by Ryan Nerz
Hungry Charles nodded. Pimping, like competitive eating, was a concept that bridged cultural barriers.
Before he was Hungry Charles, he was Charles Hardy, Brooklyn born and raised. Grew up in Crown Heights, raised by his grandmother. They didn’t have much, but they made ends meet. Grandma made no more than $20,000 a year, but Charles and his three siblings always had food on the table. Grandma got his sneakers under the table and his jeans from a man at her job who sold them on payday.
It was a happy childhood. Charles had lots of friends. Partied his ass off in high school, deejayed on the weekends. Charles was into oldschool rap and started collecting thick stacks of vinyl. He met legends like Grand Master Flash while playing clubs in the city. While deejaying a sweet sixteen party in January of 1982, Charles—or Crazy C as he was known in his deejay group, the Master Blasters—found his eyes wandering to the birthday girl’s cousin. Her name was Valerie, but everyone called her Z, an abbreviation of her middle name, Zena. Two years later, on June 9, 1984, Charles and Z got married.
The first year of their marriage, Charles was broke. He hustled as much as he could, but it wasn’t enough to support a family. One day, not long after Charles’s graduation, Z’s uncle, Xavier Hospler, whom Hardy called Uncle Brother, walked up and told him his destiny straight-up, “You’re gonna be a CO.” Charles didn’t know what a CO was, but he needed a job, so he filled out the paperwork and took the test. Uncle Brother made sure he got the job, and Charles Hardy has been a corrections officer ever since.
He started working the mess hall at Brooklyn Detention Center. Worked there for ten years, improving the cooking skills he’d learned from his dad, who had been a cook in Vietnam. When they closed the mess hall in 1995, Charles was transferred to the women’s house on Rikers Island. His job was to provide the three C’s—care, custody, and control—for the inmates. It wasn’t an entirely pleasant experience. Being a male officer amongst female inmates, Hardy says, is like being a female officer in a male prison. Naked women would make disgusting overtures and flick bodily fluids on him. “Though it’s sad for me to say it,” Hardy says, “I went from ‘Excuse me, miss’ to ‘Hey, bitch.’ ” He found that they were the only words the women would respond to.
Charles spent much of his time at Rikers with the baby killers. He would escort them from one place to the next, making sure the other inmates didn’t assault them. His job offered many revelations, few of them uplifting. Foremost on the list was that “the women in the system, they get the shaft.” In his view, women did more time than men did for the same crimes. “It’s nothing for a man to go to jail. He can bounce back. But once you’re a woman in jail, you’re fucked for life. And I kind of feel for them with that.”
One day in August of 1996, Charles Hardy, his wife, and their three kids had returned from a Florida vacation and went out grocery shopping. On the way home, at an intersection in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a car slammed into his minivan head-on. There was a second impact, which Hardy later discovered was a cop car hitting him. The driver of the first car was a woman fleeing the police in a stolen car. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to escape, she backed up and slammed into Hardy’s minivan again.
Hardy heard his ten-year-old son, Edmund, in the backseat saying that he couldn’t feel his legs. Pinned behind the steering wheel, Charles, fueled by rage, managed to squeeze out of his car, suffering several cuts. While the perp lay facedown in the street, handcuffed, Charles walked up, pointed his gun at the woman, and said, “When I come back to work, bitch, I’m going to kill you.”
Hardy was immediately transferred off Rikers Island. Two officers escorted him to his locker after hours and allowed him to clean it out. Due to the sensitive nature of the incident, Hardy says, NYPD brass agreed to brush the whole episode under the rug, but he was so upset with the way the officers had handled the police chase that he filed charges against the city. To rationalize why they were driving over the speed limit, the sergeant at the scene allegedly told Hardy it was a “hostage situation.” Hardy was sure it wasn’t. He felt he’d been lied to, and that the cop had no real concern for his family. When the case finally closed in 2004, Hardy says he got a negligible settlement. “I got pennies out of it, but it’s the principle of the matter.”
Since the incident, Charles has worked the night shift at Central Booking in Manhattan, which he calls a “retirement home for correction officers.” His job is to put perps in their cells, keep the system updated as to each perp’s whereabouts, then let them out when the paperwork comes through. He’s met dozens of famous people, including several hip-hop stars—Tupac Shakur, Busta Rhymes, Fabolous, and Cam’ron, a Harlem-bred rapper for whom Hardy has served as a bodyguard. He’s stayed up all night drinking coffee with Mike Wallace. He remembers the night that kid from the “Dude, you got a Dell?” commercials got busted buying pot on the Lower East Side. Hardy greeted him at the station with a smile and said, “Dude, what happened?” Hardy remembers having in-depth discussions with hundreds of protesters during the 2004 Republican Convention. “No offense,” he says, “but I’ve never seen so many white people locked up in my life.” Officer Hardy has enough stories in him to write a juicy memoir, and he’s already thought of a title: You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up.
It hasn’t been all celeb run-ins and protesters. Charles vividly remembers the morning of September 11, 2001. He had just got out off his shift and was sleeping with the TV on. He woke up right after the first plane hit. “I said, ‘Damn those are some real good special effects. What movie is this?’” It took him a good ten minutes to realize it was real.
He went to work that night. When the shift was over, he and some of his Central Booking buddies decided to help out at the rubble pile. They knew dozens of officers who’d died, men who had brought their prisoners to Central Booking. The least they could do was go help out. Hardy’s first look at the area surrounding the site is etched indelibly in his brain. “The most eerie thing was to come down Broadway, right by City Hall, and there were just thousands and thousands of shoes on the street. People literally ran out of their shoes. There was so much soot on the ground, it was like walking through fine snow. And you’d see hands and limbs lying around. The stuff was untouched. It was like walking onto a movie set.”
For the first week, he drove people back and forth from the site to a rest area on Canal Street. In the weeks after that, he started working on the rubble pile itself. They gave him a mask, but he only wore it for about five minutes until the filter clogged. It was too hard to breathe through, so he took it off. Hardy’s most difficult memories were from the time he spent working at the morgue. “We didn’t get no whole bodies. We’d get a lot of torsos or half bodies, gloves, arms, whatever body parts. And I’d have to go through their pockets and try to find their ID. Remove jewelry off their fingers. Lots of fingers.” Hardy started having disturbing nightmares, including a recurring one about walking down a haunted, empty Broadway. After two weeks at the morgue, he told them he couldn’t work there any longer.
Each day it was the same numbing routine. Hardy worked his shift from eleven at night until seven in the morning, went down to work at the pile, then went home for a nap and started all over again. He was so stressed and fatigued that he went into autopilot mode. He’d like to put that time behind him now, and he has, except for one thing. His voice box got singed so badly by the smoldering chemicals and carcinogens at the pile that it changed his voice. He now speaks in a baritone so raspy, low, and quiet, it reminds you of a certain character played by Marlon Brando. Even after Hardy retires, it will serve as a permanent reminder of the years he spent serving his city.
Now he’s the Godfather.
Coondog O’Karma, a close friend of Hardy’s, gave him the name. In the instant messages they sent back and forth to each other, Coondog often found himself in a confessional mode, asking for advice. He would say, “Godfather, I’m having a problem. What should I do?” And Hardy would IM back his sage response. When Coo
ndog went to qualify for Wing Bowl XII, he alluded several times to “the Godfather” while talking to the WIP Morning Show hosts. They picked up on it, and now, at Wing Bowl, the name Hungry Charles Hardy is meaningless. He’s known simply as the Godfather.
It’s appropriate that the name stems not only from his deep, gravelly voice but also his abilities as a paternal dispenser of advice, because the Godfather has become the unofficial captain of the American eaters. Three weeks after September 11, while Hardy was still occasionally coughing up blood from his experiences at the rubble pile, he went to compete at the Glutton Bowl. There, he mended his relationship with Don Moses Lerman.
Hardy had stripped Lerman of the matzo-ball-eating title just seven months before, and Lerman was still sore about it. During Lerman’s butter-eating qualifier, Hardy walked out from behind the stage and started cheering Lerman on. “Come on, Don!” Hardy yelled. “Eat that fuckin’ butter!” After the competition, Hardy congratulated Lerman on his victory and showed sincere concern for Lerman’s wellbeing during the grueling postbutter recovery stage. Lerman recognized that he’d judged the Godfather too harshly and apologized. “You know, Charles,” Hardy remembers Lerman saying, “I’ve been acting like a real ass. You really do have my back.” The Godfather told Lerman not to worry about it, and they’ve been tight ever since.
The Godfather again showed his team spirit during the taping of GutBusters in Alaska, a documentary for the Discovery Channel. The show tracks Hardy, Dale Boone, and Crazy Legs Conti in their attempts to qualify for the Flibernation Cup. After Hardy won his first-round qualifier by downing four and a half pounds of Alaskan spotted shrimp, he became a full-time cheerleader and adviser to his fellow eaters. After Crazj Legs lost to Boone at the reindeer-sausage qualifier, the Godfather critiqued Crazy Legs in a concerned, fatherly way, then helped him prepare for his last chance to qualify, at the lumberjack-breakfast competition.
“I was just eating steadily, and obviously eating too slowly,” Crazy Legs said after the contest.
“You were nibblin’,” the Godfather said.
“I was nibbling.”
“You were nibblin’ like a damn squirrel sittin’ there with a fuckin’ nut. That’s not what I expected of you.”
“Yeah,” said Crazy Legs.
“Now, you figure with pancakes, if they’re the same size as the ones we had this morning, you should get one down in thirty seconds if you dip it. Okay. So you do that for like the first three minutes. After that, you just take your time.”
“I’ll make you proud tomorrow,” Crazy Legs said. “I appreciate it.”
“I’m proud of you now,” the Godfather replied.
But it was at Wing Bowl XII that the Godfather became the true captain of the IFCCE. In his storied career as a gurgitator, it’s the competition he’s most proud of, because it wasn’t just about individual accomplishment. The Godfather won the first round, and when Sonya stripped El Wingador of his title, the IFOCE squad danced around her and lifted her in the air to show that the victory was communal. The team win was particularly sweet for the Godfather because he had lost to El Wingador in the Glutton Bowl (taped right after 9/11) after suffering an unfortunate reversal during the sushi round. “At Wing Bowl, we were all there as a team effort, to fuckin’ wipe Philly off the face of the map,” Hardy explains. “And we did it.”
In keeping with this ethos, the Godfather firmly believes that the future of the IFOCE lies in developing a broad swath of eaters with strongly developed characters that fans can relate to. If the circuit starts focusing on a limited number of eaters—Cookie, Sonya, and Kobayashi, say—then media saturation and fan boredom will quickly set in. “You take the WWF. These guys put on a good show. They’ve all got character. You can actually individualize each one.”
The analogy that the Godfather likes to use for his vision of a united squad of IFOCE eaters is the Super Friends cartoon. The IFOCE office is the official Hall of Justice where the squad gathers. From there, they shoot off to contests, where each member’s skills are unique and useful in battle. “You’ve got Wonder Woman, who’s good at one thing. You’ve got Superman, who can see through fuckin’ brick walls. Everybody has to have something to be known by.” As an example, he cites the rookie eater Tim Janus, a.k.a. Eater X, who shows up at every competition wearing a face-paint mask that’s specific to that competition. “And you know, it’s like, what is Tim Janus gonna look like today? You never know until he shows up.” In keeping with this analogy, the Godfather sees secessionists like Gentleman Joe and Chowhound Chapman as the enemy, the Legion of Doom.
If the IFOCE squad can stick together and become a recognizable band of close-knit gurgitators, the Godfather thinks the sky is the limit. He’s the link from the old-school eaters—guys like DeVito and Krachie—to the new-school crew of characters like Eater X, Crazy Legs, and the Black Widow. He’s seen the media attention and the prize money on the American circuit steadily increase over the years. “Whether people think it’s a freak show or a sport or just a spectacle, people are gonna pay,” he says. When asked about his plans for his competitive-eating career, the Godfather has developed a go-to response. “I’m gonna eat my way to Beverly Hills.” The IFOCE has been such a big pert of his life that he got a new tattoo at the 2005 World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in Venice Beach—the letters IFOCE in a tribal-style font—to add to the two he already has on his right arm.
After almost a decade of gurgitating glory on the circuit, the Godfather announced his retirement in the summer of 2005. Having recently retired from the Department of Correction as well, he’s focussing on his health and spending more time with his family. And, of course, planning his send-off party. Knowing the Godfather, who, according to Badlands, “likes to do things in a big way,” it will be a party. Think hot tabs, Veuve Clicquot dribbling down champagne flutes, Cuban cigars, bikinis, and endless platters of food.
Though he’s officially retired, the Godfather says he won’t stray too far from the table. The IFOCE recently named him commissioner, replacing Mike DeVito. Now that he’s got some idle time on his hands, he plans to implement some big ideas for his beloved sport. “I want to do some of the decision-making and try to take this thing to a higher level, where everybody can profit from it, where everyone can live like a rap star. You know what I’m saying?”
22
Training for Gurgitory Greatness
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
—Wallace Irwin
I try eating competitively for the first time in Maui. The foodstuff is Maui onions, four of which sit on a paper plate before me. I know all about them, because Dave Baer and I have been talking about them for the last six hours. We’ve been doing our best Food Network shtick, introducing chefs who prepare dishes like the Maui Onion Stuffed Veal Loin with Leek Fondue and Wasabi Garlic Mash and Purple Sweet Potato Mash. We’ve been lobbing trivia questions to the crowd, giving out T-shirts, bibs, and restaurant gift certificates as prizes. Maui onions are grown on the upper slopes of what Hawaiian volcano? Haleakala, that’s correct, sir. What are the three factors behind the sweetness of Maui onions? Sunshine, altitude, and volcanic soil. We’ve started referring to the elderly couple in the second row as the Trivia Mafia, because they’ve got a steadily rising stack of gift certificates but keep greedily raising their hands.
“Ryan has told me he plans to beat the world record right here, before your very eyes,” Dave says. “He claims he ate one pound of onions in a minute during training.”
Damn him. Dave has been eating with me for a decade and knows how unbearably slow I am. How many times has he eaten me under the table in late-night, besotted Chinese take-out chowfests? Now the crowd’s looking at me as if I’ve got skills and they’re about to witness history. I just smile and act serious, do a few mock jaw exercises. What do they know?
Dave gives me the three-two-one, and I start. I take a big chunk out of the peeled Maui onion. O
nion juice dribbles down my mouth and onto my tie. I chew and chew and try to swallow, take another bite. My bite-to-swallow duration is pathetic. I’m hyperconscious of how slow I am, how openly untalented I am as a gurgitator. Though I’ve been told that eating slow is a good thing, I’ve always considered it a plague. At family dinners as a child, I would keep eating while plates were cleared and everyone else fled to the living room, my food going from lukewarm to cold. I take another bite and flash a stuffed smile at the crowd.
“Come on, Ryan, don’t play to the crowd. Just eat.”
It’s Badlands Booker. Great. Even he’s disappointed, and it’s rare you see Badlands bummed out about anything. So not only do I suck at this, but I’ve upset one of my heroes in the sport. Other than that, though, I’m kind of digging this. I like eating competitively, even if I am bad at it. Maybe it’s because nothing could be negative here in sunny Maui, standing in the shade of this banyan tree, but I think it’s more than that—something more fundamental. It’s fun trying to eat as fast as you can with people cheering you on, and Maui onions are delightful—healthy and sweet, with the consistency of an apple and without the eye-watering aftereffect. I take another bite and revel in my juicy lips and clogged mouth. Eat lots fast! That’s my new motto. So what if I’m not a natural.
I finish my one-minute sprint and the crowd gives me a big round of applause. “Let’s go to the scales and see if Ryan broke the world record.” Dave comes back and announces that I’ve eaten .41 pounds of Maui onion, which doesn’t approach the record and would have earned me a depressing fourth place in the junior competition we have just judged. Whatever. Besides, the winner looked well over fifteen years old to me, and I wasn’t shy about discussing what smelled like fraud with the crowd. (In the process, I said the word puberty three times, until Dave finally whispered into my ear, “If you say puberty one more time, I’m gonna turn off your microphone.”)