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

Author:Ryan Nerz [Nerz, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2006-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

When Chris Kenneally and Dani Franco first met Crazy Legs in 1999 while all three were working at the film studio the Shooting Gallery, they were stunned by the extent of his obsession with competitive eating. “We used to go to his house,” Franco remembers, “and he would pull out these competitive-eating tapes. This was way before he ever competed. He was a superfan. He knew every single eater’s stats. And he got us really excited about it after a while because he was so into it.”

Kenneally remembers Crazy Legs doing spontaneous eating challenges at work. While waiting for the elevator one day, Kenneally ran into Conti, who was carrying a huge McDonald’s bag. Kenneally followed Crazy Legs to the roof of the building, where he performed a stunt called Nug Nug Ninety-nine in front of a dozen other employees. In ninety-degree heat, wearing a huge fuzzy hat, Crazy Legs ate sixty-eight Chicken McNuggets in forty-five minutes.

Another time, while working on the set of a film in Little Italy during the San Gennaro Festival, Crazy Legs made a bet with a fellow worker, a teamster known as Tommy the Teamster. While eating a pasta lunch, somebody ordered the all-you-can-drink Guinness special with lunch. “You know, Guinness has a lot of nutrients,” Crazy Legs said. “I bet you could live on that for a week.” Minutes after the comment came out, the bet was on. If Crazy Legs lived on Guinness for a week, he would earn a free lunch at the Corner Bistro, a West Village bar known for its delicious hamburgers. He won the bet, drinking about seven bottles of Guinness a day out of coffee cups while working. After the first day, he no longer felt any intoxicating effects beyond the delirium of malnourishment. By the time he redeemed his victory meal, he had lost five pounds.

Considering his affinity for such non-film-related activities, it’s perhaps not so shocking that Crazy Legs soon lost his job. He worked freelance production-assistant gigs for a while, before having an epiphany one morning on a movie set. It was 4:00 A.M., and Conti had been ordered to find a place to dump the leftovers from a meal. “And I thought, ‘What am I doing?’ ” Crazy Legs says. “I didn’t come to work in film to be out here at four in the morning fending off transvestite hookers so I could dump clam chowder while the residents scream at me about rats.”

A Johns Hopkins University graduate from its Writing Seminars program, Crazy Legs decided to quit the film biz and start writing a screenplay. To pay the bills, he took odd jobs such as posing nude for student art classes and donating semen at a sperm bank. While working as a short-order cook, a fellow worker told him about a job washing windows. It soon became his steadiest gig.

One day in late March of 2002, while watching television with Kenneally and Franco, Crazy Legs got a call from the manager at the ACME Oyster House in New Orleans.

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