”
Colbert gravely states that, on the Fourth of July, “on the island of Coney,” Don fell victim to a hot dog sneak attack by Takeru Kobayashi, who used his “secret karate esophagus” to exact a sort of gustatory Pearl Harbor. After grilling a dietitian for ways that we can eat more food faster, Colbert ends with a somber appeal to the American public: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask for seconds.”
Though this segment gently mocks Don and satirizes competitive eating in general, he shows it to me with pride. This adds to my wonder about the extent to which certain competitive eaters get it. Competitive eating as presented by the IFOCE hovers somewhere between earnest sport and cultural parody. The Shea brothers, it seems, are able to balance the dead serious with the deadpan because they believe that much of American culture is absurd, and within that context competitive eating is perfectly viable entertainment. With the eaters, it’s difficult to distinguish the earnest from the ironic, the tongue-in-cheek from the wide-eyed stuffed cheeks. So, while Don Lerman is intelligent and has a refined sense of humor, I can’t tell whether he’s playing to his audience or playing it straight when he says things like “It is an American sport, and we want to win it for America. It’s like the Olympics. Everyone wants to win for themselves, and for their country.”
Then it dawns on me: Who cares? Who cares whether Don Lerman has a sense of irony about competitive eating? The important thing is that it has transformed an aging bachelor and retired day-old-bread-shop owner into a D-list celebrity with a roomful of accomplishments and a cell phone full of friends. It has given a man with a fertile imagination an outlet for expression. Yes, believe it or not, competitive eating can lend meaning to a man’s world and make him feel alive, in the same way that paintball and poker can. In a way, if Don Lerman isn’t being totally earnest about his competitive-eating career, I don’t want to know. Because his sincerity is so contagious it makes me want to forgo all sarcasm and irony for a few glorious victories and a world record all my own.
10
The Emperor of Ice Cream
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
—Wallace Stevens
The Coat is made of black denim, extra long, with enough fabric to craft drapes for a bay window. A trench coat, technically. It took him six weeks to find it, at a flea market near his home in Long Island. He would rather have gotten blue denim, for added contrast, but when purchasing a trench coat in size 6XL, one can’t be too picky.
Airbrushed on the front of the coat is a smaller, mini-me rendition of the oversized man within. The right hand is clutching the trademark spoon. In the outstretched left palm is a house, symbolic of his job as a Realtor, and disproportionate in a way that brings to mind the globe on Atlas’s broad shoulders. At the bottom of the coat are flames, reaching upward as if to set the whole scene ablaze. And on the left lapel of the coat-within-the-coat, the one the airbrushed man is wearing, is one of the most feared names in competitive eating: Ed “Cookie” Jarvis.
Though this frontal image is arresting, and not lacking in useful metaphors, it’s the back of the Coat that draws more attention from fans and onlookers. (And not merely because it provides a posterior view of the six-foot-eight-inch, four-hundred-pound Jarvis, which has its own merits.) Listed in chronological order from top to bottom are the many titles held by one of the circuit’s most seasoned veterans. A quick glance reveals that the Coat’s wearer is among the best cross-eaters in the sport, boasting titles in a cornucopia of foodstuffs—pizza, zeppole, meatballs, pickles, steak (chicken-fried and regular), dumplings (Chinese and Russian), hot dogs, burgers, pasta, ribs, french fries, and chicken wings.
So what’s the secret behind Cookie Jarvis’s cross-eating success? It includes most of the standard ingredients for the recipe of competitive-eating greatness—voracious appetite, dogged determination, immense stomach capacity, and an almost unhealthy desire for media attention. But the X-factor that separates Cookie from his contemporaries is his scientific attention to detail. He is an eater’s eater, a clever tactician who uses every advantage he can unearth—from utensils to condiments to psych-outs—to wrench victories from the jaws of defeat.
The man, the myth, the legend—Cookie Jarvis, wearing “the Coat,” approaches the competitive eating table. In his right hand, he holds the trademark Cookie Spoon (as does the airbrushed Cookie on “the Coat”), and in his left hand, he holds a knife (while the airbrushed Cookie holds a house). (Courtesy of Matt Roberts/IFOCE)
“The french fry title was actually a few days after my dad passed away. George Shea didn’t want to call me at the time, and I said, ‘No, no, no. My dad would want me go.’ ”
Cookie Jarvis and I are seated in the basement of his Long Island home, cataloging the titles listed on the back of his coat. He has just explained how drinking Aloe Vera, a bottle of which I found in his kitchen, makes his stomach more stretchable. On the wall to my right, Jay Leno is smiling down at me. The framed picture of him with Cookie is surrounded by dozens of gleaming trophies and belts, the spoils of his gurgitory dominance, as well as an authentic Shaquille O’Neal basketball shoe that would comfortably fit Sasquatch. The basement also features an extensive collection of Beanie Babies, a huge aquarium filled with tropical fish named after fellow eaters, and an elaborate indoor playset for his two young children. We are only on his fourth title, and already I am shaken by the sentimentality with which he describes these early victories.
“I ate two pounds, eight ounces of pommes frites, which is a tougher fry than a regular fry, ’cause they’re greasy and narrow, so they’re very chewy,” he says. “I dedicated that title to my dad.”
I shake my head. “Wasn’t it hard, having that sort of emotion going into a contest?”
“I use it as fuel,” he says.
Sensing that he is too emotional to elaborate, I decide to move on. “So tell me about ice cream.”<
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Cookie immediately peps up. It so happens that the 2001 Max and Mina’s Ice Cream Eating Championship was a watershed moment in his career. After a practice run in which he was soundly defeated by Don Moses Lerman, Jarvis realized he was making a crucial error. Specifically, he was hampered by brain freeze. So he went home and, with the help of a few pints of Max and Mina’s vanilla, figured out how to avoid brain freeze.
The secret to staving off the paralyzing effects of brain freeze is to turn the spoon over. That way, Cookie says, the ice cream makes contact with the tongue, as opposed to the roof of the mouth. “Your tongue can get frozen. It doesn’t even affect you at all. Plus, your tongue pulls the ice cream off the spoon. The top of your mouth doesn’t do that—you’ve gotta use your teeth.”
Employing the double whammy of this groundbreaking technique along with the now famous Cookie Jarvis spoon, he blew away the field, knocking down six pounds, fourteen ounces of ice cream in twelve minutes. It was his first major pro victory over a field of celebrated eaters that included Don Lerman, Badlands Booker, Krazy Kevin Lipsitz, and Leon Justice Feingold. Producers from the BBC were on hand to film the contest for a segment on sweet eaters, giving Cookie his first taste of bigtime media exposure. Ultimately, the ice cream title, along with titles in zeppole, pizza, and fries, propelled him to the first-ever IFOCE Rookie of the Year award, presented on July 4, 2001.
In his first competition of 2002, Cookie continued to use strategy to his advantage. At the first ever Cannoli Eating Contest, held in Manhattan’s Little Italy as part of the San Gennaro Festival, he showed up with a mysterious paper bag. “What’s Jahvis got in the paper bag?” Cookie remembers other eaters murmuring. The secret weapon was four cups of steaming-hot coffee, which provided just enough moisture for him to dunk his way to a half-cannoli victory over Badlands Booker, twenty-one to twenty and a half.