Porthos the Pickle Pitcher
By Staff
January 14, 2004
My friend Chris Bowen is a world-class eater. He stands 6' 4" tall, is redheaded and weighs in somewhere in the neighborhood of 260 pounds. Chris never passes up free grub. Growing up, Chris had a knack for arriving at someone's house around mealtime. He has my passion for food, but he can eat more than me (and that's not an easy task for anyone).
We were the four Musketeers me, Chris, and our friends Forrest and Stan Aramis, Porthos, Athos and D'Artagnan. As kids, we rode bicycles all day long in the Mississippi summer heat and didn't think twice about the temperature. Once a day we would make a refueling pit stop to a musketeer's house for snacks and drinks. Athos' parents owned grocery stores. They had the best snacks.
We busted open the back door as if we were storming Cardinal Richelieu's castle, raided the refrigerator and snack cabinets grabbing handfuls of cookies, candy bars, Twinkies, Zingers, potato chips and popsicles. Then we loaded up on Coke and Hawaiian Punch.
With our systems spiked full of processed sugar and preservatives, we boldly fought Richelieu's minions on the way out, making an exaggerated and dramatic exit with our imaginary swords. This was summer snack-time standard operating procedure in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, except when we visited Chris Bowen's house. We didn't storm Chris' house. No. Chris made us wait outside his house. Chris would go inside and fill a small Dixie cup half-full of Kool-Aid and hand us each a cup, retrieving one cookie per Musketeer. He would then quietly exit his home with a mouthful of cookies (at least two dozen), walk over to us and hand out one cookie a piece.
One cookie for us, 24 cookies for Chris "All for one and one for all!" except, of course, when it comes to snacks. Then, Porthos says, "You're on your own."
Chris Bowen's greatest claim to fame was that he could put an entire cheeseburger in his mouth, all at once. It was for this single talent that he was known far and wide. It was an impressive feat to witness. Kids would come from miles around to watch Chris eat a cheeseburger in a single bite. This was the era of three-channel television, a time before MTV, Nintendo and laptop computers. We didn't need all of that stuff, we had Chris.
With a cunning not seen since Tom Sawyer hoodwinked his friends into whitewashing the fence, Chris had boys and girls stepping up to the counter to buy him countless cheeseburgers. As long as they would pay for the cheeseburgers, he would stuff them into his mouth in one bite. Chris was our gastronomic sideshow.
One big burger, one big bite, one big mouth, Chris ate it all, except for the pickles. He handed the pickles to his fellow musketeers and we would fling them across the restaurant and try to get them to stick to the plate-glass window (I won't mention the name of the restaurant, but it rhymes with Dac Monald's).
Note: To properly throw a pickle, one must not fling it like a Frisbee with the arm moving in a side-to-side motion hurling the pickle horizontal to the ground. It will hit the window edge-first and never stick to the plate-glass. It's all in the wrist. The pickle must be thrown with an up-and-down flick of the wrist, and inconspicuously, so as not to alert the fry guy or the Dac Monald's cash-register operator watching the floor. For the best chance at sticking, the pickle must be flung vertically, so as to land on the plate-glass window using the largest amount of pickle surface-area available.
One could ride by certain Hattiesburg fast-food restaurants and tell where we had been (and how many cheeseburgers Chris had eaten) just by the number of pickles stuck to the windows. If pickle throwing were an Olympic sport, the entire 1976 gold-medal team would have come from my hometown. Move over, Bruce Jenner, here come the pickle-throwing Hattiesburg Musketeers.
Of course, I am in the restaurant business now, and I must deal with kids who come in and pull stunts like pickle flinging. Some would call that culinary karma.
Chris and I still eat lunch together a couple of times a week. Nowadays we have traded Hawaiian Punch and Zingers for sushi Porthos at the sushi bar. However, he will still eat anything. The other day he ate a sea urchin (possibly the most offensive item available at a sushi bar). Without a thought, Chris slurped the slimy, yellow echinoderm down in one bite, just like the old days. Unfortunately, there were no pickles to be found, anywhere.
Robert St.John is executive chef/owner of the Purple Parrot Caf and Crescent City Grill in Hattiesburg and Meridian www.robertstjohn.com
