About ten blocks from Bobby Hutton Park, we picked up a tail. An unmarked car followed us for six more blocks before we shook him at a red light. I jumped on the freeway and headed south for San Jose. Paranoia was setting in and it wasn’t even nighttime. The Eagles’ “Take It Easy” didn’t calm my waters. I tried Tower of Power, the greatest group in my city’s history. Even their best album, Back to Oakland, couldn’t ease the stress.
I phoned Tsiropoulos on the cell and asked him if he had any news about warrants for me or Red Eye. Probably a stupid thing to ask over the phone. He didn’t know anything. By the time that Tower of Power album finished we were on the outskirts of San Jose and had run through every option from catching the next flight to Guadalajara at the San Jose Airport to renting a car and driving to Oklahoma to lay low for a few weeks.
Then we started tripping on the cell phone. We both knew a mobile could be a tracking device. I’d heard that taking the battery out removed the tracking capacity but I never believed technological rumors. Red Eye had heard the same theory so he encouraged me to throw the phone away for “safekeeping.” I pulled into an AM/PM and told him to toss it in the dumpster out back. He followed my instructions after he set it on the pavement and stomped on it about twenty times with his boot. It’s good to have thorough partners.
After the demise of the phone, we felt much better. An extra large coffee and a chili dog bolstered our spirits and sent us back toward Oakland. The Greeley might be Red Eye’s last act as a free man but at least I’d try to get him his chance to bring home the gold. I had to hurry. I kept it at 85 all the way, darting from lane to lane like a runaway rabbit. When the traffic slowed me down, I slid along the shoulder and prayed no cops were looking. With a replay of Back to Oakland to inspire, I couldn’t lose. Like Red Eye always said, “When in doubt, put it to the floor.”
We pulled into the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum with ten minutes to spare. A distant blue banner with the same logo as Red Eye’s T-shirt gave us all the directions we needed.
“I shouldn’t have eaten that chili dog,” he said. “It could make the difference between the gold and the silver.”
“Don’t trip. You got it in the bag.”
This was my first Greeley, and the crowd was impressive, about five hundred hysterical gluttony lovers and several teams of TV cameras. The fans were a cross section of WWE supporters, Ultimate Fighting aficionados, and the normal inhabitants of the Black Hole. Not a highly sophisticated Oakland hills gathering where a barely audible burp could draw glances of derision. A solitary black security guard policed the crowd. The Raiders could have used him on their offensive line.
Red Eye had the luck of the draw—spot number seven. The year before they gave him number two, which he said was “the same as rolling snake eyes.” I never thought of it quite that way.
Most of the contestants sported bellies that bounced, rolled, and swayed in their battles with the dogs and buns. I didn’t know exactly how best to support Red Eye’s efforts. Very stout wives in halter-tops used the screamin-his-face approach.
“Chew, Johnny, chew. You can do it. Eat that motherfucker up.”
“Keep it down, Big Louis, keep it down.”
They hollered like their heroes were breaking tackles at the Super Bowl and dashing for the winning touchdown.
At seven minutes a hefty bearded gentleman in blue bib overalls suffered the first “reversal” of the competition. At least he was in spot number three. Red Eye told me that a reversal right next to you could be fatal.
“It’s contagious,” he said, “like when you see someone yawn and you suddenly can’t resist the urge yourself.”
True to form, a bulky teenage white boy in spot number four vomited just a few seconds after his neighbor. The epidemic stopped there. Eighteen solid competitors kept shoving in dogs and buns at a frenetic pace, adding just the right amount of water to flush the food along its downward path.
The scorekeepers were bikini-clad women poised behind each competitor. They flipped over a numbered card each time their contestant finished a dog. High-tech digital displays hadn’t struck the Greeley just yet.
After nine minutes the bleached blonde standing behind Red Eye was flipping over card number thirty-seven, good for third. Lightning Johnny, in spot number eight, was in second place, one dog ahead of Red Eye. Johnny wore a Hell’s Angels vest with no shirt to hide his ink web of choppers and naked women with huge boobs. Red Eye looked like a blank slate by comparison. Two biker chicks were doing everything but eating the dogs for Lightning Johnny. When they weren’t screaming encouragement, they were miming grotesque chewing and swallowing movements or advising him to belch to “make room for more.” I didn’t know how to match their efforts.
The leader was a slim, Asian teenager named Rodney who wore a slick black tracksuit and an SF Giants cap. He was a clean, almost compulsive eater, even dabbing the grease from the corner of his mouth from time to time. He was two dogs ahead of Red Eye with three minutes to go. That’s when the Hell’s Angel began to falter. He had that overstuffed-pig-about-to-fall-over look on dog thirty-nine. The once vibrant motion that forced full dogs into his mouth in one enormous shove had slowed to an occasional half-hearted poke. He sat motionless for a few seconds, then succumbed to a mighty heave that covered his eating area and sprayed a few errant drops onto his nearly weeping female fans.
Red Eye plodded on, unfazed by his neighbor’s misfortune. While Rodney was steady, Red Eye had a final kick. At eleven minutes and fifty seconds they were both on dog number forty-two. Rodney had an adoring young female fan who provided him with mild-mannered statistical updates of his competitors’ progress.
“Stop eating,” she said. “He can’t finish his. With the extra space you’ll win the eat-off.”
Her strategy was brilliant. If they both ate the same number of hot dogs, there’d be the Greeley’s version of sudden death. Whoever ate five dogs first took the gold.
The young man instantly followed her advice, throwing three quarters of a hot dog on the table and turning to look at Red Eye.
“That’s your margin of victory,” Rodney’s advisor told him, pointing to the discarded hot dog.
Red Eye was still battling with number forty-two. With five seconds left, he took a sip of water and went for broke, trying to stuff the entire dog in his mouth. He couldn’t manage. His chewing had slowed, as if he had a mouthful of rocks instead of a 100 percent pure beef dog sanctioned by the International Federation of Competitive Eating.
Red Eye held his palm under his chin, like he was trying to keep an overstuffed suitcase from popping open. He took a big swallow but his cheeks still bulged. With two seconds to go, the suitcase burst. Just after the twelve-minute buzzer, balls of chewed hot dog meat and bun plopped out of Red Eye’s mouth onto the table. A dead heat.
The youngster took deep breaths while his female handler relayed encouragement.
“Focus, focus, focus. Visualize yourself eating five dogs in less than thirty seconds,” she told him. “Think about how that would look, how it would feel.”
Red Eye laid his head on his arms while his body convulsed with massive belches. They didn’t allow anyone to touch the contestants. Otherwise, I would have been pounding his back and trying to get a few more precious cubic inches of gas out of his stomach. If a man could expire from eating too many hot dogs, Red Eye was at death’s door.
“Ten seconds,” came the warning over the loud speaker. The biker chicks had moved over to Red Eye’s spot.
“Whip that little gook,” one of them said.
“Give Red Eye a little quiet time,” I said. “He needs to concentrate.”
They complied and went silent.
I looked behind us. The man-mountain security guard had appeared.
“Is there a problem here?” he asked, looking at the two women. “Remember this contest is about eating, not color.” He put his hand on his billy club. The women didn’t beg to differ.
By the time Red Eye raised his head to confront that plate of five dogs in front of him, he looked fresh.
“Good luck,” he said to his young competitor, “but you’re history.” Red Eye held his opponent’s stare until Rodney’s handler drew his attention away. Red Eye’s glare had put doubt into those youthful eyes.
Red Eye beat Rodney by a dog and a half. The title was coming back where it belonged.
He lay down in the back seat all the way to my place, holding the Golden Dog trophy atop his massive midsection mountain of forty-six hot dogs. He must have belched a hundred times.
I remembered I had a bottle of champagne in the fridge. We could use it to celebrate Red Eye’s victory. As I pulled up in front of my place, I realized it might be a while before I got to pop that cork. There were two guys I’d never seen before sitting in a white car two doors up the street. No one else in my neighborhood drew the heat. They were waiting for me.