Read by Rebecca Yeo
‘Count down: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Go!’
I dive in, grabbing my first hotdog and second. I slip out the sausages and push them into my throat, cutting them into chunks with my incisors and grinding them into pulp with my molars. I fold the buns over. Dipping them into water, I flatten them together with my hands and shove them into a wide mouth with a flat palm. I swallow them whole, squeezing my throat muscles to tighten and open my trachea, thrusting the food along like a snake, shredding the bread’s soft decomposing body. I take a gulp of water. And on to the next. Mechanically.
*
I glimpse the clock: two minutes gone, eight more minutes to go. I’m on track. All’s good. I see my trainer Rocco clapping and roaring my name. He’s like a football manager. I know I’m off track when he stops clamouring and starts swearing. It’s one of those scorchers on Coney Island; sweat is dripping down my face. That’s OK. More moisture. The sun is bouncing off the sand, I can smell the barbecues: mostly ribs, some fish.
*
When I arrived this morning at Nathan’s flagship restaurant in Brooklyn the crowd was already there, reserving their positions near the stage. The digital clock on the wall of fame was counting down the last hours until the contest. I took in every detail, preparing myself mentally. The large Polyethylene hotdog always hanging over the competing table makes my stomach expand in anticipation.
‘No babe. That one’s not for you.’
The sponsors’ logos in bright colors above the stage were shouting out at me: buy, buy. This year Heinz and PeptoBismol are the biggies. I turned away so as not to be spotted; we’re all supposed to arrive together in the ‘bus of champions’.
*
Five minutes. I’m halfway there. I squint at my neighbour; a large black man in a yellow Mr Greedy t-shirt stretched over a mountain of a stomach, a new guy. I am the only female out of a line of ten. I know most of these men from former competitions. George from Hungary, the Japanese consortium and there at the end of the table is the Russian guy: Afanasy. I see him squeezing the water out of the bun he just dunked: a puddle of water is spreading around his plate. Mr Greedy is ‘Chipmunking’: his cheeks puffed up into two hard balls. It’s a nineties trick; let the water and digestive enzymes melt the food. It’s too slow though. Look at George, he’s doing a ‘Carlene Pop’, jumping up and down to force the food further into his stomach. That works better but not my thing.
*
I surprise people; looking so petite and skinny. Where does the food go? You can’t see this, but I am all stomach. My heart is the size of a plum, my kidneys are olives, my liver is a chicken nugget, but my stomach is a sailor’s duffel bag and my intestines as long as a fireman’s hose. I am very good. I beat men.
*
I’m not the only small gurgitator. Another competitor who is built like a teenager is Tango. Several years ago he destroyed the record of twenty dogs by eating fifty against two big guys. The competition went from ‘Bigger is Better’ to ‘Better is Better’. We now know that large abdominal blubbers restrict the stomach's ability to expand, so you need to stay fit to eat more. For a long time men thought women were not physically and emotionally strong enough to compete. Then the first woman beat a man. She was German. Everyone knows they love their Würste. I’m told they eat them for breakfast. Disgusting.
*
Do you know how stuffing yourself became a tournament? It was an immigrant’s game born of an immigrant food: the sausage. The first frankfurter was sold in Brooklyn by a German butcher in 1880. He put the sausages in a split bun so that his customers would not burn their hands. The competition was invented by foreigners arguing about who was most patriotic. There is no better way of being a good American than to eat too much foreign food. A Polish immigrant, Nathan Handwerker, who owned a small hot-dog stand in Coney Island extended it to a chain: ‘Nathan’s Famous’ and made the competition official.
I’m an immigrant as well. Well, that’s not entirely true. I moved to America at ten when I was adopted by a good American couple who called me Mary. My adoptive mom was infertile so expectations for me were high. I think they are a bit disappointed; my mom wanted me to be a model.
‘With your looks you could make millions,’ she said. She put a ton of make-up on my face and told me, ‘your eyes can eat a man whole.’
*
My first mother would be horrified by what I do today. She was very traditionalist; she strove for righteousness, courtesy and temperance, lived by the rules: ‘Be the first to show concern and the last to enjoy yourself.’ She always avoided sensory excess. She thought wastefulness a sin. She liked the quote: ‘Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite.’ She lectured us constantly about our vices and lack of virtue and the consequence of that, so much so we were petrified we might inadvertently make the wrong choices. Before leaving for America she knelt down in front of me and held me by the shoulders, shaking me slightly.
‘Be careful daughter. America is the country of vice.’
*
My Chinese name is Xiao Mai. When I moved to New York at eighteen I changed Mary back to Xiao. My agent signed me with the IFOCE a year ago and the name written down was Show May. So now the referee calls me on stage with this clever tagline:
‘Show me, May.’
*
When I took my place at the table, some of the locals booed me. One shouted: ‘Hey May, give me a massage.’ The girls do the same: ‘Showme. Showme. Show me your boobs.’ You’d be disappointed boys and girls. There isn’t much to see. I’m all insides.
The other day this woman with five kids shouted that what I was eating was taken out of her kids’ mouths.
‘Go back to your country eat your fucking rice. Leave good American beef to the Americans.’ I didn’t get upset. I know how it feels: need. My father worked in a factory, my mom in a launderette. I have five sisters and three brothers. We had to share the little food we had. I never remember eating when I was back home. Eating wasn’t important. Surviving was. When I moved here I discovered food. So now I eat.
Most of the crowd likes me and cheer. There are forty thousand people watching me pig-out today, that’s without counting all those slouched onto their couches watching ESPN sports television. Knowing this feels great.
*
My name means Little Ocean. It’s also a medical plant which feeds the heart. You call it wheat. You process it into food which kills the heart. I never eat for pleasure. My priority when it comes to food is to make it disappear quickly. I don’t taste food anymore. In my country we say the sense of taste is also a reflection of the heart’s energy. If the heart is healthy, you can taste all flavours.
We also say the emotion of the heart is joy. When you experience joy honestly, you are feeding your heart. I think I lost the sense of joy. I feel pride, power, some sense of belonging but the innocence that joy requires is gone. I am not feeding my heart.
*
Being on the road competing can be very lonely. To keep me company I have a plaster statue of Budai, the god of happiness which was handed down to me from my grandmother. Budai sat in my room when I was a child. He terrified me. He is an obese, bald man wearing a robe which reveals a stomach spilling out like lava. Everything about him disgusted me: his deformed body with folds of skin, his drooping moobs with erect coral nipples and his ears pulled down to his shoulders by weighty earrings. His wide red mouth is always laughing, revealing a straight row of bone-white teeth and a blood-red slug-thick tongue. It made my skin crawl. He carries a large cloth bag over his back that never empties of food. Legend says he travels the country to feed the poor and needy. In pictures he is surrounded by groups of squealing kids. As I child I always believed the food in the bag was in reality the bodies of these small children.
I have grown to really like Budai. Since I have started competing I feel him by my side, protecting me. I discovered he is not only the god of happiness but also of contentment. Contentment. That is such a dirty word in American society. No-one is meant to be content. We all have to strive to reach a goal.
*
My stomach’s growling and growing. It has a life of its own. I let it do its thing. It swells up slowly. First a tiny bulge, it’s quickly a bowling ball, then a football. The thin skin keeping it all in could burst at any time. Overeating is a dangerous business. I practice alone and if I choke, no one can help me. I even risk intoxication by drinking too much water. A competitor was drinking with friends the other day. They challenged him to eat over forty dogs for a free beer. He can usually eat more, but that day he'd had three meals and drunk five beers. His stomach burst. He was so drunk and his mouth was so used to chewing that he continued to eat, filling his whole body cavity.
*
Mr Greedy next to me vomits sausage through his nose. ‘A reversal of fortune’ or ‘a Roman method incident’. That’s disqualification. Lightweight. He’s too tense. I relax my throat and let food drop into my stomach. I’m still only half full.
Now the clock shows three minutes to go. My scorekeeper flips over my number board: sixty-five hotdogs and I'm still hungry. I eat another seven. Seventy-two. The crowd is hysterical. Again. Seventy-nine. The countdown:
‘10, 9, 8.’ I eat three more. Eighty-two.
‘7,6,5,4,3.’ Two more. Eighty-four.
‘2,1’
‘Hands down. You have twenty-nine seconds to empty your mouth.’
But I’m still hungry. I grab another hotdog. Eighty-five. The referee tells me to stop. They pull my plate away. I grab five from my neighbour’s. I continue to eat. My stomach is a beach ball.
People are shouting:
‘Let her eat. Let her eat!’
I eat for them. I eat for my family, my friends. I eat for all women. I eat for my displaced fellow men. I eat for my country. For both my countries. I lift my head high to give my food-pregnant stomach more space to grow. They still shout:
‘Let the girl eat!’
(c) Laurence van der Noordaa, 2014
Laurence loved story-telling working as a Parisian guide so now creates her own fiction. This story was born in Zoe Fairbairn's excellent course at Citylit. Other fiction includes tube inspired flash fiction published on www.thecasket.co.uk and an ongoing multi-narrative novel set in Manhattan in the aftermath of 9/11.
Rebecca Yeo trained at the Guildford School of Acting; originally from Singapore and South Africa. Film credits: Panic (White Night Films); Friday Night Dinner 3 (BBC 4) Kiss The Water (BBC Films) Theatre credits: Colony Part 1(KCL) Filth (Soho Theatre), Fried Rice Paradise the Musical (Esplanade Theatre); Jus! (Drama Centre)
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