Man Vs.

By Ed Lin

 

 

The first day of unemployment was awesome.

I totally got up half an hour after what I usually set the alarm for. I went down and had a long breakfast at the diner. Pancakes and sausages and bacon.

I decided to walk the familiar route to work and now I could stop in at the places I had always wanted to. I went into a magic store and checked out their giant crystal ball in the back. I rubbed my hands all over it and tried to scrutinize shapes or words from the glow I saw deep in there. The guy told me that anything that showed up in the crystal was just a reflection. The secret was to close my eyes and see with my mind's eye while rubbing my temples. That's why they had a sign that said, "Do Not Touch Crystal."

I closed my eyes and thought hard.

If I had dropped in only a week before maybe I could have gotten a warning about being downsized. If I had known, there wasn't much I could have done, except take the week off or something. I laughed to myself. Hell, I have a lot more than a week off now!

No messages were coming to me so I went back to touching the ball. The guy yelled at me and I could take a hint.

I had overstayed my welcome and, even worse, I definitely wasn't going to buy anything.

I shouldn't have told him I'd lost my job.

I waved to the guy and mouthed, "Thank you," on the way out.

I continued in the direction of the office but I started feeling sick to my stomach. I got a soda from a deli and drank it, hoping things would settle. I felt better after belching out loud as I walked. It was just a funny, stupid thing to be doing, walking down the street, burping and watching people notice but pretend not to. You know how it is in New York. You could walk down the street with knives stuck in your forehead and everyone would walk by like that was normal.

I stopped at the fountain at Bryant Park and saw little rainbows in the water droplets. They were beautiful and they made me feel good about myself. They were way better than that crystal ball. Why should you close your eyes when the rainbow is right in front of you?

I didn't get hungry until late in the afternoon. I decided to go to this 99-cent pizza place on one of the grubby streets by Radio City that the tourists don't know about. I got one plain slice and one with sausage, and I picked off half of the sausage slices and put them on the plain slice. The cashier saw what I was doing and said something.

"Are you making fun of me?" I asked. He shook his head. "I lost my job, so how about giving me a break?"

"You'll be all right," he said.

"Thank you." That was the nicest thing someone had said to me in a long time. I went home feeling pretty good about myself. I watched TV until the phone sex commercials came on. The girls in them seemed to know that I was alone now.

I had been sort of seeing somebody at work. And it really hurt when she told me that I was fired.

When I woke up the next day, I couldn't motivate myself to leave the apartment. I got on the Internet and signed up for unemployment benefits. It was pretty easy, ridiculously easy, actually. I checked my bank account and it made me feel better. I had actually managed to save quite a bit. Food was probably my biggest expense, after the rent. I had an email from Time Warner that said my DVR was getting filled up and some of my saved programs were going to be automatically deleted if I didn't make some adjustments.

I checked the DVR. I had about twenty episodes of "Man Vs. Food." I think a marathon happened and the DVR recorded all of them. I had only seen the show twice but I liked it enough to record the entire series, including repeats.

What was so great about the show was that, here was a guy who concentrated on one thing and just went out and did it, even at the cost of his own health. Late in every season, when he was visibly bloated and semi-catatonic, he would lose some focus but that only slowed him down a little. Adam Richman was a man who could not be stopped.

I felt that if I had a little piece of what Adam had, then maybe I would have been more of a leader at work. There was no other reason why I lost my job to the guy I had once trained. He was already making more than me. I had allowed him to pass me. I should have eaten him up.

Now I was on a mission. I was going to watch all of the "Man Vs. Food" episodes. What the fuck else was I going to do? I checked the description of the oldest episode on my DVR and saw that it was a challenge to eat a five-pound burrito. I thought of something to make the experience even more tangible. I went to the Mexican restaurant run by Chinese people and I got five chicken burritos. There had to be at least five pounds there.

I watched the episode and got ready. To my disappointment, by the time they got around to the challenge, there was about 10 minutes of viewing time left even though Adam had half an hour to eat it. I paused the show and ate for 20 minutes and then hit play so that our time ended at the same point. I had eaten a burrito and a half and then I couldn't eat any more. I chewed two more burritos and spat them out bite by bite. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Adam didn't finish either.

I had learned my first lesson in achieving success -- failure is inevitable. But fear of failing is really fear of succeeding. You have to be a loser before you can be a winner. I went to sleep feeling good.

The next episode's challenge was to eat a three-foot diameter pizza. The key was that there was no time limit. I calculated that the square area of a three-foot circle (Pi R squared. Pie are squared.) was one thousand and 18 square inches.

That was the equivalent of nine 12-inch pizzas. The pizzas were going to be pretty expensive -- even at the 99-cent pizza place. However, Dominos was having a sale on 12-inch pizzas -- buy one get one free, so I ordered five and figured that I would give the extra pizza to the delivery guy for a tip.

The delivery guy was in a pretty good mood when he showed up.

"Where's the party?" he joked when I answered the door. When I told him it was just me trying to imitate "Man Vs. Food," he said, "Oh, yeah, I've seen that shit on TV. That guy's crazy."

Then when I offered him the 10th pizza for a tip, he did a 180 and became furious. "I hate this shit! You think I want one?"

So I held on to the extra pizza and gave him a five. When he got down to the lobby he rang my bell a few extra times to let me know that he was still pissed.

I shook it off and started eating. The first two went down no problem. The third was tough. The fourth one was really hard. Since there was no time limit, I started watching the episode as I took a breather.

That 36-inch pizza was bigger than I had imagined. It looked like a freshly flayed hide. But Adam was geared up. When he was done with half of the pie, I hit pause and tried to eat the fifth one to catch up, but it was too much. I got sick in the toilet and all those half-chewed crusts came up and scratched my throat. I walked back to the living room and saw him standing triumphantly, the pizza, completely vanquished.

I put the rest of the pizzas in the fridge.

Adam was just an incredible human being, unstoppable. I couldn't beat him, but I pledged with my heart to keep pace with him. The next episode was a two-pound cheesecake that had to be eaten in 15 minutes and I knew I could do it. I loved cheesecake and merely two pounds of food sounded so easy to eat.

I went to Junior's at Grand Central and got three slices of cheesecake.

"Does this weigh more than two pounds?" I asked the guy at the counter.

"Oh, yeah. But when you eat them, they become twice as heavy."

When I walked away he called after me. I went back to the counter but he claimed he hadn't said anything.

That night I started eating at the 15-minute mark. One thing that hadn't been apparent from the description of the episode was that the cheesecake was deep-fried. But it's not like that made it harder. In fact, it probably melted down the cake so there was less to eat.

I wolfed down the three slices of cheesecake and luckily I didn't even feel sick. Of course Adam polished it off no problem. I felt like we had accomplished something together.

I folded my hands over my stomach and watched the Q&A session at the end of the show. After a few questions, Adam turned to the camera, as if talking to me, and said, "No cheating, now."

That was weird. I chuckled even as I got goosebumps. I rewound the episode a little bit and there it was again. "No cheating, now."

Creepy. I stood up and shook myself off. Eating those cheesecakes made me really sleepy. I had a lot of fat running through my blood vessels now. I turned everything off and went to bed.

I woke up in the morning with the sound of laughter in my ears. I had a dream about Adam Richman and I trying to eat each other's skin off. I fired up the DVR and TV again to replay that section. I was now fully awake and I heard even more.

Someone in the audience asked him, "Did you know that Ed Lin ate cheesecake that wasn't deep-fried?"

Adam replied, "No cheating, now."

It blew my mind. How could they have known that I would be seeing this episode and eating along with non-deep-fried cheesecake? I never knew I stuck out so much from his many viewers.

I slapped my forehead. Of course!

I had my DVR set up to record all the episodes. Time Warner knew about it. They had probably emailed everybody about it.

Today was Friday. This was the day I usually went to Barnes & Noble on 45th Street after work to browse through the magazines. I thought I had better keep up appearances because I didn't want anybody at the store to think there was something wrong. I was still pretty embarrassed about not having a job.

I noticed something as I was flipping through Guns and Ammo. People were looking at me in a funny way. I didn't pay them much attention but I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me.

Then I realized that they had probably seen that "Man Vs. Food" episode where Adam called me out for cheating. They all thought that I was a cheater. Right after that show they probably Googled me and found my picture. It's not that hard.

When I moved on to Modern Bride, an employee came up and said, "Sir, can I help you?"

"No, I'm all right," I said.

"I got no beef with your reading material, but I was wondering if you could just stop talking to yourself."

"I'm not talking to myself."

 

"You are. You were just saying something about 'Man Vs. Food.' "

"No, I wasn't!" The nerve of this guy! He saw Adam humiliate me on TV and now he was throwing it in my face.

"I don't have to take this!" I said, stomping out of the store.

I had an uncomfortable thought on my way home. I had only seen one episode in which Adam mentioned me. What about all the others? The next episodes could be even worse.

When I got back to the apartment, I played the next episode with the lights out.

The taunting started immediately. During the eating-tour segment, Adam found a sushi place and embraced a huge platter covered with a monster serving.

"The only way Ed Lin could get this in his system is if he shoved everything up his ass!" he crowed.

"That's not fair," I said, hot tears running down my cheeks, "I'm allergic to seafood!"

Then throughout the rest of the show, he took every opportunity to make fun of me. He met this older Asian woman and told her she should be proud that she wasn't my mother.

Then for the finale he beat the nacho challenge and said, "Fuck you, Ed Lin!" to the roaring approval of the crowd.

I now saw the folly of my own naiveté. Imitating someone else didn't make me a leader, it made me a follower. Adam was right to call me out on it. Maybe he didn't have to be so harsh about it.

I turned the channel to the Cartoon Network to make a clean break from anything food-related. I kept hearing Adam's voice. Goddammit, the guy was doing voicework on other shows! He was a new voice on "Metalocalypse." I could hear him saying, "Hello" and "Ed Lin sucks," fairly often, voicing characters hiding behind others or in boxes.

I switched around to different channels before I heard Adam explain that he had been given a voiceover contract for Time Warner in general and could appear on any show at any time.

I turned the TV off. Adam's voice called out from a hidden speaker across the street that if I didn't turn the TV back on, he was going to say even worse things about me. Maybe even mention that I had lost my job because of porn. I had no choice. I turned it back to the Travel Channel and Adam, in a conciliatory one, told me that I should ask Anthony Bourdain for a job because we both like the Ramones.

It was the most constructive comment he had made all day.

I kept the TV on all week and true to his promise Adam never said anything particularly mean. He had all kinds of ideas for finding a new job and kept prodding me to write emails to various people on TV but I was too shy to. They all knew about my situation, after all.

"I promise," I said to the DVR box, "that when my unemployment checks start running out I will write to these people."

"You can use my name for a reference, dude!" he shouted back. "I'm your food in the door!"

"You mean 'foot' in the door."

"No, 'food,' Ed. Think about it!"

Friday rolled around again and I went back to Barnes & Noble. I had to prove to people in the store that I wasn't easily intimidated and I wouldn’t back off from the choices I've made in my life.

Before I got into the store, however, I paused in horror at one of the window displays. It was Adam Richman. He was going to be at the store next week to sign his book. I looked closely at his picture. He had his hands up in a peculiar manner. Three of the fingers on his right hand were pressed together, clearly forming the capital letter "E" for "Ed." His left hand had his thumb and index finger forming a right angle for the capital letter "L" for "Lin." Adam's eyes were looking in the exact direction of my apartment.

He didn't mean to help me at all! He was still fucking with me!

I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. This sign told me something else very crucial. Not only did Adam still have malicious intent toward me, but the staff of Barnes & Noble was all in on it, too. Clearly, they were all out to pressure me to see if I would crack.

 

I went home and shut off the TV. Adam started cursing me from the hidden speaker in the street.

"I don't give a shit!" I yelled back. “You want to fuck with me? I'm gonna fuck with you!"

I only had a week to get ready to be fully prepared. I spent all my waking hours doing push-ups and sit-ups with Adam making fun of me the entire time. I wouldn't stop to listen to him. I had to improve my physical condition as much as I could. I wasn't sure what he was going to pull, so I had to be ready for anything.

When the day of his book signing came around, I waited in the line that was going around the block. I kept my hands in my pockets and my head down. They let us in and I took an aisle seat near the front. Nobody sat with me. Who would after what Adam said about me?

Adam came out and looked at me or pointed at me with every sentence. He joked about my impending "exectution."

When we lined up for the book signing I was the third one.

The first two people talked to Adam for a long time and I heard them put me down and laugh about me but what could I do about that? People always parrot back what they hear on TV.

When it was my turn, Adam slapped my shoulder and said, "Dude! Thanks for coming out for my book thingy. But before I sign your book, dude, you have to tell me your name!"

"Yousayyoudon'tknowmynamebutyousayitallthefuckingtimeonTV!" I said through gritted teeth.

"Ah, ah, dude! I'm just gonna sign your book with my name. You know my name, don't you?"

He put his head down to write in my book. I pulled out a steak knife from my jacket pocket and ran it through his cheek.

"Shut the fuck up about me, motherfucker!" I yelled. People screamed and store employees hustled to get their weapons. I ran for the door. They had placed a woman strapped with a fake baby to try to block my exit. I punched her in the face and ran out into the night.

I had covered more than 15 blocks before I heard sirens coming. I managed to stay ahead. I heard Adam's voice, transmitted from speakers hidden in bases of the lampposts, vowing dire revenge.

"Don't you get it, Adam!" I yelled out to everyone and no one. "I'm the Food! I'm the Food!"

And I knew for sure who was going to win this time.