“Portland! The City of Roses! Beervana! Bridgetown! Rip City! Little Beirut! …Did I miss any? Nevertheless, we come in peace! Join us in celebration! Join us in consecration! Join us in a little… secretion? Festivities begin now, but join us at 6pm for something quite resplendent! Come at 6pm for something magnificent! Come at 6pm and you could be the one to set a precedent!” The booming message floated over the frigid river every hour as the entire city felt their coming.
The cherry blossoms on the riverwalk were in full bloom when Captain Pendreghast’s fleet arrived on the Willamette and claimed Portland as their own. The sounds of music and revelry could be heard long before the three large masts of the flagship, The George R. R. Martini, passed under the reluctantly raised bridges of Stumptown.
I was making my way home from work when I saw the throngs of curious people migrating from their airy open-concept offices to the increasingly smoke-filled waterfront park as the massive ships shot unloaded cannons to mark their arrival. “Is it fleet week?” asked a man who, upon further investigation, was wearing an article of Nike branded clothing from shoes to cap, tips to nips. No one bothered to answer him as we watched the 18th century sailing ships surround the Portland Spirit just beginning its tour of the river. Before they could react, sailors from Pendreghast’s crew were already onboard and eating the hors d'oeuvres. Within ten minutes, they had claimed the vessel as their own and started bringing out the finer supplies from the hold of the ship to feast upon in full view of those on shore. One of the pirate crew turned away from this spectacle and locked eyes with me as greasy meat hung from his lips. His arm lifted and I felt an icy chill as he pointed dead at me. It felt like a lifetime was spent in that silence before he finally uttered two words: “HOT DOG.” Then, he uttered two more words: “EATING CONTEST.” This leftenant, or boatswain, this Mr. Smee, then rolled or floated his way over to me in a way that defied both gravity and God. I could smell his ham breath and feel his radiating body heat. I began to sweat as he uttered the final two words of his extremely disjointed sentence: “YOU’RE COMPETING.”
In the winter I had reverted back to my stock personality, otherwise known as “recluse who frequently quotes Werner Herzog.” Now it was the beginning of spring and I needed a change. If you had told me that the change that would be thrust upon me would be Captain Pendreghast’s Hot Ham Cram Jam I would have probably laughed and asked a number of follow up questions about your mental health.
The flagship was docked near the sakura blossoms and I was shuffled up the massive gangway to the top deck where there were tables of food and drink as well as people playing games of chance with cards and knives and other things I couldn’t see before I was ushered into the captain’s quarters. Where the boatswain was a stout cannonball of a man with a striped shirt and bright red ascot, Captain Pendreghast was the whole cannon. She was tall and imposing, with a presence that could be felt the minute you entered the humid cabin. “FOUND OUR - FINAL COMPETITOR - MY CAPTAIN,” stammered the boatswain. I suppose that he just talked like that.
“Stupendous, tremendous, wondrous!” I recognized her voice as the same one that boomed over the river earlier, with that same bizarre triple affectation. She spun to look upon me and held in her hands no fewer than twenty hot dogs, buns and all. “It’s almost 6pm. Get him prepped. We begin at once!”
“PLEASE SIGN - THIS RELEASE - OF LIABILITY - IN THE - CASE OF - SEVERE INJURY - OR DEATH,” screamed the boatswain. I signed it. Afterall, what else was I doing? A burlap sack was slapped onto my head and I was pushed and prodded down into some secret part of the ship. The sounds of general fun and pirate friendship were replaced with a chant that started very low, almost imperceptible, until it grew so loud that I couldn’t hear anything but those words over and over for weeks after.
“HOT HAM CRAM JAM!
HOT HAM CRAM JAM!
HOT HAM CRAM JAM!”
When they finally took the sack off my head I was in what could only be described as a “theatre in the round, but for hot dogs and the sport of eating them.” The crowd, which must have been thousands strong, had murder in their eyes. I could only assume that they hated hot dogs and came only to see as many of them destroyed as possible. Next to me were the three other competitors: a slight man wearing a smoking jacket who seemed unphased by all of this, a large cannon covered in a burlap sack, and the guy wearing all Nike gear.
“My name is Gareth and I work at Nike,” said the man in the smoking jacket.
“My name is Nike and I work at Gareth,” said the man in the Nike gear, “I’m Gareth’s assistant. I guess technically I work at Nike too.”
“I’m a cannon, no one pay attention to me,” said the obviously not-cannon.
“I didn’t realize that we were introducing ourselves and I feel a bit of a disadvantage. My name is Hornbeam and ‘I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.’ Werner Herzog said that.” I said, feeling insecure and falling back on my winter persona.
“FINE! I lied! I’m not a cannon! I’m actually lyrical, satirical, and sometimes empirical,” the crowd roared as the “cannon” removed its covering to reveal that it was, in fact, Captain Pendreghast. “I will be competing in the Hot Ham Cram Jam this evening. Whoever wins against me gets to join my crew! Whoever loses… well… they get dead!”
I knew I should have read the liability waiver. I pondered my predicament as the hot dogs were placed in front of me and the captain fired the starting shot. If we were doing some in media res stuff I’d probably say something like “I bet you’re wondering how I got here,” but you know how I got here, I just told you in all those words above these words. I stopped thinking and started stuffing my face.
There are many techniques for eating a hot dog and all of them were on display that day in the humid and sweaty hold of The George R.R. Martini. Gareth employed the ‘dog slide’ in which he removed the dogs from the buns and let the whole separated pork meat product slide down his gullet. Then he would dip the bun in water and shove the mush into his mouth. Nike utilized the ‘dip, grip, n’ rip’, in which you grip the entire dog from shoes to cap, tip to nips, and dip the whole dog in water, then take a huge bite, then rinse and repeat. Captain Pendreghast was attempting something totally new to me, something I’ve never seen in my years of sometimes watching the Kobayashis and the Joey Chestnuts as they slam Nathan’s hot dogs year after year. I watched in both horror and delight as she crushed the dogs into tiny balls and shoved them into her mouth before taking a huge draught of water and chewing two or three times before reloading. As I looked at my competition, I realized that I would need to be on a whole new level. You see, what I failed to tell you and my rivals was that I am not “Hornbeam,” but I am actually 17-time competitive hot dog eating champion Mortimer Durango, who made his name not only for the quantity of hot dogs consumed but for the style in which he did it. I had been testing a new technique for many months, a style I called the ‘Durango Dangle.’ It wasn’t quite ready yet, but what ever is? It was either succeed, or die. It was time to dangle with the devil. Fuck, that’s a good name for it too.
The idea for the Durango Dangle is to hold the dog above your head and let gravity bring it to you before loading another in the chamber. The trick is to constantly be chomping. Never stop opening and closing those little teefies. Munch a bunch and I’ve got a hunch you’ll have a helluva lunch. These are all marketing pitches I’m working on because once this thing hits, it’s gonna be bigger than the freakin’ yo-yo in the early to mid 2000’s. So I craned my neck up, I brought the dog into position and I started chomping but when I dropped the dog it just hit me in the forehead. Fine, when we drop a dog on the floor we pick it up and eat it again. We all know the old saying in the hot dog competitive eating scene. So I tried again. It fell again. Now I look over to see that everyone is 5 or 6 dogs ahead of me. That’s almost impossible to make up. I’ve got to pull this out. Come on, Durango. Do it for Werner. The world can’t be all shit and piss, it’s gotta be milk and honey sometimes too. Maybe there’s even some ketchup, as a treat. So I dangled again and this time something clicked. I’m chewing through these hot ham tubes like a paper shredder, but for meat. 20, 30, 40- eventually I lose count. I entered a flow state where it was just me and the dogs. I checked the time to see we’ve got 10 minutes left and I checked the competition to see that they’ve hit the wall. Gareth is choking on whole dogs, Nike is just doing it (and by it I mean vomiting), and the Captain is looking fully loaded and ready to blow. In fact, as I turned to look at her, she locked eyes with me and then shot a blast of hot dog balls out through the upper decks of the ship. Through the hole that got blasted out I could see the stars smiling upon me.
They raised my hands in victory but I couldn’t hear them any more. I had reached a higher plane of existence. Everything dropped away and I finally saw God.
When I came to the doctors said that the amount of sodium that I had consumed alone should have killed me, and that I was lucky to be alive. They were right, and I was lucky enough to join Pendreghast’s crew and call myself her first mate. We go sailing to new ports every day and I hardly have any reason at all to quote Werner Herzog. What a fucking dream.
Years later, we sailed into Astoria and I saw a man on the docks whose eyes seemed to say “do you not hear the horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence?” I lifted up my arm and pointed.
“HOT DOG - EATING CONTEST - YOU’RE COMPETING.”
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