While rummaging through a bin of donated books in a Salvation Army Thrift Store, the highly untrustworthy (but very entertaining) author Lee Siegel claims to have come across an odd and long-out-of-print little manual titled The Schlossberg Book of World Records. It consists of biographical vignettes of Schlossberg record holders, including a Hindu holy man who can lift heavy stones with his penis, a man who was married sixty-one times, a magician who spent forty days underground, a blindfolded female sharpshooter, a collector of a woman’s wrestling memorabilia, and, for example, these two:

Gregor Jebac
A Sausage-Eating Contestant

Every year for the past fifty-nine years the Polish-American Country Fair has been held on the Feast Day of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Pierdolic, Wisconsin. The music of Mazovia is played, Polish folk songs are sung, polkas are danced, Polish jokes are told, and most salient and celebratory of all is that traditional Polish foods (luscious pierogis, scrumptious kielbasas, delectable zrazy) are sumptuously served and reverentially gobbled up. In keeping with a hallowed Polish heritage, rambunctious games, like Find A Pretty Virgin’s Kielbasa, Don’t Squeeze the Cabbage Roll Between Your Legs, and other fun divertissements involving pork, are played. The climactic entertainment, the event that every celebrant at the fair waits for is the thrilling contest in which competitors attempt to eat the most Polish sausages in one hour.

Historians maintain that this tournament has its origins in the fourteenth century when High Duke Casimir “The Great Gobbler” took possession of Silesia, Pomerania, Masovia, and other Eastern European domains by eating more sausages in less time than the rulers of any of those particular regions. 

Every year since the inauguration of the fair, Polish-American competitors have come from all over the Midwest hoping to set the record for the most pork sausages consumed in an hour. They are made of pork to discourage Jews from entering the contest. And most of those contestants hope to get immortalized in a book of world records, be it Guinness or Schlossberg. 

And every year since he was only thirteen years old, Gregor Jebac, the now seventy-two-year-old retired life and car insurance salesman, has entered the contest. He believed that it was a patriotic act, that Poland was truly the homeland of the greatest pork sausage eaters of all time.

In his first attempt, almost sixty years ago, Gregor was able to eat only three sausages before becoming too nauseated to continue.

Able to consume no more than eight sausages in his best year at the age of forty-seven rendered Gregor hopeless and heartbroken. The winner that year, a German military attaché, Sonderführer Hans von Lustmolch, stationed in Poland, was able to devour an impressive and record-breaking seventy-two sausages in his allotted hour. He claimed to hold three places in the Guinness Book of World Records, making the sausage record his fourth.

Gregor’s devoted wife, Chlapa, did not reveal to her husband that she could eat many more sausages than he in any given time period (at least forty-three in an hour). Trying to cheer her despondent husband up, she whispered in his ear: “My darling, my sweet kochanie, if only the sausages had been prepared according to my recipe with sauerkraut and potatoes, then you would have been able to eat so many more of them. Just remember that I love you no matter how few sausages you can eat in an hour or even in a minute or even a year.”

Unbeknownst to her depressed spouse, Chlapa applied to the Guinness Book of World Records for recognition of what she considered her husband’s impressive accomplishment: “He has entered and failed to win the Polish-American Country Fair Sausage Eating Contest fifty-nine times, breaking the record of Desdamona Siemowitz who entered and failed in the contest eighteen times.”

The Guinness adjudicators showed no pity, no empathy, and absolutely no sense of humor when they informed Mrs. Jebac that her application set a record for being the most ridiculous one they had ever received. They condescendingly advised her to apply for recognition of her husband in The Schlossberg Book of World Records, “a second-rate, low-grade spinoff of our best-selling compendium.” She followed their sarcastic advice. And so Gregor Jebac is celebrated in these pages for being ridiculous and having failed to win a sausage-eating contest fifty-nine times. In so doing he demonstrates the way in which even a loser can be recognized as a winner and enjoy the delicious taste of the glory that comes with being immortalized as a record holder in The Schlossberg Book of World Records.

Maria Cipa
Young Lady With Very Long Pubic Hair

More lush dark jungle than mere mammoth bush, Maria Cipa’s curling pubic tresses form swirling locks that cover the fleshy pink of labia majora, spreading from there to pale inner thighs and down to a shadowed precious perineum and hirsute rectal region, hiding the bashful vulva and the puffed-up mons pubis. That sumptuously shaggy growth measures a sensational twelve feet and three inches long. At that unbelievable length, Maria’s pubic hair is even more sensationally awe-inspiring than the legendary eleven-foot one-inch long payes of Shukr ben Salim Kuhayl I, a 19th-century Yemenite Jew who proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. His minions interpreted his exceedingly long sideburns as a mystical sign that their spiritual teacher was indeed the awaited savior of the Jewish people as prophesized in the Torah. So too Maria Cipa’s ineffably long pubic hair inspired occult metaphysical reverence.

Maria’s pulchritudinous golden fleece is fragrant to the nose, silky soft to the touch, sweet to the lips. But her lusciously lengthy overgrowth, preternatural if not supernatural, had for the seven years since going through puberty caused Maria Cipa substantial embarrassment, humiliation, shame, and feelings of disgust over the weird demeanor of her own crotch.

Before puberty, Maria’s pubis had been rather ordinary, subtly dappled as it was with barely noticeable fine and fair wisps of pale run-of-the-mill vellus hair.  At the age of twelve, so her mother elucidated in Maria’s Schlossberg record application, there was a dramatic pubarche: Miss Cipa’s genital zone began to sprout coarse, crinkly, curly, and very rapidly growing hair.  And trimming it only caused it to grow thicker faster, curlier and significantly longer, spreading out over her lower abdomen and reaching all the way up from her vulva to her navel. Curiously, however, there was no hair growth in her armpits or on her legs or upper lip.

It was a loving maternal attempt to alleviate the shame and disgust that her daughter’s pubis engendered that Mrs. Cipa told the pubertal girl the tale of Roszpunki, the Polish rendition of the Grimm’s fairy tale of Rapunzel. “Her pubic hair was even longer than yours, my darling. A nasty old witch, jealous of Roszpunki’s august pelvic pelt, had kidnapped the girl and imprisoned her in a tall tower in the wilds of the Tatra Mountains. Roszpunki kept her marvelous muff rolled up during the day and covered at night so that birds, snakes, lizards or insects could not nest in it. On every occasion of a full moon or any of the many Polish Catholics All Saints’ Day she’d hear a call from below the tower. It was Prince Robić Loda, a handsome nobleman from Krakow: ‘Roszpunki, Roszpunki, let down your long pubic hair.’ She would obey and he would then spryly climb up the tresses to embrace and kiss her until dawn when the witch would come to check on her prisoner. Once the wicked sorceress discovered what the Prince and the girl were up to, she decided to put an end to their amorous shenanigans by shaving Roszpunki’s mons pubis. When she arrived, razor in hand, at the cell on top of the tower where Prince Robic Loda had been hiding, the Prince killed her with her own razor, took the key to the tower that she wore on a chain around her neck, and opened the cell door. He carried Roszpunki away with him to Krakow where they were married. Guests at the wedding were given the honor of stroking and sniffing Roszpunki’s beautiful golden fleece. So maybe, even though your pubic hair is not quite as long as Roszpunki’s, a wealthy and handsome prince fascinated by your pubes will marry you too. Let’s hope so.”

Maria’s father was as proud of his daughter’s pubic bush as was her mother, but much to her father’s disappointment, her mother had adamantly insisted that for the sake of modesty, propriety, and privacy, Maria’s father could only look at his darling daughter from her knees down and neck up.

By honoring Maria Cipka’s pubic hair as the longest, the most astoundingly copious mane in the whole wide world, we, the adjudicators and editors of The Schlossberg Book of World Records, have helped to turn all remnants of Maria’s adolescent embarrassment into a newfound pride and her self-conscious shame into self-esteem. Proudly, with her mother’s help, she washes and conditions her pubic hair every day. She braids it, weaves fresh flowers and silk ribbons into it. She uses a rich styling cream as well as an anti-frizz foam and gel, a hydrating hair oil, and a detangling pomade. Caring for her daughter’s pubic hair requires Mrs. Cipa to have a well-stocked arsenal of combs, brushes, and a powerful handheld blow dryer.

Asked on the application form for a Schlossberg record what she believed had been the cause of her daughter’s extraordinary pubic hair growth, Mrs. Cipa humbly answered, “I guess we were just lucky.”

Listen to a conversation between Lee Siegel and George Salis on The Collidescope Podcast:

Lee Siegel is the Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii. He has published many novels, including Love in a Dead Language and Typerotica, multiple non-fiction books about India, and a translation of Sanskrit love poetry called Sweet Nothings. Siegel’s writing has earned him a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, two Residency awards at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and the Elliot Cades Award for Literature.