Book Excerpt: The Last Pre-Katrina Oyster Contest
Metairie, La., before the flood. From the "Gurgitator Islands" chapter, p. 243-249.

Iused to wonder if competitive eating was a sign of the apocalypse. What if? What if eaters really were "horsemen of the esophagus," in the words of George Shea—canaries in the coal mine telling us how we were losing touch with our bodies and our rapidly toxifying environment? Eating seemed like a highly entertaining but empty vice, its very emptiness made terrifying by its intensity, and its intensity made terrifying by its emptiness. A dark phenomenon with dark consequences. Scary. But over the course of my year on the competitive eating circuit, as I humped around America in Southwest 737s from one gorgefest to another, I began to suspect that eating wasn't so easily pinned down. It didn't seem as discrete and monolithic as other cultural products with built-in KICK ME signs. Performance art. Jackass. Grand Theft Auto. Eating was broader, more slippery. There were a lot of variables, and a slight shift in audience, food, or venue could transform a contest's flavor—could make it go down easy or make it stick, like a chicken bone, in the spiritual craw. I started to see that eating was more like a political rally or a church sermon, or any institution that involved a call and response, a crowd and a performer and, most important, a place. Eating could bring out the best in the American character or the worst, or it could merely bring out two diametrically opposed tendencies and marry them for a brief berserk moment, like at the shoofly-pie championship in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in summer 2005, which was attended by equal contingents of Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders and Amish teenage boys (shoofly pie is an Amish delicacy) and after which my fiancee saw one Amish boy, maybe 14 years old, in black pants and suspenders, clutching a photo of a blonde cheerleader in a white bra. The photo read, "To Samuel, Cheers & go Eagles, Caroline." Whether an eating contest felt life-affirming or soul-destroying, or just bizarre, all depended on the context.

It was in March 2005 when I saw, for the first time, an eating contest that felt perfectly calibrated to its context. The venue was the Acme Oyster House in Metairie, Louisiana, where I'd flown for the Acme World Oyster Eating Championship. The morning of the contest, I got up early and walked a mile from my hotel on Lake Ponchartrain to the Acme on Veterans Boulevard, about twenty blocks west of downtown New Orleans, across a thick grassy median from a Borders bookstore. I poked my head in the back door at 7:30 a.m. because I wanted to see the oyster-shucking operation. On most days, Acme employed three or four shuckers at its oyster bar on the restaurant floor, but this morning the restaurant had called in extra shuckers to prep the 1,908 oysters that would eventually be consumed by the eaters in that afternoon's main event. Five junior shuckers, all African-American but one, worked an assembly line in the kitchen, wearing rubber gloves to protect themselves from the sharp shells and prying open the oysters with squat, pointed knives. It smelled damp. To one side, off the assembly line, was Michael "Hollywood" Broadway, age forty-six, a gaunt man with wiry arms who tapped me with his fist and said, "I am the senior bad mothershucker in the house." Hollywood is the dean of all shuckers in New Orleans, having shucked for twenty-nine years, and he is also something of a media star. He said, "I've been on Blind Date, A&E, Travel Channel, Food Network, E!, Gourmet magazine," so he was used to doing what he did with me now, which was to pull live oysters from a big tub to his left (reef oysters, he said, mud-grown, from the brackish waters of the Gulf of Mexico) and narrate his technique to the soundtrack of his knife as he shucked: Smother the oyster. Press down hard with your hand. The more you press, the less work the knife has to do. Force against force. Go in perpendicular, knife point down. Pry. Don't push. Pop it open through the small side, the oyster's head. If that doesn't work, tap the wide side—the hinge—to make a flat area and crack through. Slide the knife to the wide side to sever the muscle and free the oyster for slurping.

"Hey Hollywood," one of the shuckers teased, "you been talking since last night! What's up?"

"I'm doing an interview, son. Have your people call my people." Hollywood picked up a new oyster, shucked it, and pointed out the color in the shell. Color means it's a male. Males are sweeter. Always wipe the knife, so you don't get shell shavings in the juice. "If it ain't clean, it ain't worth eating. That's what I tell my customers. If they ask you how you like your oysters, don't say big or small, say clean and cold. Clean and cold, the Hollywood way." Hollywood was proud he could give the eaters the best, cleanest oysters. He picked up a shucked oyster and slurped it down. "Oh, they good and salty, good and salty," he said. "They'll love 'em." Hollywood said he wasn't rooting for any particular eater, but he had been amazed by last year's winner, Sonya Thomas, who'd eaten thirty-six dozen oysters in 10 minutes. Out front at the oyster bar, faint-mustachioed and diamond-earringed Travis Pflueger, twenty-four, said he was trying to shuck the oysters extra-clean so that his friend Crazy Legs Conti would have a shot to beat Sonya. "They say she's a buck-oh-five and she throw it down like that," Travis said. "That's serious, man." He would periodically disappear out back to retrieve more oysters from the truck of Acme's supplier, P&J Oysters, founded by Croatians whose successors had been fishing oysters from the Gulf for 130 years, and then come back carrying orange mesh sacks of a dozen dozen. Travis started pulling oysters from one sack and said, "They shouldn't have a problem eating these today. They're small." An oyster is only water anyway, he said. To demonstrate he squeezed an oyster dry with his towel, leaving a vague stain. "It's the original Viagra, man," said Laurie Brunet, Acme's manager and house mom, who was sitting at the bar with me. "Louisiana Viagra."

I drank coffee with Laurie and watched Travis shuck oysters and waited a couple hours for the fog to burn off and the parking lot to fill up outside with eaters and contest-goers. Then I walked outside and saw that Acme had set up a state fair in its parking lot, complete with food tents (crawfish, corn) and a ticketing system (three tickets for a beer, four for a frozen daquiri). A girl in a white wedding dress roamed the lot, handing out beads. A man's t-shirt read IT'S A GREAT TIME TO BE A REPUBLICAN. I saw Badlands Booker and Crazy Legs Conti taking pictures with fans. Bad rock music blasted through a PA system. Walking by four Louisiana Wildlife Fisheries officers in identical gray shirts, I heard one of them laugh, "I ain't gonna let the dynamic dago duo collect my money," and assumed he had a side bet with his buddies (of Italian descent) on the upcoming "heroes" competition, a one-minute contest to honor local state workers and firefighters and cops. Also on today's intinerary was a "neat-eating" contest for kids (in which they would try to construct the perfect ice-cream float), an oyster-shucking competition, and a "dignitaries" competition for local politicians and chefs. Chefs were considered dignitaries in New Orleans. Laurie spotted me and asked if I'd ever had a crawfish before. I said no, a small and harmless lie; I had eaten them once before and found them baffling, and I figured Laurie would have fun initiating a tourist into the society of crawfish-lovers, and I was right. She walked me to a crawfish booth, scored me a styrofoam clamshell full of the buggers—I tried to pay, but my protestation of reportorial ethics was useless before Louisiana hospitality—and led me to a table of girls in black halter tops selling car calendars. Hey girls, this boy's never eaten a crawfish before, can ya show him? I blushed as a heavily made-up brunette ripped the head off a crawfish and told me that the way to eat it is to, eh, suck it… and then Laurie ushered me to a picnic bench with two nice middle-aged women and their kids, making sure I wouldn't have to eat alone, and the women smiled and patted the open seat on the picnic bench, and we ate the spice-hot crawfish, all of us howling for water. Behind us, long tractor trailers rolled by as part of Metairie's Italian and Irish parade, decorated in bright primary colors and showering not candy but food, actual groceries, from the windows, a throwback to some Tammany Hall boss's food-for-votes picnic.

It was starting. Rich Shea, George's little brother, presided over the "undercards," the one-minute contests for the heroes and dignitaries, after which I grabbed a Senator Ken Hollis, Republican of Metairie, and teased him about his poor total of twenty-four oysters. "I'm a gourmet oyster eater," he said. "I don't eat for speed. I like to enjoy 'em in a little sauce." We talked for a while about the bad old days of the Louisiana Senate, when it was thirty-eight Democrats and Ken Hollis, and how nowadays it was a red tide of Republicans—but today's contest was hardly political, unless it was a fundraiser sponsored by the firm of Tabasco, Lea & Perrins. Hollis guessed that on his best day he could eat thirty-one oysters in a minute. "How many did you eat, judge?"

"Forty-one," said the judge, a spry man with white hair.

"It's experience," said the senator deferentially. The judge had a great old French name: Duplantier. Adrian Duplantier, U.S District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana. He was seventy-eight years old. "I'm what they call a senior judge but I'm still on the court," he said. "If they gave me two minutes, I think I could eat my age. You know how golfers say they could shoot their age?" He was holding a plaque commemorating his forty-one-oyster performance. "I have to bring my plaque to the courthouse," the judge laughed. "All my colleagues will think I'm crazy."

We fell silent out of respect for Miss Louisiana, a product of St. Charles Parish, who was now on stage. She said, "I can't do this alone, so please join in our National Anthem," and we did. Then Rich Shea spoke in somber tones about a recently departed fellow named "Crawfish" Nick Stipelcovich, a longtime denizen of the oyster contest and a beloved local chef. "Somewhere in the heavens, I venture to think the southern part, is the very kind, big-hearted gentle man looking down with a resigning smile," said Shea—

"CrawFISH!"

"A giant!"

—and after a moment of silence the spirit of Crawfish Nick ceded the stage to a tiny Korean-American woman in a white IFOCE armband and white track pants that ended at her ankles, billowing around her skinny legs to provide the freedom of movement she'd need to put on her show. Sonya stood hunched over her circular oyster plates, a dozen per, and, with her cute little oyster fork, stabbed two or three at a time in a flash of toothpick wrists, no wasted motion, downing a dozen every fifteen seconds, four dozen in under a minute… "Sonya THOMAS, ladies and gentlemen, eighteen dozen! Lousiana! Oysters! In three! And a half! Minutes!" The crowd was stunned, agape. A man screamed, "She's doin' fawty dozen, fawty dozen!"

By now I'd seen Sonya eat four times at four contests, but I'd never seen her so… sensual. Unfreakish. It wasn't that she herself appeared any less severe eating those oysters, just that the contest's happy atmosphere had bled into my viewfinder, softening Sonya's hard edges. I got the sense that the contest would have been the same without her. To the locals here she was a great kick, but also just one in a long line of big eaters who'd walk into New Orleans oyster bars from time to time boasting they could eat so many dozen—big boys, "nasty boys" as Travis Pflueger calls them, guys like Boyd "The Hammer" Bulot (he of the current house record at Acme, fifty dozen, the record it looked like Sonya was about to break), guys like U.B. Chase, aka "The Unknown Knight," who once ate, back in 1922, five pails of crawfish, then saved "the remainder of his supply for his supper," according to a contemporaneous New York Times clip; guys like Andrew Thevenet, former crawfish world-record-holder (thirty-three pounds in two hours), who once claimed, to a source of noted food writer Calvin Trillin, "There have been kings who didn't eat as well as I did." The New Orleans tradition of overeating was robust enough to absorb Sonya and frame her alongside all the old gluttons, who weren't really gluttons at all, as Trillin observed back in 1972 at the Crawfish Festival in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Back then, Trillin wrote, "in all of the discussion about excesses—about beer cans being thrown and immoral acts being committed in the churchyard and people walking half naked in the street—nobody had said a word about gluttony."

They didn't consider it gluttony because gluttony is a dire, consequential word and this sort of indulgence feels casual; it's been made to feel casual, which is the amazing thing about it, what separates the oyster contest and the New Orleans style of gorging from other communal eating spectacles like Wing Bowl. Wing Bowl is not casual. Wing Bowl is social, but only in the way that a race riot is social. People will die at Wing Bowl someday. No one will die in New Orleans at an oyster contest unless a neurotoxin is involved. If they suffer, it won't be from the binge but from what the binge covers up, the deeper problem that even that day in the Acme parking lot was visible in the obvious racial stratification of the chefs and the shuckers, the all-black shuckers being the ones who were emptying the circular plates of oyster shells into large trash cans and dragging them to the Dumpster. Yes, New Orleans was living a precarious existence then, and not in the Dennis Hastert sense—Hastert, prairie congressman and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who, after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city, said that New Orleans "it looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." He didn't see the true precariousness, the more fundamental socioeconomic imbalance that couldn't be indefinitely overcome by minor eruptions of civic unity like the oyster contest. Still, what gorgeous fragility…

"EAT 'EM!!!! EAT 'EM FAY-ASTER, BABY!!!!!!"

A woman with short blonde hair and a scandalously sloping top had leaned over the railing in front of the stage and cupped her hands to yell at a man on the stage's far right, presumably her boyfriend. The boyfriend was losing to Sonya. Everyone was losing to Sonya. The man tried to communicate the futility of his enterprise by looking up from his oysters, staring solemnly at his girlfriend, and mouthing the words: "SHUT! UP! SHUT! THE FUCK! UP!" Sonya's eighteen dozen became twenty-six dozen, then thirty-six, which broke the record—and she kept going. "Oh my God," said Shea, "SonnnnYAAA!!!! SonnnnYAAAAA!!!! Forty-six dozen oysters in ten minutes! HISTORY HAS BEEN MADE!" And still she kept eating—not for the contest title, but to break Acme's house record, which only took her a few minutes extra.

The music started up again, a funk beat, as Sonya gave interviews to local press. After a few minutes, Sonya and the local TV cameras made way for a cover band in military fatigues and hats that said TOP GUN. The band launched into "Sweet Child o' Mine." The woman who'd screamed "EAT FASTER, BABY!" started dancing. She saw that a man was trying to take her picture, so she grabbed a few of her girlfriends and they all leaned into each other and leered and stuck out their tongues as every man within twenty yards craned his neck to catch a peek—she's got eyes of the bluest skies as if they thought of ray-yay-yain!—while behind them Judge Duplantier and Senator Hollis were kicking back with their people, and Michael "Hollywood" Broadway was autographing the t-shirts of IFOCE eaters with the slogan Slow but good, Hollywood, and even Rich Shea had cracked a beer—and I saw that the oyster contest was the best kind of eating contest because it wasn't about the food at all. Devotion to the food, to the oysters, was real enough, but it was only a means to an end. The food was an excuse for a federal judge and a state senator and Miss Louisiana and a New York carny barker and a voracious toothpick-wristed woman in track pants and the world's most mediagenic oyster shucker and the disembodied spirits of Crawfish Nick and Axl Rose to gather together, in a parking lot next to an oyster house, and share a moment of American joy.