The651.com

After a summer-full of Staycationing with my son, a well deserved dad break was in order.  I decided to attend The Guy Expo at the River Centre Convention Hall in downtown St. Paul and participate in a chicken wing eating competition.
My first foray into the world of “Competitive Eating Contests” started with a simple question.

“What size Elvis jumpsuit would you like to wear?”  The coordinator of the Guy Expo asked me, as I was preparing to partake in an Elvis themed Chicken Wings Eating Competition.

“Medium,” I replied.

“The Elvis suits are quite see-through,” the coordinator said, “So you might want to wear underwear, you know, just in case you weren’t going to wear any to the event.”

“Good to know.”

In the days leading up to the event, I prepared for the competition by pumping my entire digestive system with Imodium, Prilosec, and Tums.  I ate rice cakes to expand my stomach.  I solicited advice from a duo of carnivorous all-stars:  My friends Gumbo and J.R.

“There’s a difference between Wings and Drums,” Gumbo told me, sounding like some sort Meat Professor  “If they give you drummies, you gotta stick it in the back of your mouth, by your molars, and chomp, then spin it, and then chomp it again.”

“But if they give you wings, there will be two bones.  Use your two index fingers to push the meat out.  Then rotate the wing like a top,” J.R. said.  Then he demonstrated a technique that can only described as a “cannibalistic mouth harp”.

On the day of the event, I was greeted at the competition stage by a man dressed as Elvis.  His ivory white jumpsuit was bedazzled with jewels.  His Elvis inspired twitching and snarling made it look like he had a case of Las Vegas Turrets.

“Are the wings in the competition spicy?”  I casually asked Elvis Guy.

“Oh, yeah,” he said.  “You gonna feel it the morning.”

Yikes.

Back stage, I changed into my Elvis jumpsuit with a bunch of dudes.  They had bellies and wore backwards baseball caps and were clearly in it to win it.  I was literally out-manned.

“I’m pretty sure I’m going to eat all 25 of my wings,” boasted the guy with his Elvis shades hanging near his navel.

“Hell yeah,” roared a fellow contestant.

We took the stage and I sat directly in the middle of a long cafeteria style table.  A few hundred spectators stood watching.  Twenty feet away, a UFC cage fighting ring had been set up and several men grappled and wildly smacked the crap out of each other.

“OOOOOKKKKAAAYYYY,” Elvis Guy bellowed into a microphone. “It is time for round two of the Chicken Wing Eating Competition.  Here are the rules:  Each contestant gets 25 wings.  Eat as many as you can in 5 minutes.”

The audience started to clap.  The UFC fighters stopped smacking the crap out of each, scurried up to the top of the cage, and sat there watching like a flock of crows.  The audience filled with guys and their beer swillin’ girlfriends.

“For a wing to count, the contents of the wing have to stay in your stomach for two minutes,” Elvis Guy said.  The crowd clapped in hysterics.  Then a woman in a polyester referee’s shirt placed a barf bucket in front of me.

I looked over at the contestant sitting directly to my right and said, “Forget the bucket.  I need a diaper.”

The competition started.  I flipped open my box of Pizza Hut wings to find that they were coated in some sort of Napalm orange Buffalo sauce.  And they were boneless.  I chomped down on my first wing and my mouth instantly filled with some sort of meat-ish texture that tasted like something between a Chicken McNugget and the rubber toe of my Converse Chuck Taylors.  As I shoveled wing after wing into the orifice that used to be known as my mouth, I openly gasped for air.  Then a woman in the audience who was wearing a tight tank top that read “Beer Me!” across the chest, yelled, “Come on.  Eat it!”  At that exact moment, when I was heckled by a floozy at the Guy Expo, I felt like (a) weeping, or (b) drinking a vat of activated charcoal to remove the contents of the wings from my stomach.  I finished with a respectable total of 9 wings.

I returned home and found my lovely wife nestled in bed.  “How’d it go?”  Sarah asked.  I shrugged, careful as to not disturb the noxious contents of my stomach.  Then my feelings of regret of entering the competition manifested themselves.  I burped up a belch that was so toxic the Federal Government instantly raised the terror threat level in the Twin Cities.

“Oh, not good,” Sarah said, as she shrank under the covers.