The Great Gretna Pie-Eat of 1960

The Great Gretna Pie-Eat of 1960 is the climax of Gordon Lachance's story "The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan," a tale he tells to his friends Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio while they rest during their hike to find the body of Ray Brower. The contest is the final event of Gretna's Pioneer Days, held on a bunting-decorated platform on Main Street, with a long trestle table stacked high with blueberry pies. The contestants, their hands tied behind their backs, are announced by Mayor Charbonneau and have white bibs tied around their necks. The reigning champion is Bill Travis, a lanky mechanic from the local Amoco station, whose yearly victory brings extra business to the garage and allows him to bet substantial sums on himself, often at unfavorable odds. The other contestants are Calvin Spier, the town's fattest man who runs the jewelry store; Bob Cormier, a disc jockey from WLAM in Lewiston; John Wiggins, the principal of Gretna Elementary School; and the youngest and most unlikely entrant, David "Lard Ass" Hogan, a fat, bullied twelve-year-old boy who has been called "Lard Ass" by the other kids for years.

The Contest and the Revenge

Lard Ass Hogan enters the contest not to win but to exact a spectacular revenge on the entire town. Before the contest, he has emptied a bottle of castor oil, drinking every last drop. As the contest begins, he eats with demonic speed, finishing his first pie in forty-two seconds, a contest record, and calling for his second before the legendary Bill Travis has finished half of his first. He tears into his third and fourth pies with lunatic rapidity, deliberately torturing himself with grisly fantasies of eating cowflops and greasy gopher guts. By the time he calls for his fifth pie, the "Ultimate Pie," his stomach, loaded beyond endurance with castor oil and blueberries, revolts. He raises his head, grins at Bill Travis with blue teeth, and vomits a huge blue-and-yellow torrent that covers Travis. This triggers a chain reaction: Calvin Spier pukes on the mayor's wife, Bill Travis jets vomit over the first two rows of spectators, Principal Wiggins throws up in his own pie plate, Mayor Charbonneau vomits all over the microphone, and Sylvia Dodge, the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary, adds her fried clams and Bosco chocolate cake to the mess. The contagion spreads through the crowd, with people staggering around, holding their throats, and vomiting on each other, on a Pekingese dog, and into their own purses.

Aftermath and Significance

Lard Ass Hogan, at the absolute apogee of his young life, watches the chaos with a calm, beaming face. He takes the microphone from the trembling mayor and declares the contest a draw, then walks off the platform and goes straight home. The story ends with him lying on his bed, his mother asking if he won, and he says nothing. The tale, which Lachance's friends find thrilling in its gross-out details but disappointing in its anticlimactic ending, is a darkly comic fable of revenge through bodily abjection. It inverts the expected triumph of the underdog, replacing victory with a deliberate, self-inflicted humiliation that brings the entire social order of the town to its knees, if only for a few minutes. The pie-eating contest, a ritual of community bonding and petty gambling, becomes a scene of carnivalesque chaos where the boundaries between inside and outside, self and other, are violently dissolved in a shared, involuntary eruption of disgust. Lachance later reflects that the story, despite its pretensions and derivative style, was the first piece of fiction that felt truly his own, a controlled expression of the troubling memories and feelings of his childhood, including the image of his dead brother Dennis in the closet of his preserved room, which appears transformed in the story's own haunted imagery.