Charles Coxe

I was startled by how cold the autopsy table was—although, to be fair, I was lying with bare flesh on metal, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was even more startled when the medical examiner described me as both “fit” and “tanned.” But it wasn’t until Dennis Farina lifted up the sheet to peek underneath, and then asked if anyone was “in the mood for sausages,” that I actually burst out laughing—forcing the director to yell “CUT!” as laughing is something a corpse is NOT supposed to do.

The last thing you want to have to do when eating the greatest smoked meat you’ve ever tasted in your life is to just take a small bite and then throw the rest away. But when you’re judging dozens of plates of pulled pork, and chicken, and brisket, and beans, and desserts against each other at an ultra-competitive BBQ contest, you have no choice—or I shouldn’t have, if I’d been less of an idiot. Instead, I was sweating and nauseous, already completely overstuffed and only halfway into the contest.