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

by Ryan Nerz

  “I know you’re a better eater,” I say, “but this no-dunking policy could prove to be your downfall.”

  “We’ll see.”

  The EMT arrives. He’s a young black guy named Rudolph. Nice guy. When he sees that we’re both dressed in sporting gear and listening to “Eye of the Tiger,” he asks what’s going on here. We say we’re about to have a one-on-one eating contest, and he’s here to make sure it’s safe. Rudolph shrugs. “Okay,” he says, his brow wrinkled in confusion. I tell him we don’t have any accidents planned and ask if he wouldn’t mind taking photos with my digital camera. “Okay.” I try to imagine what Rudolph is thinking and can only come up with White people are crazy.

  We give the White Castles a minute-long zap in the microwave, then stack them up in two twenty-burger pyramids on the pool table. I line up two glasses of water and stare down the burgers for a moment. Dave hands the iPod to Rudolph and tells him to press play when he says to. We shuffle back into Dave’s bedroom.

  “How freaked-out must this guy be?” Dave asks.

  “He seems fine, actually.”

  “All right, Rudolph,” Dave yells out. “Now!”

  Rudolph presses play and the Rocky theme comes on. Dave makes his entrance, jogging out to the pool table with both fists raised. I follow behind him, making fake jabs and waving to a pretend crowd. Rudolph doesn’t even crack a smile.

  We square off at the pool table. Dave counts down from ten, and we’re off. Right out of the gate, you can see he’s got a speed advantage. The Rocky theme keeps us both on top of our game. “Gonna fly now!…Flying high now!” I can’t tell if my dunking technique is helping or hurting, but I still can’t force myself to swallow until my cud is fully chewed. At the three-minute mark, Dave’s up seven to five. Rudolph keeps taking snapshot after snapshot from the same angle. He seems less concerned with artistry than just getting this over with.

  When the Rocky theme finishes, the next song in queue is “Rocky Mountain High,” by John Denver. I start cracking up and a snot wad flies out of my nose onto the pool table. Dave is laughing, too. Finally, he goes over and changes the song. This is an act of supreme confidence that, were I a lesser man, I would take advantage of. But I slow my eating chivalrously. Dave picks out a mellow Dave Matthews tune that’s not much of a competitive eating anthem. We’re at the halfway mark. I’ve got to pick it up.

  I stop dunking. White Castles aren’t my favorite, and when sopping wet, they’re awful. Rudolph keeps taking snapshots. Just another Friday night in New York. I’d continue to describe our battle, but to be honest, there’s not much to it. Dave wins, seventeen to twelve. The sad thing is, this is an improvement for me.

  The author (in the Indiana Pacers jersey and BAD ASS hat) and Dave Baer compete in an unsanctioned White Castles eat-off. (Courtesy of Rudolph the EMT)

  “I’m disappointed in you, Dave,” I say afterward.

  “Why’s that?”

  “You could’ve done the deuce.”

  We pay Rudolph and he wastes no time getting out of dodge. Before he leaves, Dave tells him we have contests like this all the time, so we might be calling him again soon. We spend the rest of the night imagining our next phone call to Rudolph.

  “Hey, Rudi, this is Dave. I’m at the Royal Buffet on Seventy-fifth and First. Can you be here in fifteen minutes?”

  “But it’s three o’clock in the morning!”

  “I know what time it is, but it’s about to go down! Are you in or are you out?”

  Next call. “Rudi, Ryan here. Meet me at Chow Fun Delight Restaurant in Spanish Harlem in thirty minutes, all right? Oh, and bring a stopwatch and some needle-nosed pliers.”

  Follow-up call. “Yo, Rudi! Ryan here. Where the hell were you? My opponent here at Chow Fun just choked on a sparerib and went into a coma. I hope you’ve got insurance, because my lawyer will be contacting you within the week.”

  We never get around to calling him. The day after the contest, I hang out with my girlfriend. She’s got a keen sense of smell and keeps mentioning that I “don’t smell like Ryan.” Note to self: Schedule two days of alone time after each contest. I have every intention of going for a second checkup with Dr. Girlfriend’s Dad, but out of laziness and fear of a follow-up prostate exam, I never get around to that either.

  23

  Downing Sliders on the Krystal Circuit

  I want to keep fighting because it is the only thing that keeps me out of the hamburger joints. If I don’t fight, I’ll eat this planet.

  —George Foreman

  The Krystal Square Off Burger Eating Championship circuit, on which I intend to make my debut as a competitive eater, is a series of eleven qualifying competitions that culminates in a championship contest in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The winner of each qualifier gains a spot in the championship, which offers a total of $17,500 in prize money. I am scheduled to emcee four contests and compete in two. In my second-ever contest, in Jacksonville, Florida, I will compete against Takeru Kobayashi, whom many consider to be the best athlete alive.

  SEPTEMBER 19, 2004

  The Krystal circuit gets off to an auspicious start when Sonya Thomas eats forty-two burgers in eight minutes in Chattanooga. My start is less promising. The journey to the third qualifier in Knoxville, Tennessee, is plagued by travel snafus. My cab ride to La Guardia is beset by pond-sized puddles, the remnants of Hurricane Ivan. At the airport, I discover that my flight has been canceled because the Atlanta hub I’m supposed to transfer through is a mess of posthurricane missed flights. After umpteen phone calls, I’m able to transfer instead through Chicago, where I’ll have a six-hour layover.

  It gets better. The contest is scheduled at the worst time imaginable. Sunday, September 19, 12:30 P.M., at the Tennessee Valley Fair. What better time for an eating contest than midday on Sunday in the middle of the Bible Belt? To make matters worse, the gates open only a half hour before the competition, so the place is empty. I do my best to build a crowd, shamelessly appealing to local sensibilities by comparing the contest to the Tennessee Volunteers’ home upset last night over the University of Florida. I take off my carnival barker’s hat and put on an orange Tennessee hat brought specifically for this purpose.

  I make a long, rambling speech about James Wilhoit, the Tennessee kicker who went from goat to hero in the previous night’s home game against Florida. We find ourselves in a similar position in today’s burger-eating contest, I say. We have athletes coming from outside of Knoxville, trying to humiliate you on your own turf. Specifically, we have Bill “El Wingador” Simmons, fourtime Wing Bowl champion, who has made the twelve-hour drive from New Jersey to win this qualifier. “And I know you proud Tennesseeans don’t want to lose to no damn Yankee,” I add, sensing by the resulting silence that the word damn doesn’t sit well on Sunday at noon in Knoxville, especially when spoken by a Yankee.

  My long diatribe about an unlikely hero turns out to be an appropriate analogy. El Wingador, who tells me before the contest that he plans to eat only enough to secure a victory, is matched burger for burger by a local named Jeff Hicks. They’re tied with five two minutes in, then at eleven four minutes in. To beat the thirteenth-ranked eater in the world, Jeff Hicks needs Knoxville’s support, I say. I try to start up a cheer of “Wilhoit! Wilhoit!” but it comes out garbled and the crowd doesn’t understand. At the eight-minute final buzzer, it’s too close and I have to consult with my judges. After a few recounts, I announce that second place goes to El Wingador with twenty-one delicious Krystal burgers. The crowd starts buzzing. “Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like the Volunteers have done it again! In first place, with twenty-two burgers, your new Krystal-burger-eating champion, Knoxville resident Jeff Hicks!”

  SEPTEMBER 28, 2004

  The travel nightmare continues. Ten minutes into my cab ride to the airport for my flight to Memphis, I realize I’ve left my ticket at home and we have to turn around. I arrive an hour late at La Guardia, only to discover my plane is delayed two hours. This time th
e culprit is Hurricane Jeanne. In the Atlanta airport, I guide the busty Israeli girl seated next to me to the smoking lounge, which is among the most depressing, overtly cancer-ridden environments I’ve ever laid eyes on. An announcement over the PA system says that my connection flight is delayed until 2:00 A.M., another six hours, because Hurricane Jeanne is presently having its way with Memphis.

  I sit at an airport bar until it closes, reading The Doughnut Dropout, a children’s book about competitive eating. Judging from the scornful looks I receive from barstool football-watchers, it’s not exactly a testament to my masculinity. By 1:00 A.M., I’m tipsy and exhausted but have just enough time before my flight that I can’t take a nap. I conclude that there is a special section in hell fashioned after an airport terminal, in which planes neither arrive nor depart. Within this special section is a punishment area for the worst sinners—the smoking lounge.

  The PA system keeps making the same announcement over and over: “Maintain control of your carry-on luggage at all times Maintain control? MAINTAIN CONTROL? I imagine myself strangling the woman behind the robotic voice. Are you telling me to maintain control? When we finally touch down in Memphis, the entire cabin breaks into relieved applause. It’s 4:00 A.M. A sign says WELCOME TO MEMPHIS, THE DISTRIBUTION CAPITAL, but it’s unable to distribute me to my hotel room, because the rental car centers are all closed.

  The next morning, I decide to shave off my goatee but leave the mustache. I imagine that this will give me a sort of game-show-host look, but I look more like a cop or a gay porn star from the seventies. The competition takes place at the Mid-South Fairgrounds, where a good-sized crowd gathers around the main stage. Don Lerman is already there when I arrive. In keeping with my game-show-host theme, I ask trivia questions and give out prizes. What female country singer took her name from her love of the Krystal burger? That’s right, folks, Crystal Gayle. To egg on the crowd, I claim that eaters from up North have been claiming that Southerners are “a bunch of gastronomic wussies,” and if a local is going to take Lerman, the eighth-ranked eater in the world and a champion burger eater, the crowd’s support will be the deciding factor.

  The goading comes in handy. For the first two minutes of the contest, Don is neck and neck with a local named Sam Vise. Then Vise starts to pull away, and Memphis gets behind him. The competition ends in a stunning upset: Vise eats thirty-four to Don’s twenty-one. Another example of the many lone wolves out there just waiting to be discovered.

  OCTOBER 13, 2004

  I keep waiting for someone to perform an intervention. Honestly. I’m fully prepared to come home and find my closest friends assembled in the living room. “Ryan, this competitive-eating thing has gone too far,” one of them will say. And how could I argue? I’ve lost contact with friends and family. I spend random Tuesday nights timing myself eating White Castles. I have a stopwatch on my key chain in case a spontaneous competitive-eating situation arises, and I check multiple competitive-eating Web sites daily. While eating dinner with friends, I’ve started noticing who takes big bites, chews fast, and cleans their plates first.

  I think about stuff you probably shouldn’t think about, such as competitive-defecation events as follow-ups to contests, stomach-enlargement surgery, and how competitive eaters would make great drug-smuggling mules. I have had a half dozen conversations about the word on the bottom of the broken cup at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects: Kobayashi. I know that, in the beginning of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Captain Saavik, a Vulcan lieutenant in Starfleet, loses to the Kobayashi Maru simulator’s preprogrammed no-win situation and have wondered if Kobayashi Maru also describes the feeling eaters have when facing Kobayashi. This is my mind-life. Am I in too deep? No time to ponder that, because the circuit keeps moving forward, and I with it.

  Next stop, Montgomery. The competition takes place on October 13, during the third and final presidential debate. I feel punchy and start rambling to the crowd about how we’ll be conducting our own debate, not about domestic policy, but about ingestive prowess. Competitive eating has gotten so popular, I claim, that the National Hockey League has canceled its season out of pure fear of the IFOCE overshadowing them. Taking a cue from George’s playbook, I toss in some irrelevant material. “Did you know that Engelbert Humperdinck wasn’t even his real name?” The crowd at the Alabama National Fair stares at me, bewildered. “True story. He stole it from a nineteenth-century German composer. Just a little trivia for you.”

  The eaters include a soldier who has just returned from Iraq, a pawnbroker who does a somersault when I introduce him, and a man who sells jerky for a living. They will face Carlene LeFevre, whose husband, Rich, is sitting in the front row. “We say sexism is a thing of the past, but clearly this is not the case. Even now, in the twenty-first century, we underestimate women. Why, for example, do they call Ivan a hurricane and Jeanne a tropical storm? It’s sad.”

  OCTOBER 31, 2004

  This may not be the best spot for a man on the verge of losing his mind.

  It’s Halloween night, and Dave and I are at Sloss Fright Furnace in Birmingham, Alabama. Sloss Fright Furnace is an abandoned factory certified by the National Association of Psychics as one of the most haunted locations in the world. Its history has been covered by the Fox TV show Scariest Places, and the history is pretty grim. From 1882 to 1971, Sloss Furnace transformed coal and ore into the hard steel that became the building blocks of the industrial revolution. More than sixty-seven workers died at Sloss. In 1921, Brad Hainsworth was crushed by a giant gear that kept spinning, revealing less and less of Hainsworth’s body with each revolution. A few years later, Noah Tyson was killed by an inexplicable blast of molten ore.

  The eeriest legend is that of James Wormwood, a hard-driving graveyard-shift foreman unaffectionately known by his underlings as Slag. To impress his bosses, Slag Wormwood forced his men to speed up production, which involved taking dangerous risks. In his four-year tenure, forty-seven of his workers lost their lives—ten times the mortality rate of any other shift in Sloss Furnace history. On October 16, 1907, Slag lost his footing at the top of the highest blast furnace and plummeted into a pool of molten iron ore. His body was instantly incinerated. That Slag had never before set foot on top of the furnace led to speculation that his fed-up workers murdered him, but nobody was ever brought to trial.

  So why would we come to this godforsaken place? Because I’m about to eat in my first contest here, and in keeping with the tradition of Sloss Furnace, I am transforming myself into a beast. A wolf, to be specific. I pull the mascot costume out of the huge hockey bag I’ve been carrying it in. The furry body suit goes on first, then I step my feet into the paws. I slide my hands into my two other paws and pull the wolf head over my head, tightening the chinstrap. I can hear Dave Baer warming up the crowd. “Today’s contest will feature eleven humans and one nonhuman. The winner will compete on November 13 in Chattanooga for the grand prize of $10,000.”

  I put on my dead-serious game face like Hungry Charles and visualize putting down burgers the way Badlands might. The plan is to act like a villain before the competition and a rabid animal during it. You are a wolf. As part of my method acting, I have decided that I despise Birmingham and all its residents, using as fuel the fact that we were grossly (and I’m convinced deliberately) overcharged for drinks last night at the bar.

  Time to make my entrance. I look through the wolfs mouth but can’t see much. As I clomp toward the stage, my snout bounces off spectators. I hear gasps and laughter, see vague forms pointing. It’s moments like this when the mascot costume seems worth the investment. “Whoa!” Dave cries. “And here he comes now. Ladies and gentlemen, I welcome to the stage the eater known as the Wolf. He is combative and unpredictable, so please be careful.”

  I rush toward him in a crouched, slinky way that I hope appears wolfish. I bounce my snout into Dave and pretend to claw at him. “Settle down now, Wolf,” Dave says. “Now you’ve told the press you’ll eat forty burgers and
a human hand in tonight’s contest. Is that true?” Dave points the microphone at my snout. I say nothing. Wolves don’t talk, and neither do mascots. I’m staying in character.

  “I’m sure many of you don’t speak wolf,” Dave says, “so let me interpret. He says that, before the night is over, Birmingham will bow before the Wolf.”

  I lunge at the crowd, convinced that they’ll cower in fear, but they just laugh. The kids in particular find the Wolf amusing, and not in a menacing way. A group of kids gather around me and start opening up the Wolf’s mouth, trying to get a glimpse at the man behind the mask. “What are you doing in there?” one of them yells. Valid question. I stare at him and resist the urge to smile. Wolves don’t talk, I tell myself, but the kid won’t stop tugging at the Wolf’s tongue.

  “Hey,” I say. “Quit that.”

  I grab the tongue with my paw. But the boldness of one kid escalates into a full-fledged kiddie mob. I feel hands on my fur and tugging on my wolf tongue. They pry the mouth open and I find myself staring at a half dozen smiling kids.

  “The Wolf seems to have met his match,” Dave says.

  They try to pull off my wolf head. Thank God for the chinstrap. But I think my villain role is ruined at the hands of these meddling children. As Dave starts introducing my fellow eaters, I clomp backstage for some precontest alone time. Sweating profusely, I pull off my wolf head and secure it in the Krystal wagon. I try to get hungry and focused. Eat lots fast, I tell myself.

  If ever a chance for competitive-eating dominance presented itself, today is the day. I think about Tim Janus, who called before the contest to give a few pointers and express his confidence in my ability to win this thing. No ranked eaters are in attendance—Badlands backed out at the last moment. That said, Bill “the Bottomless Pit” Pendleton is here, and he ate twenty-three in Montgomery. Pendleton’s entourage, the Pit Crew, who are quickly emerging as the circuit’s answer to Jimmy Buffett’s Parrot Heads, have predicted an outright victory. I do a couple breathing exercises and envision myself dunking and eating, dunking and eating.