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The crowd squirms, cranes necks, points. One thirty-something
man, tanned and lean, his muscled bicep sporting a ship's anchor
tattoo, pops pierogi like a stoker at the nearby mills shovels
coke. Shove, two, three, a gulp of water and one goes down the
gullet. Soon he's eaten five, seven, ten and no one else is even
close; he leaves them lost in his dust, or in this case, butter.
The teenagers circulate with more plates of pierogi, but most
contestants don't finish their first helping, the glue-like innards
of the thick turnovers expanding in their mouths, choking off
their air. The tattooed man stuffs, swigs, swallows and a second
plate is passed down, and then a third, until he's eaten 28 pierogi.
Finally, mercifully, time is called; three minutes are up. The
winner smiles, shakes hands, exchanges high-fives with his admirers.
"I'm from Akron, I'm Polish, and I've come all this way
for a good pierogi!" he says, drawing a smattering of applause
from the crowd. He takes home the grand prize-tickets and a limousine
ride to a Cleveland Browns football game, down at the new stadium
on the lake.
The second [and third] place finishers hold a coin toss, as both
ate 14 pierogi. One of the "winners" is a barrel-chested
wide-stomached young man of 22, the other a 40 year old with
a full beard and mumbled speech.
"He's got no teeth," says my friend, who lives in the
neighborhood.
"C'mon," I say, not quite believing him.
"Hey, living down here, we're just lucky we have only four
fingers and one thumb on each hand," my friend says. I close
my eyes and breathe, inhaling the fragrance of french fries,
potato pancakes, kielbasa and smoke from the nearby steel mills.
"Hey, who wants a pierogi?" the emcee says. Thanking
the crowd for coming, he reminds them that "Our neighborhood
is coming back," and passes around a plastic plate as the
masses surge forward, buzzing around him until the plate is empty,
the crowd has gone, and the plaintive sound of a slow waltz dances
in the heavy air.
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