bending history with hotdogs
The man is Joey Chestnut, winner of fifteen Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating contests. Two years ago he ate 32 Big Macs in 38 minutes. He’s eaten all kinds of things, holds all sorts of records. In 2013, he ate 54 cow brain tacos in 8 minutes. This year, he dominated with 63 hot dogs in ten minutes, 13 short of his record last year.
At one point during the competition, a young protestor wearing all black and a Darth Vader mask burst through the line of contestants. He held up a sign: EXPOSE SMITHFIELD’S DEATH STAR. Chestnut put him in a chokehold and yanked him backward and he disappeared. The police sidled over, put the boy in cuffs, and took him away. Smithfield is a pork processing company whose factory farms are well-documented sites of animal rights abuses: gaping wounds, piglets nursing on pus and blood, sows in gestation crates. At the time, most people thought someone was trying to sabotage Chestnut. We couldn’t see the sign from where we were, up on the rooftop of a restaurant called Crab du Jour.
Chestnut, in a daze, resumed his gobbling amid cheers and whoops. “I’m pretty much drunk on hot dogs,” he once explained in an interview. “I feel like there’s something wrong with me. All my answers are goofy.”
The man in the straw boater hat had introduced all the contestants in wonky hyperbole: one was “the vortex at the center of the vortex,” another “the eighth archangel—Gideon, the exalted.” Chestnut, the emcee cried, “will curse and sneer and spit and shout his name at the heavens: I am the shining arc of humanity! Yield to my dominion!” For ten minutes, the contestants shuddered and sweated and slurped.
You’d think spectacles of gluttony would wear you out, make you sick. But there was an enormous line outside Nathan’s after the show. Similarly, spectacles of American silliness don’t always make you cynical so much as silly. The language is all scrambled through loudspeakers, the whole thing is funny and stupid. It’s gross, it’s the Fourth of July, it isn’t supposed to make sense. The district attorney swore in a bunch of judges wearing referee outfits. A Bollywood dance troupe performed. There was a moment of silence for a police chief who died last week, who said at his retirement ceremony in 2020 that “I was like a kid in the candy store in Coney.”
The city smells like melting plastic. The boardwalk teems with heat and grease. All my answers are goofy. All I want is cold beer. I’m not sure I could ever get enough.
ben tapeworm