Eat This Book: A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit

by Ryan Nerz

  —Crazy Legs Conti

  MAY 2, 2004

  The phone rings. It’s George Shea, calling to give me the rundown on tomorrow: In a never-before-attempted stunt, Crazy Legs is going to eat his way out of a popcorn-filled sarcophagus as a promotion for the premiere of the documentary Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating, at the TriBeCa Film Festival. My job is to dress up as a priest—no, make that a pastor—and just be there for Crazy Legs’ spiritual support. I should wear all black, including a blazer and some black slacks, and I’ll need a dickey, one of those collars that priests wear.

  “You can say you’re from the Brooklyn Episcopal Unitarian Church,” George explains. “Located in East Flatbush.”

  I laugh. “But I think maybe if you’re Episcopal, you’re not Unitarian. Those are like two different denominations.”

  “Right. Maybe Brooklyn’s not good anyway. Too close to home. You can be from the Hauppauge Unitarian Church, in Long Island.”

  I grab a pen and a scrap sheet. “How do you spell that?”

  “H-A-U-P…I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter. Just find a town in Long Island.”

  “Got it.”

  “So you’re Reverend…what’s that name you go by, your alter ego?”

  “Manning,” I say. “Roscoe Manning.”

  “Love it. So you’re Reverend Manning, the pastor at Hauppauge Unitarian…no, junior pastor! You’re the junior pastor, just got out of the seminary and took a position there. The reason you’ve come down to the theater is because you heard about Crazy Legs’ stunt, and you’re concerned because the danger level is so high.”

  “Right.”

  “Quite frankly, you’re concerned for his life. You think there’s a chance he might not emerge from the sarcophagus, so you want to be there to perform last rites if necessary.”

  “Okay.”

  “Before he goes into the sarcophagus, you’ll consult with Crazy Legs quietly, hold his hand and console him. You might even ask aloud if he’s ready to meet his maker.”

  “Got it.”

  “Say that you object to what Crazy Legs is about to do. You think it’s insanity, that it’s testing fate, testing the will of God. You disagree wholly, but you’re not gonna abandon Crazy Legs at this crucial juncture just because you disagree.”

  “Naturally,” I say. “And what’s my background again, I mean, besides the Unitarian Church?”

  “You trained in Bangor, Maine, and did your missionary work in…I don’t know…”

  “Bangalore?”

  “Bangalore,” George says. “Perfect. So I’ll have Yesenia get you a collar. You can pick it up at the office in the morning.”

  “All right then. Game on.”

  “I have the utmost faith in you, Reverend Manning. See you tomorrow morning.”

  You can tell Crazy Legs is nervous because he won’t take off the goggles. Red marks are forming around his brow, cheeks, and nose from the suction. You can barely see his eyes beneath the fogged-up lenses. He looks even more cartoonish than usual, a goateed white guy with reddish brown dreadlocks wearing a tuxedo, shorts, top hat, and a pair of swimming goggles with the attached snorkel flapping beneath his chin. Actually, Crazy Legs explains, it is two snorkels duct-taped together to ensure that it reaches the oxygen above the popcorn.

  A movie-theater concession stand is not a place typically associated with tension, but this isn’t your average concession scene. Danielle Franco and Chris Kenneally, the filmmakers and Crazy Legs’ friends, are all over the place, handing out press clippings to reporters, advising cameras where to set up, checking in on the handyman. It’s a matter of minutes till go time, but the handyman is still on his knees in the corner with an assortment of tools, feverishly working out the kinks of the sarcophagus. Popcorn-filled trash bags are piling up next to the concession stand like a family of fat ghosts. George Shea—whose outward cool on the mic at events is doubly impressive considering the frenetic mind state it masks—is fully bugging out. He keeps walking over to check with the handyman, who doesn’t look up from his toil but assures him that everything’s cool. George’s main concern, as he’s mentioned quite a few times, is carbon monoxide poisoning. The only one who seems vaguely composed here is Rich Shea. Feeling guilty about my uselessness in the beehive, I walk up to Crazy Legs.

  “You might wanna take those off,” I say, pointing at the goggles. “You’re gonna be wearing those for a long time.”

  “Oh, right.” Crazy Legs takes off the goggles and stretches out his face. Big red rings encircle his eyes. It’s disorienting to see him even a little rattled, a rare sight. Despite the misleading name, Crazy Legs is generally levelheaded and self-possessed. I’ve come to think it’s precisely this quality that allows him to surround himself with such an off-kilter crew of friends and never lose his sense of self.

  “How you feelin’?” I ask him.

  “All right. I felt fine until I talked to George.”

  “You ready to eat some popcorn?”

  “Yeah. I’m ready. I just hope they don’t have to use that ax.”

  I pat him on the shoulder. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Thanks, man,” he says, smiling. “That’s reassuring coming from you, Father.”

  Cynics might say the word “sarcophagus” is a bit dramatic for what Crazy Legs has just lowered himself down into. “Chamber” might be more accurate. It stands approximately nine feet tall, a good three feet taller than Crazy Legs, who is six feet two and 213 pounds. It’s about four feet wide and three feet deep, open at the top, and has been fashioned of plywood into the shape of a box of theater popcorn.

  As garbage bags of popcorn are being dumped onto his head, George and Rich Shea attempt to give the hundred or so reporters and fans gathered in the theater lobby a sense of the magnitude of Crazy Legs’ stunt. I might be tempted to take the Shea brothers’ hype with a grain of salt, but the behind-the-scenes tension today makes this feel momentous. They explain that Crazy Legs has been rigged with a color-coded emergency communications system. On his thumb is a strip of green tape, for “all systems go.” There’s a strap of red tape on his right wrist, for “danger,” and the other wrist is yellow, for “alert/need more butter.” In the unfortunate case that Crazy Legs flashes the red signal, there is an ax handy for destroying the sarcophagus. An EMT is on standby for any medical emergencies. When the final bag of popcorn is dumped, all you can see of Crazy Legs is his goggled face in a square Plexiglas window.

  “He is the David Blaine of the competitive-eating community,” Rich belts out. “The Evel Knievel of the alimentary canal, the Houdini of cuisineee…”

  “Like George W. Bush before him,” George chimes in, “He enters the chamber numb, bereft of an exit strategy.”

  As Crazy Legs’ face is slowly submerged beneath white-and-yellow kernels, George introduces Reverend Manning, the junior pastor who has taken it upon himself to help Crazy Legs in this time of need. As often happens in scenarios like these, George immediately disregards our agreed-upon backstory. He says that before I went to Brooklyn Unitarian I did missionary work in Bulgaria, and then he hits me with a non-sequitur question.

  “So then, Reverend Manning…Bulgaria. Is that near the Hague?”

  “Uhh, I don’t believe so.”

  “And what exactly is The Hague? Is it a country, a territory, or some sort of commonwealth?”

  I try to cover up my panic with outward spiritual calm. “I couldn’t say actually. That wasn’t covered in my studies at the seminary.”

  “No matter,” George says. “What is the church’s take on a stunt like this?”

  “Officially, the Old Testament would call this gluttony. But I’m not concerned with such labels. My only concern is that this young, foolhardy man makes it out of that sarcophagus alive.”

  “And how old is the Old Testament, Reverend?” Rich asks. “When was that published again?”

  “It’s very old,” I say.

  “Because I u
nderstand that it has been through several reprintings,” Rich adds.

  Crazy Legs is now fully submerged and has wriggled his way to the front of the chamber. All we can see are fogged-up goggles and a few dreadlocks. He looks like a termite buried in its own wood-gnawings. I make eye contact with Crazy Legs, then press my hand against the Plexiglas window. He does the same. We share a moment, one that can only be described as tender.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” George says. “Witness one last moment of contact between a holy man and a man submerged in sixty cubic feet of popcorn. May both of their prayers be answered.”

  When Chris Kenneally and Dani Franco first met Crazy Legs in 1999 while all three were working at the film studio the Shooting Gallery, they were stunned by the extent of his obsession with competitive eating. “We used to go to his house,” Franco remembers, “and he would pull out these competitive-eating tapes. This was way before he ever competed. He was a superfan. He knew every single eater’s stats. And he got us really excited about it after a while because he was so into it.”

  Kenneally remembers Crazy Legs doing spontaneous eating challenges at work. While waiting for the elevator one day, Kenneally ran into Conti, who was carrying a huge McDonald’s bag. Kenneally followed Crazy Legs to the roof of the building, where he performed a stunt called Nug Nug Ninety-nine in front of a dozen other employees. In ninety-degree heat, wearing a huge fuzzy hat, Crazy Legs ate sixty-eight Chicken McNuggets in forty-five minutes.

  Another time, while working on the set of a film in Little Italy during the San Gennaro Festival, Crazy Legs made a bet with a fellow worker, a teamster known as Tommy the Teamster. While eating a pasta lunch, somebody ordered the all-you-can-drink Guinness special with lunch. “You know, Guinness has a lot of nutrients,” Crazy Legs said. “I bet you could live on that for a week.” Minutes after the comment came out, the bet was on. If Crazy Legs lived on Guinness for a week, he would earn a free lunch at the Corner Bistro, a West Village bar known for its delicious hamburgers. He won the bet, drinking about seven bottles of Guinness a day out of coffee cups while working. After the first day, he no longer felt any intoxicating effects beyond the delirium of malnourishment. By the time he redeemed his victory meal, he had lost five pounds.

  Considering his affinity for such non-film-related activities, it’s perhaps not so shocking that Crazy Legs soon lost his job. He worked freelance production-assistant gigs for a while, before having an epiphany one morning on a movie set. It was 4:00 A.M., and Conti had been ordered to find a place to dump the leftovers from a meal. “And I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Crazy Legs says. “I didn’t come to work in film to be out here at four in the morning fending off transvestite hookers so I could dump clam chowder while the residents scream at me about rats.”

  A Johns Hopkins University graduate from its Writing Seminars program, Crazy Legs decided to quit the film biz and start writing a screenplay. To pay the bills, he took odd jobs such as posing nude for student art classes and donating semen at a sperm bank. While working as a short-order cook, a fellow worker told him about a job washing windows. It soon became his steadiest gig.

  One day in late March of 2002, while watching television with Kenneally and Franco, Crazy Legs got a call from the manager at the ACME Oyster House in New Orleans. On February 3, 2002, Conti had broken the restaurant’s oyster-eating record while watching his favorite team, the New England Patriots, win the Super Bowl. The ACME folks explained that they would like to pay for Crazy Legs to come to New Orleans and compete in the Big Easy Oyster Eat-Off speed-eating championship.

  Kenneally and Franco, who had just bought a video camera, decided to follow Crazy Legs and shoot his quest to upgrade from fan to pro eater. They shot him training with butter and oysters, then filmed his first visit to the IFOCE office, where they were shocked to see that George Shea recognized Conti.

  They shouldn’t have been. Every year from 1996 on, Crazy Legs had made the annual trip to Coney Island to pay homage to his favorite eaters. He remembers the days when the contests weren’t crowded and how a person dressed in a pea suit showed up each year to advocate vegetarianism. He was bummed to have missed Krachie’s dominant years but psyched to have caught the Japanese takeover of Arai and Nakajima. When the Shea brothers retired Mike “the Scholar” DeVito’s mustard-stained jersey to the rafters, Crazy Legs had been hanging from a pole to get a better look.

  Franco and Kenneally had no particular ambitions for their project. They just wanted to have fun and maybe get a short film out of it. But when Crazy Legs won the Big Easy Eat-Off on April 13, 2002, they realized something bigger was in the works. Having started his gurgitating career with a bang, Crazy Legs decided to go after the grail—qualifying for the Nathan’s contest. So they followed him to the Boston qualifier, interviewing his parents along the way. What might have been throwaway footage turned into a revealing look at his food-obsessed parents—an artistic mother who had bronzed her son’s pacifier and a father who cooked incessantly when not working as a rocket scientist on the Patriot missile program.

  After losing the Boston qualifier, Crazy Legs decided to give it one last shot at a remote qualifier in Seattle. He won. Realizing that he would be competing in Coney Island now, Kenneally and Franco decided they had a feature-length documentary on their hands. They recruited friends from their film jobs to help with the editing and friends from open-mic nights to help with the score. Crazy Legs told them he wanted to be a pure subject with no influence on the film. The first time he saw the final product was at its first screening, which Kenneally and Franco arranged by renting a theater for a hundred people in Boston.

  When Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating was selected as one of the feature-length documentaries for the TriBeCa Film Festival, a New York City event founded by Robert De Niro, Kenneally and Franco were overjoyed. Here they were hoping to make it in the world of entertainment, only to get their biggest breakthrough in the form of a unique friend.

  Although the movie contains all the elements of a compelling story—the quest of an interesting protagonist, obstacles, a villain (Cookie Jarvis), and redemption—the story ultimately succeeds on the basis of Crazy Legs’ character. He is enigmatic, in many ways a nice, normal guy, but with a host of peculiarities. He wears shorts 365 days a year and only owns two pairs of pants. His nickname has become his real name such that only his closest friends know the real one (Jason), yet he refuses to explain the story behind how “Crazy Legs” came about. He is highly intelligent and articulate, well-read in acclaimed literature, yet chooses only low-paying jobs and has an obsessive collection of lowbrow eighties movies, especially those starring “the Coreys”—Feldman and Haim. Though he has a clear sense of irony, his interests in eighties movies, obscure foods, and competitive eating seem entirely earnest.

  Perhaps most interesting is Crazy Legs’ social life. He is a self-appointed social events coordinator who is constantly e-mailing notices of group activities to his many friends. The events include the ongoing open-mic night known as Doctor Jellyfinger’s Paradise Jam, New York bike tours and bar crawls, kickball games in Central Park, and parties at “Coleman’s Bar & Grill.” This is the name Conti has given to his East Village apartment, which is jammed with books, VHS movies, liquor bottles, an industrial stove, a Door of Fame, and a neon COLEMAN’S BAR & GRILL sign. The people who travel in Conti’s circle are artistic by temperament and go by strange names. There’s the Drunken Poet, Little Jimmy (a little person from Coney Island), Dinshaw, Sandwich, Bourbon, Wet Levi, and Doctor Jellyfinger. The common tie that binds them is their love of a good time and their allegiance to Crazy Legs.

  So it was probably inevitable that somebody in this motley crew of artists would ultimately recognize that their de facto leader was an obvious subject for a film or a book or a song (or all three, as it has turned out). Like many writers, Crazy Legs leads a double life as a character worth writing about. In the tradition of beatniks like Ken Kesey and Neal
Cassady, he has been added to the canon of youthful American protagonists who reflect their surroundings in meaningful ways.

  The problem with distance eating is that it takes so long. Crazy Legs has been steadily munching for a solid hour; we can now see his face and upper torso. The goggles are off, his dreadlocks are matted with popcorn shrapnel, and his once white tuxedo shirt is stained a chemical-butter hue of toxic yellow. As Crazy Legs requests a tube of Chap Stick, the Reverend Manning strikes up a conversation with a woman named Elyse HF Maxwell, the founder of the Burger Club, a group of New York residents who meet twice a month in search of the perfect hamburger. The reporters are beginning to tire of the whole spectacle, but Crazy Legs is determined to continue eating until his film premiere—six hours from now. The “We love you, Crazy Legs!” cheers have died down. The only thing sustaining the crowd is the ongoing banter of the Shea brothers.

  GEORGE: It appears to be awkward, Rich, this eating one’s way through sixty cubic feet of popcorn.

  RICH: There’s something gerbil-esque about his movements that’s both beautiful and disquieting.

  GEORGE: When things slow down, I’m going to talk about how the Indians called it maize.

  RICH: They introduced it. I understand we introduced taxes.

  Reporters from the Daily News, the New York Times, Knight Ridder, Reuters, and the Food Network are moseying around, trying to decide whether to wait it out. Jeanne Moos, an anchor from CNN, has resorted to reaching down into the sarcophagus to wipe off Crazy Legs’ goatee. One reporter is so desperate he interviews the Reverend Manning and inquires about the strange name stenciled on his Bible: RYAN NERZ. An argument sparks up between a few television reporters and the Shea brothers. The reporters want footage of Conti’s exit, for closure to the piece. The Shea brothers, in defense of Crazy Legs’ wish to continue eating, have run out of relevant comments but continue to buy time.