A breeze wafts off the river, but it does nothing to soothe the yearning in the young man. He gnashes his teeth slowly, unaware that he’s even doing so. His gums itch, the exposed parts between his teeth especially so. He wants nothing more than to scratch that itch with a big bite of food, meat preferably, followed by a satisfying chew and swallow. And another, and another. All to fill the hollowness inside him, to satisfy that craving.

Matt is hungry. Matt must feed.

He’s planned this well, sitting as he is on the patio of Kampot’s most popular expat restaurant. The Rusty Keyhole is known for its cheap beer and ribs, the sign above the door touting a Phnom Penh newspaper’s claim that it has the ‘best ribs in Cambodia’. Probably not much competition for that one, but still. Matt’s not here for the ribs–well, technically he is–moreover he’s here to train. He’s just ordered one full-rack and one half-rack (and their sides), when Ran spots him from across the street and strides up with a lady-friend in tow. The lanky Israeli followed Matt back from Koh Rong, having his own fill of the balmy island.

“Hey, I’m Matt,” the American stands up to introduce himself to Ran’s friend.

“Tamzin,” she tells him. “Don’t worry if you can’t pronounce it right.” She gets this a lot.

“Tamzen?” Matt tries.

“Close enough.”

The chivalrous guys pull over some spare chairs to the former table-for-one, scraping the metal furniture across the rough concrete sidewalk that is Rusty’s (un)official patio. The comparably shorter woman does most of the talking, bringing Matt up to speed. She’s Canadian, which her pale skin certainly corroborates. She’s just starting her Southeast Asian tour after finishing her training to become a doctor. She’s a full MD now, eager to get a tan and have some time to herself after years of grueling schooling. She met Ran at Mad Monkey the other day and they’d become something of an (un)official travel couple for the time being.

When the ribs finally come (at the same time as the couple’s later-ordered mammoth chicken burrito and fajita), Tamzin’s shocked. “That’s all for you?”

The two plates have what appear to be teriyaki-glazed, lightly-charred bricks of meat. A few bones peek out from underneath, but they are unlike any ribs in the States, much closer to a roast of some kind.

“Yeap,” Matt glances at his watch, “I’m in training.” He doesn’t look up from pulling a slice out of the block and shredding the tender white meat between two forks. It’s nearly falling apart on its own. On top goes a scoop of mashed potatoes, followed by a heavy dash of malt vinegar. He mixes it all together. “They have an eating challenge here. It’s two full-racks of the ribs which is a kilo of meat, like two-and-a-quarter pounds.” He lifts a forkful of his pork-mix. “And what’s gotta be like a pound of potatoes.” He takes his first bite. “In wess dan an hour,” he slurs through the food.

“Wow. That’s uh, that’s impressive.”

He grins around the sweet and savory mouthful, nodding. He gets this reaction a lot. He keeps up progress through the conversation, which is mostly handled by the other two. Soon one plate is reduced to a pile of bones, but the pace slows considerably midway through the second. Each bite is a struggle, but after almost two hours, he does it.

“Tada,” Matt groans, letting his fork clatter to the plate. It’s not as much food as the challenge and nowhere close to fast enough. This is gonna be brutal.

Tamzin whips her head back to him. “Did you just finish?! I didn’t even see you do that last bit.” She looks at the plate, then up, then back at the plate.

Ran beams his friend’s triumph. “Mazel tov! [Congratulations!]” he half-jokes in Hebrew.

“I just… I just wanna go to bed and do nothing but slowly roll around for the next few hours…”

“Are you staying at the Mad Monkey, too?” Tamzin asks.

“Nah, I wanted to try out a few different places. I’m staying at a place called Magic Sponge close to the center of town. You should come by tomorrow for dinner, they have the best Indian food in town.” Matt winces. “Definitely come tomorrow, I’m not eating anything tonight. And I don’t mean to cut this short, but like, I’m going now.” He sticks his thirteen dollars under a glass of water and leaves the amused couple behind.

The dull, throbbing pain hasn’t subsided much after the walk back to the hostel. Matt pushes through a pair of swinging saloon doors dividing the interior from the gated courtyard of the Magic Sponge. There’s a miniature mini-golf course outside, looking a tad abandoned, though in the evenings, sloshed backpackers give it a whirl. He leaves the ‘course’ behind when he steps into the bar that makes up most of the ground floor of the hostel. A pair of fans whirl overhead, welcome in the midday heat.

“Hey man!” Steve spots him first, snapping to attention when he sees who it is. “You want a beer?” He’s sitting on the stools for the patrons, but leans one hand up and over to the row of taps.

Steve’s got an all-American voice, a voice fit for radio. It’s a little bit deep, a little bit gravelly, with a energetic cadence that harkens back to his New York upbringing. He’s left his family, something about them being small-minded hicks who can’t go ten sentences without talking about fishing. Now he spends most of his time teaching English to the local kids: the school kids in the morning, the rich kids in the afternoons, and the working kids (the ones who have to spend their days working at their parents’ shops) in the evenings. The working kids are his favorite, he’ll tell you with a flick of the straw-woven fedora he wears every day. They really listen, they really want to learn. He adjusts his hat as he goes on. One time he told one of them not to be ‘such a wiseguy’, and a week later heard them using the phrase properly out during recess. They really care.

After a year in Kampot, dealing mostly in broken English, he’s ecstatic to hear Matt’s American accent and get a taste of home.

Steve doesn’t work at the Magic Sponge, not officially, but he’s such a common sight that the owners let him man the bar, sort of.

“No thanks, I just ate a shitload of ribs.”

“You did the food challenge?” Rafa chimes in from the far end of the room, two frosted mugs in his hands and a grin on his face. “You really did it?!”

Rafa, short for Rafael, is the probably-Spanish bartender. He retired from his semi-pro UFC career a few years back, though how the wiry frame put up much of a fight isn’t obvious. He travelled the world with his fiancee Jess and lives out here in Kampot with her now.

Oh, Jess. While Rafa can become distracted from clearing the bar or taking orders by stories or the TV showing whatever movies they can stream from the far corners of the internet, Jess never messes around. She’s the real boss around here (despite not actually owning the Magic Sponge). She’s a slight British woman, only just now hurdling thirty, but her ever-present half-scowl and no-nonsense attitude makes her seem both larger and older. Matt and the row of nameless, grey-haired geezers that fill the rest of the stools and practically live on this fifty-cent-a-pint bar are glad for Rafa’s shifts when Jess isn’t there to mother them.

“No, I only did one full-rack and a half today.” Only. “I’m working my way up. I’ll try the real one the day after tomorrow.” Matt sways as though he’s as drunk as the elderly bar flies.

“Why even try, man? It’s a ton of food, it’s too much.” Steve doesn’t get it.

But this has been Matt’s thing for six years now.

* * *

July 9th, 2008, a momentous day for the twenty-one year-old Matt Schiller (though he doesn’t know it yet).

He’s in The Woodlands, Texas, a residential suburb north of Houston, working as a summer intern for a small energy trading firm, a minor subsidiary of AIG. What energy trading is isn’t important (educated gambling and insurance surrounding oil/electricity prices), and what Matt does for them isn’t either (mostly updating Excel spreadsheets and SQL queries). What is important is what he and his coworkers are going to order for lunch.

“We’ve got a few choices,” Mark, the head of the office starts off in his quiet-but-commanding tone. He walks over from his side of the room with a few pamphlet menus and drops them on his intern’s desk. “You can choose today.” One of the perks of the job is the company-ordered lunch every day.

“Is this ‘Mel’s Country Cafe’ place any good?” the youth asks, picking up a menu and flipping through. The pictures of glistening steaks and sides caught his eye. “I’ve been in Texas for like, three weeks already and haven’t had any ‘real’ barbeque.”

“Are you kidding me?!” Scott’s voice fills the room that is their shared office. He’s loud and boisterous, being the first to have his say over the course of his now-adult life. It’s his job to make contacts at other firms to fill the buy and sell orders their market predictions dictate. “Mel’s is the best! We gotta get Mel’s now, guys!” He’s addressing Mark and Young Bill.

Young Bill’s desk sits just next to Scott’s, so he’s used to this kind of outburst and doesn’t even turn to look at him. Perhaps he’s long-deaf in his left ear. “You want some barbeque, Matt?” Young Bill is calm and easy, his voice is almost a whisper, at least compared with his teammate. He’s also a trader, and while he’s Mark’s second-in-command, he does pretty much the same job as Scott. Albeit in a totally different manner.

“Of course I do.” The New York kid flips through the Country Cafe’s offerings. “What’s this one?” He reads from the bottom of the page, “The Mega-Mels?”

“Ohohoho!” Scott laughs with a hint of caution. “You don’t want to try that one!”

Matt reads the description anyway. “Six quarter-pound patties, a pound of bacon, a quarter pound of cheese, and all the trimmings.” He pauses. “I could do that.”

Mark, usually the most serious, takes his turn to laugh. “We had an intern last year who tried it and he couldn’t do it.”

“So?” Matt had been a fat kid growing up; eating was his wheelhouse. Meat was especially the kind of food his dad had loved to make for dinner, real ‘stick to the ribs’ food he would call it,  “I could eat it.”

“Sure you can!” Scott scoffs goodnaturedly. “And read the fine print. You gotta do it in sub-two hours.”

“I say we let him go for it,” Young Bill, who hasn’t turned away from Matt, winks. “We don’t have time to drive all the way out there for lunch, only delivery, so let’s do a dinner thing out of it.”

“Yeah!” Scott’s doubt flips to excitement over a show. “I could bring the twins!” He’s referring to his sons, both eleven years old. “You in, Bill?” He’s addressing Old Bill.

Old Bill finally looks up from his monitor at the end of the row. His white hair swoops back to reveal old-man-bulbous ears and nose, perpetually reddened by whatever affliction ails old Irish men. He’s not so incredibly old, barely over sixty most likely, and full of fury, but compared to the others in their thirties and forties, he’s the grampa. He sighs as he’s wrenched from his coding session, poised to make another crack about how he’s the only one who does any real work on the team. Give him a chance and he’ll tell you all about the days of coding with punch cards and COBOL, whatever that is. “I’m not going out to dinner with you idiots, I have plans. Figure out what we’re ordering for lunch and stop bothering me.”

Young Bill smirks, appearing almost his intern’s age for a moment, though he has a wife and infant son at home. “Does six work for you, Mark?”

“Sure does.”

Matt smirks too, remembering the last time they went out together. It was for his twenty-first birthday–just two weeks ago. The odd couple of Scott and Young Bill had tried to educate him on the virtues of drinking beers like Smithwicks and Allagash over ‘whatever’s cheapest’, but it’d be years until the youth learned that lesson. And over the course of the evening his beer pong-trained liver was able to overrule their insistences that they could match him pint for pint (on his first day of legal alcohol consumption, no less). They’d shaken their heads as wives were called to pick them up from the bar. It was a blast!

“So what’re we gonna get for lunch then?” he asks.

“We’re gonna get Mexican,” Young Bill turns back from the small huddle with Mark and Scott. “You aren’t eating anything until dinner. You’re in training.”

Matt opens his mouth to protest, but thinks better of it.

Twenty minutes later, Susan, the team’s once-Southern-debutante, now-middle-aged receptionist glides in, carrying the food-laden paper bags, one for almost everyone in the office. She stops at the champion-in-training’s desk briefly, just long enough to give him a can of Coke and a vote of confidence.

The young man salivates as those sitting at the desks around him unwrap burritos, quesadillas, and assorted Tex-Mex entrees, and his stomach growls. His instincts tell him to dive over the desks, swipe aside computer monitors, and rip the cheesy, grilled wraps from the others’ hands. Instead he turns to crack open the can that rests next to the oversized mug he’d found earlier. He isn’t thirsty. That mug’s for water, gallons of water. This will be Matt’s first eating challenge-competition-whatever, and the internet says over-hydrating is crucial, especially when you’re going to be eating something with so much salt in it.

At dinner he can understand why. The burgers, cheese, bacon, pickles, onions, lettuce, everything on the Mega Mel’s taste delicious. At the start.

Scott cheers the challenger on and his twins ask the young man with the tall burger questions about college and video games. Mark watches the gobbling with all the solemness he can muster before bursting into laughter at the ludicrous spectacle. Over and over he stills himself until another fit takes him. Young Bill offers subdued encouragement, “You got this,” sure that his bet with Old Bill–that Matt can do it–will pay off.

His wager may be lost. Soon it becomes a chore to swallow. The once-welcomed saltiness stings Matt’s tongue and from deep inside him come the pangs of compression and stretching of things that should not be compressed or stretched.

The well-wishing continues. Other patrons, who have entered, ordered, and finished their meal already, peer over from their tables to watch the final stretch. Only one patty, and some of the trimmings remain. Will he finish or won’t he? The strangers don’t leave until they know.

The Mega Mel’s Burger doesn’t go down easy. But it goes down. It takes 101 minutes to be defeated, far from a store-record, but it goes down. Matt’s starting grin melted to a grimace over the course of the meal.

Lying in bed that night, the whole experience is foggy already, but bits and pieces remain. At one point he remembers that when the towering burger came out from the kitchen, Scott, filming with his camera†, asking if Matt was hungry.

Gingerly rolling onto his other side, Matt doesn’t want to be hungry for a long time.

* * *

“So, you hungry?!” Tony asks, eager for the spectacle on the Rusty’s patio. With his rectangle-framed glasses and affable skepticism, it’s no surprise to discover he’s from San Francisco, backpacking for a tour of the region. So far he’s seen the misty heights of Bokor Mountain Park as well as the underwater rainforest off the shores of Koh Tao, but he’s never seen anyone attempt a serious eating challenge before. It’s why he’s come out on this Wednesday afternoon. That, and to order his own plate of food.

Matt doesn’t look up at his Magic Mushroom dorm mate. He only has eyes for the two full racks of ribs, just-over two pounds, and the plate next to it, piled with mashed potatoes. “Actually, I’m not. I don’t know why, I just went to the gym for like an hour and I haven’t eaten breakfast… Ah, fuck it.” He shreds a juicy slice of pork and digs in.

Tony watches on, making idle chit-chat, even after his own meager plate of grilled fish and fries is finished. “That’s… impressive,” he says as the first rack is picked clean. The curling of his lips falls between the forced line between encouragement and disgust.

“Mmhmm.” Seriously, Matt gets this reaction like every time. Or maybe it’s because he’s tackling this shirtless. After his stint in Koh Rong, it just feels right.

He lifts the strip of bones out of his way and onto Tony’s mostly empty plate. One half down.

That progress is thwarted, however. At the one-hour mark, the cut-off for victory (and his picture on the wall), the authoritarian waitress, the matron of the whole establishment, comes out to announce that time’s up. Only three-quarters of the meal is finished; Matt couldn’t eat all of this in the time limit, it was just too much, too fast. He’s more of an endurance eater anyway. Even still, he’s doing this for himself, not for the woman or Tony or anyone else–but where are Tamzin and Ran, anyway? They’d said they’d be here to watch‡.

If only he didn’t wish he could stop without feeling like a failure! Who knows, those now-familiar feelings of organ-stretching, of an esophageal traffic jam, of nausea that’s one wrong turn away from a total meltdown, it could all be seriously bad for his health to keep going on? But seeing this through, it was something he’d promised himself. He’d try as hard as he could! If only–

A tapping on his arm. “Please?”

Matt turns to see a small local boy, maybe eight or nine years old, shirtless as well but for a discarded military jacket five sizes too big. He must’ve wandered up when he saw the gorging American flag then fail. “You want some food?”

The boy nods.

Perfect.

“Alright, hold on a sec.” He stops the big woman in the apron who’s hovering to take the plates and leftover food.. “Can I get a box to go? A takeaway box?” He pantomimes.

She doesn’t need the gesture, she has a strong command of the English language and understands right away. A minute later, Matt’s shoveling the succulent ribs, potatoes, and even the ice-cream-scoop of coleslaw he hadn’t touched into the box. He smiles and babbles at the boy telling him how good the ribs at Rusty’s are, all in gratitude for a win-win finish of the challenge.

The boy watches with a hungry smile. His mouth waters and his eyes flicker between the proffered box and the sweaty young man in the chair in front of him before accepting it. He’ll have no problem finishing the food.

† For the curious, here’s the video of the Mega Mel’s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI6f5c-7SjE

‡ The next day, when Matt met up with the couple for drinks, the reason was obvious. Tamzin with a cast and her arm in a sling told the story of how she’d wiped out her scooter on the sand and gravel scattered at the intersection out of Mad Monkey. Ran drove with her to the local hospital where she put her newfound medical training to good use: analyzing the fracture in her left shoulder. She would have to cut her trip short and head home to North America if she wanted proper care and for the joint to heal properly. So her journey ends like many before her have: too early, cut short by a scooter accident. Seriously, they’re like trip-killing machines.

Two full racks of ribs, delicious. And deadly.

Schoolkids rushing home after classes for the day. The fleet of bicycles swarming the roads is a common sight in Cambodia around lunchtime, as most schooling is only a “half-day” to give even full-time students time to help their family’s business.

He certainly gives everyone else a run for their money for ‘Cutest kid in Kampot’.