Autobiography of a Marshmallow Gobbler by Sydney Hartle
Autobiography of a Marshmallow Gobbler
The Association says I ‘endangered the sanctity of the sport’, stealing victories from the ‘rightful winners’, but let’s make one thing abundantly clear: they stole something from me.
Marshmallow Gobbling wasn’t like any competition I’d tried and failed, and that’s what made it hard for the public to understand. It wasn’t a hotdog eating contest – you couldn’t win by eating the most marshmallows, and more importantly, you couldn’t lose by not eating enough. It wasn’t a bake-off, or a sommelier certification, or anything that required knowledge or practice. You didn’t build anything or perform anything. You just ate. You experienced.
So, no, I can’t say what it was that made me a ‘star’. You already know the details of that first victory, the beginning of my reign, the beginning of the end. My last taste of peace, though I didn’t know it yet. Now that I’m officially blacklisted and my time as a champion has ended, it might be worth mentioning there was also a time before.
*
I first came to Marshmallow Gobbling the way many others did, back when it was only an app. I was depressed and already binge-eating, so shovelling sweets into my mouth was hardly a novel concept. I’d lost my job and my girlfriend and the reliability of my body, and passed the time spending upwards of nine hours a day playing a mind-numbing dog hotel simulator on my iPhone. My hotel, the Bark Hyatt, was never even ranked in the top 2,000 among other players, which I guess just goes to show just how many depressed people there are in the world.
The game was free, making its money from in-app purchases (I still sometimes regret not buying the Dobermann bellhop for two dollars) and un-skippable 30-second advertisements at annoying intervals. The apps they advertised ran the gambit of either-ors. Simulation games where the plumber lives or dies based on which plumbing equipment you choose to seal a leak. Choose-your-own adventures where you help cartoon women with Disney cowlicks decide whether or not to take back their cheating-bastard cartoon boyfriends. Puzzle games to determine whether you have the IQ of Einstein or an Alzheimer’s patient. No in-betweens.
Then came the ad that changed my life: ‘I gobble marshmallows – and so can you!’ It’s the only suggested app I ever actually downloaded.
Actually, I didn’t download it right away. I clicked the X in the top right corner, leaving a greasy fingerprint on my screen – residual Tiger Balm I hadn’t wiped off completely after giving myself the Tin Man treatment of lubing up all the aching joints in my body.
Still, I couldn’t get the ad out of my head. The soft, bubbly edges of the animation style, the pastel pinks and blues. The sequinned sparkle in the anime eyes of the cartoon elf and her open mouth full of marshmallows. The absurdity of the little smiling faces on the marshmallows, so delighted to be eaten alive. I hated that ad. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was sidewalk gum stuck to the sole of my brain.
I’d be lying in bed at night, exhausted by my own existence and unable to sleep, and it would come to me: ‘I gobble marshmallows – and so can you!’ I’d be awake as the next morning crept into the afternoon, still in my bed failing to muster the energy to get up and pee, and I’d hear its siren call: ‘I gobble marshmallows – and so can you!’ Staring at the screen of my laptop, not understanding a word of the emails piling up in my inbox: ‘I gobble marshmallows – and so can you!’ Incapable of cooking: ‘I gobble marshmallows –’ Or even deciding what to order on Deliveroo: ‘And so can you!’
I went to the cupboard, empty except for an open box of stale pasta, Carmen’s brand of black tea, spice jars, and a few slippery bottles of soy sauce (why could I never remember I already had soy sauce?). I groped blindly into the depths and somehow the tips of my fingers made contact with the plastic bag, the one I wasn’t even sure was there. I stood on my tiptoes and, pinching the plastic between two fingers, I held my breath and pulled. And there it was.
Coles’s Fluffytastic Pink and White Mallows. Totally unopened. I peeled the bag open carefully, gentle like any sudden movement might break the spell, undoing the miracle of marshmallows in the cupboard. Then I held a marshmallow between my thumb and index finger, applying a little pressure to its flat edges until they went concave, its marshmallow waistline bulging. And I popped it in my mouth.
The spongey press and release was euphoric. I ate another, then another, then another still. Each bite was spring-loaded, subtly vanilla, or intensely artificial strawberry. It was like inhaling that first, crisp breath of air after emerging from a dive into the swimming pool, such a forceful reminder you’re still alive it almost stings.
I downloaded the app because it was right. I could gobble marshmallows. I wondered if the game’s bouncy graphics could give me the same sugar rush, open me up to the possibility of something. And, for whatever reason, it kind of did.
Maybe it worked the way mindfulness meditation is meant to. The ten-minute format offered something my day was sorely missing: distraction and structure. And pleasure. Every morning the app would alert me that it was time to gobble marshmallows and I’d get out of bed, grab the bag of marshmallows, sit at the kitchen table and let the little animated elf sing her upbeat melody, guiding me through the next ten minutes.
*
People say it was my story that people connected to. That my eventual diagnosis made me someone to root for, that my years without recognition made me an underdog success, that my gap-toothed smile was winsome. But I think the story of me was created retrospectively in the wake of my growing success as a Gobbler. And you should know by now they only build you up to skewer and burn you.
*
The push notification that invited me to the first Marshmallow Gobbling competition wore me down the same way the ad did. I dismissed it immediately, the thought of holing up with other sad losers who wasted their days on smartphone games drained what little energy my recent fatigue left for me. But as the registration deadline approached, I kept looking at the empty days in my calendar, long stretches of empty paper punctuated only by doctor’s appointments and public holidays, and I figured trying something new wouldn’t kill me. And who cared if it did.
I took the five-hour tram-train-bus trip out to Hamilton to meet with my ‘local’ chapter. It was a tough commute from Melbourne. I was missing Carmen a lot then, her arms, her warm breath, her thoughtful advice, and especially her car. I tried to imagine what might be happening in my other life, how she’d glance over at me from the driver’s seat when I told her about my GP appointment that morning, about the cholesterol in my bloodstream, the abnormal clotting factors, the fact that my blood was an oily, gurgling stew that gunked up every organ it entered. I’d try to make it a joke and she wouldn’t let me, and maybe she’d pull over and we’d have a little cry about this unknown thing that might be killing me, but we’d face the task of finding a specialist to put a name to it together. In my real life I was pretending to be asleep with my skull rattling against a smudged window on the train, holding my muscles taught so I wouldn’t accidentally brush up against the musky strangers sitting next to me.
I hadn’t slept, but meeting the other Marshmallow Gobbling app users was like a dream. A dream where you feel intensely self-conscious because you have no idea where you are or why you’re there, and maybe you’re about to fail a calculus exam. In the motel dining room, I scribbled my name so nervously onto the name tag people kept asking what ‘Sabby’ was short for. I told them Sabriella, but no one laughed. People never know when it’s okay to laugh at you when you emanate the sort of sadness that makes them feel uncomfortable.
The crowd wasn’t what I was expecting. Not all 20-something basement-dwelling video game nerds, though James Huggins was, indeed, the heavyset white Japanophile in a Rick and Morty tee-shirt I predicted would make up the key demographic. But soft-spoken Lachie was full of good jokes if you were close enough to hear them, and he played a beautiful rendition of the Marshmallow Gobbling elf’s tune on the ocarina every time the group Gobbled together. The group was mainly middle-aged women, actually. At 32, I expected to feel like an old crone, but I was one of the youngest people there. The actual youngest was Marie Santos, the 14-year-old half of a mother-daughter duo, and although she maintained an air of disinterest that suggested she had been dragged along, her mother told me it was Marie who got them both into the app as a way to wordlessly connect after they lost their lolo the last May.
*
Go search ‘Gabby Jenkins first Gobbling win’ if you want to hear me say what an honour my first victory was, how much I love Marshmallow Gobbling, how inclusive the community is. This is before I got the diagnosis, before the synthetic hormones, so in the video I’m all puffy-faced and sweaty, baseball-capped to hide my hair loss, and invisibly nauseated and aching all over. But I’m happy.
Anyway, that’s all over now. Board President Fartie MacMillan saw to that. (Rot in hell Arthur!!!)
I hear how jaded I sound. I hear the ‘martyr-complex’ Channel Ten accused me of having. But what you have to understand is that the rules to ‘encourage fairness and uniformity across MG events’ eliminated everything that Marshmallow Gobbling stood for. The scorecards introduced strategy and forethought into an environment where in-the-moment experience was all that ever mattered. It used to be a meditation, a sugary salve for hopelessness.
*
Bill Takahashi once won the minor circuit without putting a single marshmallow in his mouth. He just licked one, shook his head, and spent the next 9 minutes and 56 seconds squishing a single marshmallow in his hands, smiling like it was an amusing joke only he was in on. It was incredible to watch. And it would be impossible for such a thing to ever happen again under the current scoring system. How would he get any points for Quantity, Style, Mastication, or Velocity? The judges wouldn’t know what to do with it.
*
The Board wanted me out. Probably for a lot of reasons. My consistent victories weren’t good for viewer morale, didn’t give them any dramatic upsets to get excited about. I criticised their management too loudly. My gapped teeth didn’t look good on promotional materials, and my fluctuating weight made me hard to consistently recognise, hard to commodify. It’s hard to sell something you can’t categorise.
So they made some changes to prioritise our health. We all started seeing the League-appointed physician to review our medications and make sure no one was taking anything that could be considered performance-enhancing.
It started with a routine blood test. I already knew which antibodies would be elevated, which proteins were right and which were wrong. I brought the printouts from my last test to the League-appointed physician. Of course, he wanted to run his own tests, and because I’m a team player I let them press another needle into the thin skin of my arm, still bruised from my last blood draw. The phlebotomist wheedled around the soft flesh of my elbow-crook, digging until the point finally punctured vessel wall instead of meat.
‘Shy veins, eh?’
I gave the phlebotomist a queasy smile. Pain is a small price you pay for permission to carry on.
The League-appointed physician confirmed all my incorrect blood proteins were correct, which is to say the new test results matched the printouts I brought in. My critics have claimed the first test results I brought were proven fraudulent that day, but that isn’t what happened. What the physician actually said was much worse: ‘In my professional opinion, these results indicate you don’t have —’
Levels were off by a decimal point, according to updated guidelines.
So I was the cheater. But on a technicality. With my diagnosis retracted I was taking synthetic hormones – so-called ‘appetite stimulants’, performance-enhancing drugs – without licence. But what I’m telling you is despite everything they took from me that day, my title and my reputation and my favourite pastime, the worst thing they took was my diagnosis. Because the symptoms don’t stop just because they no longer have a name, just the same way you don’t stop loving someone just because they stopped loving you. And your words don’t lose truth just because nobody’s listening. Please believe me.
You have to believe me.
