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Prizes generously donated by Scholastic Children's Books

The King-Pin

Enjoy this one by Sophie Klimt (16). It’s sickening!

“Twenty-five competitors, ladies and gentlemen, twenty-five men and women here for you today!” George Handler shouted, his big, red face getting bigger and redder as he shouted to the assembled crowd of thousands. “All of them here for one purpose and one purpose only – to show you just how many doughnuts they can eat in under teeeeeeeeeen minutes!”
George Handler is an idiot, Eric Cavalli thought, tucking his bib into his jeans belt. George Handler is a big, red idiot. He was surprised to note that his hand was shaking.
Handler patted the first contestant on his meaty shoulder. “Here we have Mr ‘Damaging’ Dale Cranmer, the champion of the Second Annual Gingerbread Man Eating Contest! Tell me, Dale,” here Handler leant down conspiratorially and pointed the microphone into Cranmer’s famous mouth. “just how many gingerbread men did you eat?”
‘Damaging’ Dale shrugged. “Seventy-seven.”
“And how long did those seventy-seven delicious gingerbread men take you to eat, Dale?”
“Eleven minutes.”
“Eleeeeeeeven minutes!” Handler shouted, while the crowd whooped in appreciation. Eric cast an eye over them and spotted his wife and daughter standing by the cotton candy cart. He gave them a wave, which went unnoticed, and he returned his hand to his stomach, which unfurled under his belt comfortingly.
Handler had similar introductions for each of the competitors – Patrick ‘Big Man’ Menchetti, 8 pounds of baked beans in under three minutes; Joseph ‘The Eclipse’ Dodd, 23 grilled cheese sandwiches in ten minutes; ‘Lovely’ Linda Leeler, who wasn’t so lovely after cleaning six plates of spaghetti bolognaise in a little over five minutes – before he made his energetic, hyperbolic way down the table to where Eric sat, sweating into his stretch-waistbanded shorts.
“We have a very special competitor here today, ladies and gentlemen!” Handler screeched into the microphone “Some of you may recognise him from previous events such as the Annual Mudpie Eating Contest, the inaugural Deep-fried Twinkie Challenge, and many, many more! Tell us, Eric,” he said, his mouth close to his ear. “What’s your personal best?”
The answer changed every year. The 1982 State Fair had been the start, where he’d been the skinny 150-pounder who’d taken on the infamous ‘Blazing’ Bob Crawley and emerged with $150 in his back pocket and twenty-two Frankfurters in his stomach. It was as if the world had been opened up to him – he spent the minutes he wasn’t washing dishes at Tony’s Fish Plaice scouring local newspapers for mentions of competitive eating competitions, where he would stroll in and use his God-given talent for inhaling food to collect the prize money. It was at the Saturday afternoon carnival where he won his title of Hard-boiled Egg Champion (67 in 6 minutes) that he met his wife, Sonja, who had been back then a fresh-faced beauty serving french fries. More and more competitions followed, their challenges and titles blurring into each other, 121Bananafritters-19slices16”pizza-46crabcakes-23peanutbutterandjellysandwiches-34BigMacs-2gallonschocolatemilk89dillpickles6lbspam, until Eric “King-Pin” Cavalli was possibly the most famous competitive eater in all of California – ‘Possibly,’ one hushed article suggested, ‘in all of America. Possibly,’ even more hushed, ‘in all of the world.’
“Uh,” Eric said, detesting George Handler. “I would probably have to say my 2002 win at the Jalapeño Hoedown.”
What a night that had been. Eric could still hardly think of it without wincing. The actual competition itself had been surprisingly easy, with a mountainous pile of jalapeño peppers on his right and twelve knock-kneed teenagers on his left. 177 jalapeños went down that night, and Eric had lasted just the fifteen minutes it took to declare him the winner and grant him his trophy before he was on his hands and knees in the dirt, crying like a baby, streaming what he was sure was pepper juice out of his eyes. He was too terrified to go to the doctor’s in case his worst fears were confirmed about his stomach actually having caught on fire, so he spent the next three days feverishly hovered over the toilet drinking pints of milk to calm the burns in his throat. That was the night that Eric had started to lose his fervour for the competitive eating competitions, and it had been a downward slope to disillusion ever since. Sonja, of course, couldn’t understand it – he was making thousands of dollars without even trying, and he had “always been such a pig anyway, honey.” They could afford to live in a comfortable house and send their daughter to the best school in the neighbourhood, just like men with proper jobs did. Only Eric was starting to feel as though there were something those men had that he didn’t, like pride or integrity, a feeling which both Sonja and his manager, the effusive ex-boxer Connor Lee, were quick to dismiss. Eric had gone to visit Connor the night before to enquire about pulling out of this year’s competition, and found him predictably, persuasively unyielding.
“You’re no different from the average working man, Eric,” Connor said, lifting his shades and surveying him with two different-coloured eyes. The story went that, aged 26 in a fight against a 7”1 Puerto-Rican, Connor had been punched so hard in the left eye that it turned from brown to blue. Eric had always believed this story because he had no reason not to, but as his mistrust for his manager grew, so did it for his far-fetched stories. “In fact, you work harder than he does. All he has to do is make a few phone calls, check out the secretary’s legs, doodle some memos. You, on the other hand, you’ve got to push past every pain barrier known to man, you’ve got to amaze and trump every sonofa that dares to compete with you! It’s a noble profession, my friend, one which you should be proud of. Count your blessings that the Virgin Mary chose you for this.” With that, Connor leant back in his chair and blew a cloud of smoke at the framed portrait of a thirty-years-younger self, bobbing and weaving against the great Fists LeFevre. He hadn’t lasted longer than three minutes in the ring.
If there was one thing Eric was certain of, it was that his profession was anything but noble. All of the Californian competitive eating circuit may have been familiar with his face, but it was a face covered in oysters, spaghetti, clotted cream, chicken drumsticks, and, on one occasion he would rather forget, pig liver.
The Jalapeño King forced a smile for George Handler and then for Chad ‘Bonestripper’ Podelesky, who was sitting next to him, meticulously folding his napkin (which was ironic, Eric thought, given his notoriety for being one of the messiest competitors of all). He didn’t even acknowledge Eric, perhaps remembering his crushing defeat the previous year at the hands of the Kingpin in the National Raw Cookie-dough Eating Semi-Finals (4 lbs versus 7.2). As Handler shouted for the “DEEEEEEEEEEEEEELICIOUS DOUGHNUTS!” to be brought out, Eric swept a flickering eye over the crowd, most of whom wore ‘Kingpin Cavalli!’ T-shirts (priced $15, half of which went towards buying Connor Lee a new condo). Twenty-five carts of doughnuts were wheeled out and placed behind each competitor, and the usually thrilling aroma of food carried on the air and made Eric gag.
“May God be with you all,” Handler said into the microphone gravely, and began the countdown. “3… 2… 1… go!”
Mechanically, Eric reached for the first doughnut. It was the same as always, he thought, and ripped it in two. This was the Kingpin method which had stumped hundreds of opponents throughout the years. Rip it in two, dip it in water and swallow it, fast. He had been disgusted to see Venetia enjoying her teatime snack in a similar way a few weeks before – not disgusted with her, but with himself. It was time to get out, he had thought then. It was time to get out.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I can’t believe what I’m seeing! Eric ‘Kingpin’ Cavalli, the man we all thought would walk away with the title of Californian Doughnut Eater of the Year, is flagging behind! Yes, that’s right, you heard me! The Kingpin is on NO doughnuts! Nada! Niente! Nichts! This is truly a momentous day! We’re all waiting with bated breath to see what this once-great star will do – meanwhile, ‘Damaging’ Dale is on eighteen doughnuts already – how can he possibly live this one down?”
Eric looked down at the doughnut in his hand, almost surprised at his stasis. He hadn’t consciously made the decision not to compete, but found the idea of it strangely repugnant. He knew that even after having lost his head-start, were he to start Kingpinning it now, he would win easily. There was nobody like him, and every single one of the twenty-four other competitors knew it. Bonestripper was smiling next to him with a mouth daubed in powdered sugar and bits of dough as he shovelled in doughnut after doughnut.
“You’ve got a little something just there,” Eric said to him as he stood up, ignoring the gasps and jeers which followed from a crowd that had already forgotten its hero. He picked up another doughnut in his hand, walked calmly over to George Handler and introduced the hated man’s face to it.
It was a sunny afternoon in early Autumn and Eric Cavalli was forty-six years old, with a gut and no back teeth and greying hair, but for once he had a different taste in his mouth than hastily swallowed crab cakes. It could be, he thought happily, self-respect, which to him was worth more than the prize he would have received for inhaling a cartload of doughnuts. He turned over an unpaid bill in his pocket and remembered the planned trip to Morocco, and the school fees, and Sonja’s love for expensive jewellery, feeling his self-satisfaction slide off his face. Shoot. It looked as though he’d be attending that Macaroni and Cheese Fest in Riverside the next day after all.