A Really Awesome Mess (16 page)

I HAD TO HAND IT TO HER. EMMY WENT UP TO THE BOOTH NEXT TO
the stage like she did this every day and tried to enter the hot dog eating contest.

The woman seated in the booth looked like she had won a few eating contests of her own in her day, and she shook her head. “Darlin’, this is the state fair. You don’t just walk up and enter a contest with Joey Chestnut! Every farm boy with a big appetite for two hundred miles figures, well, if that kid can win, so can I. They started signing up right after the last one ended. And bless your heart, you’re no bigger than a minute. Unless you’ve got a hollow leg, I don’t see how you’d stand much of a chance against this field. Now how many tickets do y’all want?”

Emmy walked away looking dejected. “Well, I tried.”

“The contest was a chickenshit move anyway,” Jenny said.

We all walked on for about two steps before any of us realized that Jenny had just spoken.

“Wait wait wait,” Tracy said. “You just talked!”

Chip went up for the high five, but Jenny left him hanging. “I mean. I thought this was, like, we were all trying our things, and you talked, so …”

Jenny looked at us like it was no big deal, and Emmy was in her face right away.

“Like hell it’s a chickenshit move! You know what’s a chickenshit move? Not talking for months at a time! That’s what’s chickenshit. Hiding from the world behind a wall of silence.”

“I’d just like to jump in here and compliment my friend Emmy on the excellent metaphor,” I said, and while neither she nor Jenny even seemed to notice that I said anything, Diana nodded in agreement.

“Entering an eating contest is a chickenshit move because everybody barfs in eating contests. It’s kind of expected. It’s part of the sick reason sick people watch them,” Jenny clarified.

“Hey!” Diana yelled. “That’s actually a big part of why I like ‘em. Can’t resist a good puke scene, you know?”

“So,” Jenny continued, “that way you were gonna get to eat without having to worry about the food staying with you and giving you boobs somebody might actually want to see.”

Emmy sputtered, and Jenny, seeing her opponent on the
ropes, went for the KO. “So the whole time you were giving us a pep talk, you were thinking about how you could weasel out of your thing.”

Emmy looked kind of ashamed.

“Damn,” I said. “That is some freaking brilliant manipulation! I would have thought only Tracy could have done that. My hat is off to you. Or it would be, if I had a hat.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Emmy said. “I mean, it wasn’t really a conscious thing. And I’m not chickenshit. Diana. Order me a Whopping Wiener with everything.”

Diana ran off, grinning, and returned with the Whopping Wiener.

After Diana’s earlier “wiener in your mouth” remark, I felt kind of creepy gathering in a circle to watch Emmy eat a big one. But not actually creepy enough not to do it.

And any kind of perverted sexual thrill I might have gotten from the scene dissolved pretty much the instant Emmy took her first bite. The Whopping Wiener, which was smothered in, as near as I could tell, onions, mustard, relish, chili, Cheez Whiz or some similar cheese analogue, and hot sauce that Diana had added with a very heavy hand, was not something that could be eaten sexily. Or even neatly. Or really any way but disgustingly.

But I had to give it to her here, too—Emmy chowed it. Her face was soon a red and yellow mess of chili and Cheez Whiz,
and she stopped only occasionally to belch as she did battle with the Whopping Wiener. It was a quick, if messy battle, and Emmy emerged from it looking stunned, semiconscious, and pleased with herself.

“Nap … kins,” she said as a drip of chili-cheese ran off her chin and plopped to the dirt at her feet. Diana produced a stack and handed them to Emmy, who began slowly cleaning off her face.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Tracy said. “That was straight-up disgusting. Any kind of horniness I might have had evaporated there.”

Emmy looked at him and belched in response. “Oh my God. I missed food. I had no idea how much I missed food. That was horrible and gross and probably the best thing I ever ate. I don’t think I’ve given bingeing a fair shot. Why bother purging one piece of cantaloupe when you can stuff your face and then get rid of it all, right?”

“Don’t even
think
about purging now,” Jenny said.

“Promise,” Emmy said. “I’m gonna let this one run its course. And by the way, I think you’re all gonna be suffering the consequences of that decision when you have to ride in a van with me later. I have no idea what my guts are going to do with chili, but I suspect it’s not going to be pretty.”

“Great,” Jenny said. “Now I wanna show you guys something.”

We followed Jenny through the state fairgrounds, and it was only when we almost got to the livestock barns—at least that was where I thought we were because the smell of hay and crap
was thick in the air—that we realized Chip wasn’t with us.

“Um. Hey Jenny. I hate to interrupt whatever point you’re making here, but it looks like we lost one.”

Everybody stopped and looked around. “Where the hell is Chip?” Emmy said.

“Does looking for his sorry ass count as doing something for someone else?” Diana asked.

“No,” Emmy said.

“Damn.”

“Well, we all know where we’re gonna find him,” Tracy said. “The midway.”

We trudged back to the rows of rip-off carnival games. Sketchy guys in sleeveless T-shirts tried to mock us into throwing rings at ducks or shooting baskets at too-small hoops or throwing baseballs at bottles that were probably made of lead.

“I got him,” Tracy said, pointing at the booth where a row of kids were shooting streams of water into the mouths of clowns.

“I never understood that,” Diana said. “Like, you shoot water into the mouth of the clown and it makes a balloon fill with air and explode. What the hell sense does that make? I’d like it better if the clown’s head exploded. I hate clowns.”

Chip was surrounded by the following items: A medium-sized SpongeBob SquarePants, two large stuffed Dora the Explorers, and a colossal Perry the Platypus.

“Gimme that,” Diana said, grabbing one of the Doras. “You don’t need two.” She tucked it under her arm and gave us all a
look that dared us to make fun of her. I was sure as hell not going to be the one to do it.

Chip was too intent on watering his clown to pay much attention. So Tracy grabbed the squirt gun and turned it on Chip’s face. “Ah! What the hell! I was gonna win that one!” Chip yelled.

“Guys, grab him,” Emmy said, and so Tracy grabbed one arm and I grabbed another. Chip let us lead him away without much of a struggle. He actually looked kind of embarrassed and didn’t protest at all as Jenny and Emmy distributed his winnings to actual children.

“Dammit! I could have totally done that! Why didn’t you tell me?” Diana said when Emmy and Jenny rejoined us.

“Well, see, part of the idea is that you have to actually think about someone else. Not just grab a Dora for yourself and do something else as an afterthought.”

“So if I gave this Dora away now, it wouldn’t count?”

“Right,” Emmy said.

“Thank God,” Diana says. “I really like me some Dora.” She looked at us defiantly.

“So what the hell, Chip?” Emmy said.

“It’s just … I knew I could win that one. And it’s like … it makes me feel good like nothing else does. I just get kind of lost, you know what I mean? I can forget myself for a while. It’s the only thing that works.”

“I hear you,” Tracy said. “I get this buzz off of convincing
people of stupid stuff that I am actually really craving.”

“Yeah,” Diana said. “I used to cut myself for that feeling. But I know what you mean.”

I didn’t, though. Even among a bunch of really sick kids, I was the sickest. Because they had escape valves—weird, unhealthy, and potentially deadly escape valves, but things that made them feel better. I really didn’t have anything like that. Which was part of the reason I took the Tylenol.

“But we were all gonna try to …”

“I did try, Emmy,” Chip said, and it looked like his eyes were filling up. “That’s the thing. I did try. But I mean, if it was as easy as wanting to, I wouldn’t freaking be at Assland in the first place. I mean, are you gonna eat every meal like a normal human from now on?”

“Well—”

“I can answer that,” Diana said. “She’s been thinking about how to burn off those calories ever since that dog hit bottom. She’ll probably try to get away with not eating anything for three days to make up for it.”

“That’s not … I haven’t …”

“You really need to work on your lying skills,” Tracy said. “Nobody believes you right now.”

“Okay,” Emmy said. “So it’s hard. So it doesn’t happen automatically just because you want it to. Does that mean you don’t even try?”

Chip shrugged.

“Deep philosophical shit,” Diana said. “And boring as hell. Can we go see Jenny’s pigs now?”

“I just want you all to know this,” Chip said as we all began ambling back toward the livestock barns, “I want to be gaming every single second I’m here. Every step I take away from those games is hard for me.”

“I know,” Emmy said. “I want to puke really bad right now. You have no idea.”

“And I got my eye on a little farm-fresh cutie over there who would totally believe I’m a redshirt freshman basketball player,” Tracy said.

“And I am a weepy little bitch,” Diana said. “Oh no wait, that’s all of you. Can we please get the pigshit over with now?”

Jenny smiled and patted Diana on the back and led us back to the pig barn.

“Walk around for five minutes and meet me back here,” Jenny said. So we all split up and walked down the aisles of the barn, looking at the pigs. They smelled, but in one pen I saw two nuzzling each other, and that was kind of cute, and in another pen there were a bunch of piglets sucking on their mom, which was completely gross, but the piglets were completely adorable. But, I mean, after you’ve seen four or five pigs, it gets kind of boring, at least from my perspective. I had no idea what Jenny wanted us to get out of this.

We all met back at the front of the barn, and Jenny started talking.

“I’m not gonna say anything else all night because I’ve talked enough, and I hate it. I just want you to know this: Every pig you saw there tonight is going to be killed and will die screaming. And these pigs here, pigs like the one I raised, those are the lucky ones. The pigs you don’t see are the ones crammed into pens where they don’t even have room to turn around. They spend their lives in their own shit and vomit, they get gross patchy hair from the diseases they have, most of them have broken teeth from trying to bite through the metal bars that hold them in, and oh yeah, they’re all so insane they make us look healthy.”

“So what?” Diana barked. “So we’re supposed to all stop eating meat? So we’re supposed to burn down the slaughterhouses? Why the hell are you telling us this, anyway?”

Jenny, true to her promise, didn’t say a word.

“Uh, buzzkill,” Tracy said.

AFTER CHECKING OUT THE PIGS—NONE WERE GETTING MASSAGES
, playing soccer, or jamming out to tunes like Jenny’s
Pigs Rule
list suggested they might be—we hit the hot dog eating contest. Diana was busy drooling over Joey Chestnut, who was probably thirty years old and just about as attractive as you’d imagine a guy who gorges himself on wieners for a living to be, when I spotted this tiny Asian woman stuffing her face right along with him.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and just like that any fun I’d been having at the fair faded into a familiar black hole of anger and futility. The lady looked like she barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she was chowing down like a Biggest Loser contestant before going on the show.

I quickly ran some numbers in my head: One hot dog was
around one hundred and ten calories. The bun basically doubled that. And here was this woman who, according to the announcer, would quite possibly eat over forty of them in just ten minutes. That was nine thousand calories right there. At that rate, she’d gain nearly three pounds in less time than it took to watch an episode of
CSI
.

But the thing was, she was still thin enough not to set off my overly sensitive chub-o-meter. And she clearly entered contests like this all the time, because she was giving Joey Chestnut a run for his money up there, so it couldn’t be that she restricted her eating anywhere near as much as I had to. Ditto for purging: No amount of puking in the world would eliminate all of the damage she did as a professional eater.
How does she do it?
I wondered again and again, and kept coming up with nada. Zippo. Zilch.

It was like, nothing made sense anymore. Nothing had turned out the way I’d planned it. None of this was what I’d wanted. Though I tried hard not to lose it, I started sobbing like a complete baby. Everyone—including Diana, who came here specifically to get off on Joey’s eating abilities—was all over me in a matter of seconds asking what was wrong. Even Jenny hugged me.

“She … she’s … still … skinny!” I finally managed to choke out.

“Remember how you said I had to be one hundred percent, totally honest here?” Tracy asked.