A pair of blue-ribbon eaters

By the time I met Giorgio Pandone he was a very old man, but he was still chugging up the staircases to visit his paesani and sell jewelry and insurance. Tall, bald, paunchy and stately in his gray three-piece suit, with a gold watch chain spanning his ample vest, he looked like an Italian Alfred Hitchcock. He had lost a fortune in the crash of ‘29 and worked the rest of his long life to pay back what he owed and make a comfortable home for his daughter and himself after his wife died.

Zi’ Giorgio (as my parents and I called him out of respect) would pay a congratulatory visit to his friends and acquaintances whenever a child was born. The parents usually ended up buying something at his cut-rate prices, whether it was life insurance for the new baby or a gold good-luck corno. Since my parents had taken out $500 policies for both me and my sister — “just in case, God forbid” — Zi’ Giorgio came to collect the premium twice a year. He never omitted to bring us kids a little box of tasty umbrella-shaped chocolates on a stick.

Because he made his rounds after supper, my mother, knowing his reputation as a trencherman, would ask him to “favor us” with his acceptance of a snack. Zi’ Giorgio wouldn’t consent right away but would hem and haw until my mother, divining the cause of his hesitation, would open the oven door and show him the leftover in question. When he could plainly see there was, let’s say, a quarter of a roast baby lamb in there, he would graciously agree, having ascertained it would be worth his while to get his gastric juices flowing.

My father told us an amusing story about Zi’ Giorgio. When his wife was still alive, she had set up a separate bedroom for him, to be used whenever he had indulged in one of his eating orgies at some client’s house or elsewhere. This private room — a man cave of sorts — was intended as a free-fire zone where Zi’ Giorgio could snore, belch, pass gas, exhale garlic-breath, gag, wheeze and regurgitate to his heart’s content, all without giving offense to his spouse.

Zi’ Giorgio was a staunch Sunday-afternoon habitué of the South Bronx boarding house where my father lived for a while when he first came to New York as a teen in 1938. One of the entertainments available at such establishments was the eating contest, which combined Italians’ love of food with comic relief, the chance to place a bet, an excuse to drink deeply and temporary relief from boredom and loneliness. The proprietor, on the other hand, had the opportunity to make a buck by charging the participants and spectators for the extraordinary amounts of food and homemade wine consumed during the competition.

My father told us about one such event he witnessed between an unspecified “big man” who hung around the establishment, vanquishing hungry opponents left and right, and a middle-aged guy named Mike Ciavolella, who was only five feet tall. When he stood up to challenge the big man, Mike was almost laughed out of the packed dining room.

“After I finish the food,” said the man, jabbing Mike’s shoulder with his finger, “I’m gonna eat YOU, too.”

“Let’s eat,” said Mike.

The terms were that the loser had to pay the bill for both meals. The men sprawling on the benches of the long wooden table all made their side bets, and each paid his dollar to the proprietress for a bottle of homemade wine to enjoy during the show.

It will surprise no one to learn that after several hours of intense eating, the winner was little Mike Ciavolella. His victory had required him to pack away 42 pork chops and two pounds of spaghetti, all washed down with half a gallon of vino rosso. As soon as his victory was declared, Mike set out to jog very slowly all around St. Mary’s Park.

“It was either that or explode,” Mike explained to me many years later when, as the owner of a bar in the North Bronx, he was still 5 feet tall but had swelled to 4 feet around.

As for the big man, he had barely managed to stagger out of the boarding house before leaving a massive offering of semi-digested meat and pasta in the gutter of East 151 Street.