With a Mouth Full of Burger, No One Can Hear You Scream

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NOTE: Apologies for the lack of pictures, I have yet to make a purchase on a new camera. There should be more up in the next couple days as I receive them from Charlie.

Yesterday, I celebrated the five-month anniversary of life in Southeast Asia; that first blog seems like eons ago! All things considered, my experiences thus far have been massively rewarding and whatever the future holds, I am certain that the ongoing adventure is one I will carry with me from this day until my last. However, such rewards are not possible without their trying moments. Living in Vietnam is essentially one big challenge that can be deftly broken down into many smaller, more manageable challenges. Four times a week I face the challenge of devising a new classroom game to keep a mob of sugar-crazed, puberty-afflicted hooligans occupied for just long enough that they don’t break off chair legs and storm the teacher’s desk. Some mornings, at a quarter-past five, I am challenged to withhold from throwing various blunt objects at the neighbor’s house after being gently culled from sleep by a Vietnamese-language version of “Love Potion #9” blasting through my window at bowel-loosening volumes. More often than not these days, I’m finding it a challenge to update this blog instead of snuggling into the couch corner to catch a repeat of the American Idol elimination show (seriously, this is becoming a problem). However, the challenge that Charlie and I bestowed upon ourselves last week might have been the most grueling, tumultuous affair yet. I am, of course, talking about the Big Cheese Challenge.

Black Cat Restaurant, located downtown on Mạc Thị Bưởi, is, in all respects, a fairly typical foreigner-centered establishment. Western food is served in the form of battered appetizers, herby pastas, stripped down curries, creamy salads, and a more than adequate selection of burgers. It is safe to say that any decently hungry customer who so wishes to sit down, enjoy a reasonably priced meal with a few beers, and leave their table feeling pleasantly satiated will not be disappointed with a visit to Black Cat. In fact, one could spend an evening with friends at the restaurant, eating, laughing, sharing stories, and never suspect a thing to be out of the ordinary. But, as locals and stay-arounds are well aware, the Black Cat holds a terrible secret. For deep in the kitchen, there grows an abomination. An ungodly cretin, too terrible for fiction. Some know it as a sort of boogeyman, nothing more than an old bedtime tale to scare children. But it is here within the restaurant the monster lives, lurking on the menu, inconspicuously hidden among the numerous entrée choices. In various cultures and mythologies, it has been by called many names: “Hell On a Plate”, “The Thing That Should Not Be”, “El Diablo Gordo”, or, in some parts of the world, simply “It”. But at Black Cat, the leviathan is known by only one moniker: “The Big Cheese”. Standing over half a foot high and weighing in at over 500 grams, the Big Cheese is not so much a burger as it is an outright atrocity. Six strips of bacon, four slices of cheese, forests of lettuce, seas of ketchup, and no less than a cattle herd of beef, all packed inside a bun roughly the diameter of a crop circle. For the non-negotiable price of 250,000 dong, one clogged aorta, stomach-stapling surgery, and a lifetime of regret, any foolish patron is welcome to test their mettle against the likes of the Big Cheese. So it was that Charlie and I took one look and signed ourselves up.

Eating the Big Cheese is analogous to running a marathon. That is to say, one cannot decide to simply show up the morning of the race and expect success. It takes months of preparation, or in our case, a full day of teaching, not eating, and drinking gallons of water to keep the stomach well and bloated. Fellow teachers likely suspected that I was scheduled for a urine test and, in danger of failing, was now making a desperate attempt to sweep the lake for traces of THC. The majority of the day was spent running back and forth from class to the water jug, back to class, to the bathroom, to the water jug, back to class; my students probably learned more about the hydrologic cycle of the human body than they did English vocabulary. Upon leaving the school, I walked past the sandwich lady whom I routinely employed for a between-class snack. She reached for the bread and smiled, only to frown in confusion and hurt when I did not break stride on my way to the parking area. No bánh mì today, I’m afraid. Once at home, cranky with hunger and hopped up on nerves, I threw on my sweatband and did some appetite cramming: twenty furious sets of stairs, followed by another half-liter of water. When Charlie, holding his own deprived stomach, limped downstairs to find me curled in a pathetic ball, half-consciously murmuring something about bottomless Red Robin steak fries, it was clear the issue needed to be resolved. It was time to pack up and test our valor at Black Cat.

We arrived to find the restaurant surprisingly short of business for a Friday night, a good thing, I determined, as I wanted as few people as possible to have to witness the spectacle of us leaving the building on a gurney. We took an out-of-the-way table in the corner and with hearts racing, feigned an indecisive look over the menu, all the while trying to avoid eye-contact with one particular item found at the very bottom of the burger list, in the dungeon, as it were. Finally, we dropped the bomb to our waiter, who stood patiently, pencil in hand.
“I’ll have…the Big Cheese”.
“Better make that two.”
The waiter arched an eyebrow, gave us each an extra look-over, as if sizing up stomach space, then smiled a “these guys are idiots” smile and wrote down our order while informing us that each Big Cheese came with two complimentary bottles of Budweiser. He did not specify whether they were to help wash the burger down or to numb the pain of a stomach wall being torn to shreds, but retrospectively, I lean towards the latter. In a moment of contrast, Kate, who we had dragged along to capture our demise on camera, settled on a decidedly less fiendish burger named the “Veggie Kitten”.

Our fate sealed, Charlie and I sat at the table like inmates on death row, nervously looking back at the restaurant entrance, wondering if it was too late to make a run for it. I couldn’t help but think it appropriate if the string quartet from Titanic had come set up by our table and started playing mournful arrangements to help us travel peacefully on our impending journey into the afterlife. And then, in a moment I shall never forget, the first Big Cheese came into view. It was indescribably enormous, freakishly so. At a distance, it appeared to be a sort of Frankenstein creation - the end result of a mad scientist’s misguided attempt to meld together seven individual Double Whoppers. The sheer girth of it forced the waitress to carry the platter with both hands and as she staggered towards our table, customers stopped conversing mid-sentence, mouths full of food, eyes bulged. A couple simultaneously reached for their camera. Somewhere, a small child started to cry. When the waitress thudded the burger in front of Charlie, letting out an exhausted breath in doing so, the table groaned and seemed to all of a sudden be resting at a tilt. Up close, the burger was nothing short of breathtaking, and as we leaned forward tentatively prodding it with silverware, checking for a pulse or other signs of life, we both realized we had a long night ahead of us.

After receiving my equally gargantuan burger and watching the table nearly splinter in half from the combined weight, we posed for pictures, slapped a good-luck handshake, and, each taking a preliminary swill of beer, commenced the gorging. We had not discussed at length our strategies for tackling the behemoth burgers and after a few minutes of furious chewing and swallowing, it was apparent that we did not share the same plan of attack. Surprisingly, to anyone who has ever watched me eat, I seemed to employ the more civilized approach, cutting the burger from the center and making a go of it slice by slice, much as one would eat a pie. In fact, that’s all the burger was: a swollen, meaty, cheesy, fatty, greasy, bready, soggy pie. In a contrasting effort, Charlie had taken a cue from Animal Planet and went at the burger in the same manner that a starving polar bear might plunge itself face first into the carcass of a stranded elephant seal. Toppings flew into the air like confetti, and sauce splattered across the table and onto the floor where it collected in puddles. The bun, saturated in ketchup, grease, and saliva, quickly developed a porridge-like consistency and we found ourselves half chewing, half slurping down the infinite calories in front of us. As Kate squeamishly snapped pictures and stole nibbles from her Veggie Kitten, the scene at our table grew increasingly savage with us reverting to near-Neolithic methods of consumption.

Amid the flurry of gulps and snorts and grunts and belches, I became aware of an astonishing but undeniable truth: the Big Cheese was becoming the Rapidly Diminishing Cheese. After wiping an especially large collection of mayonnaise from my cheek, I looked down and saw that the burger sat at about a 40% chunk, in pie-graph terms. I was over halfway done, and, shockingly, not feeling particularly stuffed yet. I was, however, entirely and utterly sick of burger. I felt like I was drowning in the taste of burger, the texture of burger, the smell of burger, the sight of burger. Charlie, who in five minutes had reduced his once majestic Big Cheese to an unrecognizable pile of mush, agreed that the hardest part was not actually the amount of food, but rather the duration of uninterrupted burger inhalation. Still, we forged ahead. I fell into a steady rhythm of cutting, lifting, chewing, swallowing, repeat; witnesses later described it as a person eating whilst in a vegetative state. There may have been a point at which I actually blacked out, as my recollection of progressing from 20% burger left to 5% burger left is next to nil, but eventually I looked down and there it was - the final piece. Relief washed over as I acknowledged that this would most certainly be the last bite of Big Cheese that I would ever willingly place into my mouth and I prepared for the ceremonious affair by finishing my beer, loosening my belt, and readying my gag reflex for one more suppression. With cameras flashing, I lifted the last of the Big Cheese and with a swallow, became a man of honor. And grease stains.

Alas, I would be alone in the Big Cheese conquer that day. The taste and smell of the burger (“There’s a reason they don’t call it the Big Tasty Cheese”) were overpowering enough to keep Charlie from following me down the path of lost dignity and self respect, and, with a tear in his eye and vomit in his throat, he announced his retirement from the meal, dramatically stabbing the remains several times with his knife in the process. Covering the gruesome scene with a napkin, as one might place a sheet over the victim of a street shootout, we paid our respects to the burger that fought its way right down to the final bite. As we later shuffled down the restaurant stairs, hands on bulging bellies, Charlie turned back with a grin.
“You know,” he said, “I’m still kinda hungry.”
“Me too. You wanna get ice cream?”

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