Cheap McNuggets at the gates of Heaven

I placed second in an impromptu Chicken McNugget eating competition when I was in the 12th grade for the second time, and it taught me more about being alive than anything I was ever taught in school.

There was a time—and this is me being old and wistful for the past but also just a careful reminiscence of what was once possible—that McDonald's had cheap days for staple items on the menu. Cheeseburgers were $.39 on Wednesdays, regular hamburgers were $.29 Tuesdays. I believe Fridays were for the Filet O’ Fish, which I can’t imagine ever being a particularly popular day, and if anything it was respite for the line cooks overworked Monday through Thursday. How exhausting it must be, keeping up with the eager demands of thrifty patrons loading up on their weekly bread. McNuggets were on Thursday, a 6-piece for $.79, and for a while, it was perfect.

This is my memory of the facts, and the dates might be off, the numbers might be skewed, but everything else is as real as any memory can be. This is to say, it is perfect and fallible. It is hazy. But it is real, and I know it is real because I was as there as I have been anywhere. I can still smell the truth of the day when I think about it. The musty odour of a fresh McNugget, food that smells like a dare unchallenged, blending with bulk floor cleaner and wild panic.

By my second attempt at completing the 12th grade, I had firmly found my place among the skate kids, the burnouts, and the punk rock kids. These were and remain often overlapping circles. We skipped class, often searching for adventure, but mostly in the name of smoking weed in my prized 1988 Datsun Maxima. A four-door sedan with rear-wheel drive, an inline-six engine that talked, saying things like door is ajar, and gas tank is low in a sweet robotic monotone. You can imagine how thrilling it is to be as high as the moon in the perfectly clear winter sky, driving in slow circles in a half-empty parking lot in a car warning you that the door is open, and it is dying of thirst. You can imagine heaven if you try.

At lunch on the day of a McDeal, we were free because we had something to look forward to. We had food on the horizon, we could taste the salt and the sugar and could consume it in high number. We had something to love, something we told ourselves would love us back in time. There was a kid we knew who always brought his lunch to school in a large decommissioned ammunition box, and he would buy as many as he was allowed to purchase (limit 10 per customer, but this was a rule loosely enforced). Rumour was that he would eat what burgers he could gather throughout the week, leaving them in a camping cooler on his deck and while we never proved it, it certainly was the kind of prep work a kid bringing his regular lunch in an ammo box would do. He was like a squirrel, storing his little treats and treasures for future needs instead of living his life all at once. But we lived for destruction, and we ordered as many as we were allowed and sat there until we were done, or until they were done with us.

It took longer than expected to decide on turning the day competitive. Maybe because we loved it, maybe because we held too tight to the ritual of it all, the planning and the meeting at the car. Who gets shotgun, and who would choose the CD for the drive downtown? Who had money anyway? Was there gas? The car will tell us if there isn’t. These days were ours, and they were the days we lived for every week and even then, I think we knew we could ruin this for ourselves. What do we have when we no longer have the love we have allowed to become a craving? But one day it was an idea, something said in a car moving swiftly down the road, across the Yukon River bridge and away from school for just a minute. How many McNuggets could you eat if you could eat forever?

I didn’t know, but I was young, and I was foolish and brash and a little high, and I said 50. I could eat 50, easily. I could leap over a mountain if you asked. I was young, and I was a liar, and I have never been as invincible as I was when both of those things were true. No one in the car thought I could do it. 50? Impossible. So, we challenged each other, as we drove downtown listening to whatever the co-pilot had decided was the soundtrack that day. Likely NOFX, but I can’t be certain, and I am no longer invincible enough to pretend.

Here are the rules, in case you want to do this yourself, although I would advise against it now. But also, I’m now 43 where I was once 17, and when you’re 43 being alive is something very different.

• No one is allowed to leave the table once the competition begins
• You have to choose your dipping sauce at the start, and stick to it
• Each contestant starts with 24 nuggets, to avoid waste if they tap out
• If you vomit, you’re out baby
• We assigned runners to go to the counter and order more nuggets as needed. This is an important relationship, someone needs to be able to see when you need a refill, and get enough that they won’t be running every minute of their life.
• Your honour tracks how many you have eaten
• Time limit is an hour
• If you vomit, you’re out baby

We ordered our initial run, chose our sauces as if they were pistols on a table, and sat. Someone snacked from a side of fries they ordered because “they panicked”, which would be their undoing. Like showing up to a knife fight and shooting yourself in the hand before anyone sees the hint of a blade glinting in the sun. None of us had drinks, and we made a last-minute change to the rules to allow beverages, but they had to be Sprite. Then we started.

I ate quick, but not overwhelmingly so. I dunked nuggets gently in the sweet and sour sauce I selected with foolish pride. I had gone with a personal flavourite instead of a competitive edge, and when I’m honest with myself, I still regret it. I ate 6 quickly, faster than I ever have before, and I felt alive. I felt like 50 was just around the corner. I thought about how happy I would be when I hit it. How I would show everyone who doubted me just what I was capable of. My slight and tender frame held nuggets in the hidden pockets of my bones, and stashed them away like careful secrets. I ate 6 more, and watched as the first competitor backed out when he hit 14, held back by the fries he had snacked on before the start was announced. There were 5 of us now, and I was still in the fight. I ate faster in defiance of the first failure to fall. Another bailed at 18, and then there were 4.

I felt sick, but just a little. Washed the unease down with slow sips from a medium Sprite, victory washed down with crystalline water. I had a second wind, rounded 20, kept going. Runners who could see the numbers in front of us start to dwindle had returned with fresh batches, and one thing you learn in an eating competition is how the food in your hand is going down easy because it has cooled and settled. The fresh batch is hot and it is eager, and it burns a little when you bite with desperation. Another tapped out at the first bite of a fresh and warm nugget, then rushed off to vomit in the bathroom.

In the distance as they disappeared into the change rooms, the sound of someone playing Mario Tennis on the Nintendo 64 kiosks behind the order line. The sound of rubber soles squeaking on a once clean floor in rapid decline. The beep of cash registers, and orders yelled. Someone called out for Nuggets as if it was a announcement for us, and with each loud order of our prey we cheered with obnoxious pride.

We were down to 3 competitors.

I started to regret the sweet and sour sauce. Each new package I tore open stung my nostrils before I could even taste it. So sweet, and so tart, and such a stark reminder of leaning too hard on the only thing you hold dear in this life. I chose sweet and sour because I didn’t like the other sauces, and I didn’t like them because I had never tried them. But all the same, despite the bitterness of the sweet and sour, I kept going. All the way through 20, past my initial 24, and then onto 30. The pace of my body slowed, my limbs moved at a speed counter to the clock on the wall. Time marched ceaselessly on, even as our internal clocks set themselves to a slower rhythm.

We stared at each other with tender animosity. We had once been friends, coming here to load our bodies with the cheap offerings of the week, but now we were something more to each other. We kept going. I watched a friend of ours, a mountain of a man who ate McNuggets with the alarming ferocity of a hungry and desperate bear when the leaves start to fall to the cold dirt at their feet, send runners for more. His number seemed incalculable, and I knew I could never win. I looked at the remaining third of the competition across the table from me who ate with a pace similar to mine, a man who was also twice as large as me but tender-hearted than the clear winner, and I knew we were keeping pace with each other. I kept going. Raced the clock. Past 30, then 35.

They tasted bad. I had loved these little deliberately-misshapen nuggets when the hour began. Each new offering dunked in sticky sauce had been a gift to myself. Tasting heaven only cost $.49, and each bite brought me closer to God. Only now, as 40 approached, did I consider that I never believed in God in the first place? I had forsaken myself, and each new nugget brought to my mouth made me want to die. But I had claimed 50, and I was so close, and I had to keep going. Runners announced the time we had left. Minutes before we had to go. I ate faster, no longer tasting anything. No longer feeling anything. I ate so fast that I could no longer think. I just knew the core functions of my body. Hand in the box, pick up a nugget, dunk generously, eat in one bite if you can. A little Sprite if your throat feels like it can no longer allow entry for oxygen to commune with the blood. We had minutes left, and I pushed my body to ignore its desires to quit.

Keep going.

Push.

But then, it was called.

Time.

I ate 46. The man across the table from me ate the same. The man who won bragged about how he could keep going, he had eaten 60 and then took one out of the box in front of me and ate it too. Just to prove that he could. We cleaned our mess, my body moved slowly with the weight of everything it had been through. My legs in shock, my arms tired of performing even the simplest of tasks. And then we opened the doors, felt the sun on our face again, took fresh air into our tired bodies, and the man I tied for second place with vomited on his feet in the doorway of the McDonald's.

I had come close to my boast of 50, and I failed. As we walked back to the car, I expected everyone to laugh me out of the driver's seat. I expected my failure to be all that defined me. I regretted my dipping sauce choice, my technique. Maybe I hadn’t been strong enough. Maybe I just wasn’t able to be the person I claimed to be. But when we all slid our tired bodies into the car, all anyone could do was laugh at the shared absurdity of it all. People laughed that I had ever thought I could do 50, but were amazed that I ran the distance to 46. I knew I had failed to reach the goal I had laid out for myself, but it didn’t really matter to anyone but me. Everyone was more amazed that I had been bold enough to try at all. I was free again, laughed about my choice of dipping sauce —fucking sweet and sour? What was I thinking?—and the one bag of fries that had been our friend’s downfall. We shared in our own triumphant failures together, we were bonded by them. The man who won had nothing to claim beyond his own forceful triumph, and I suddenly felt bad for him because there was little to share in victory. It was hollow, lonely. He had won, but what of it. We drove away, and the car reminded us that it too was thirsty.

When we all lost, we lost together, and failure bonded us more than victory ever could at that moment. We struggled with the cheap days after that, because we had ruined it for ourselves by making it more than it ever could be. When we recalled the failure of that day, we did so together. We shared the same fate. I couldn’t smell a McNugget for years afterwards. It smelled like doom on the horizon, and just seeing one made my body feel like I had smoked too many cigarettes too quickly. Sick and hot and flushed, desperate for air. I never once wished I had won that day, and I am glad for all the things that trying and losing has ever given me.