The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “Teats is titties,” Pop said.

  “Stop saying titties,” I said.

  “It’s all nipples,” he said.

  “What kind of people talk like this at Christmas dinner?” said my wife.

  I could tell by her look that she considered me one of these people.

  After all, I was having my own problems—not at home, where my wife could hear, but at work, where that old family disease, that verbal dysentery, had begun to pour forth from a new mouth.

  “Morning!” a colleague would say in the hallway.

  My brain, desiring both to say morning and hello, simply combined the two.

  “Horny!” I would say, as they ran for the fire escape.

  In elevators, I would find myself trying to be congenial.

  “Have we met?” I’d say to some attractive new colleague.

  “Yes,” she’d say. “We met last week. I never forget a face!”

  “What I remember best are smells,” I would say.

  And there would be grave, frightened silence, while the elevator lurched, slowly, giving us all plenty of time to smell one another.

  I would enter some new university building, and the female guard, really a very nice woman I did not intend to hurt, would ask to see my ID, which was in my pocket, and my hands would be full, and I’d be sweating.

  “Can I see your ID?” she’d say.

  “It’s in my pants.”

  “Well, I need it.”

  “Well, how comfortable are you putting your face inside my pants?”

  I would try to apologize, but it was too late.

  Worst, though, were office kitchens, where I often stumbled upon nursing mothers heaving out their bosoms like sacks of English peas. There I’d be standing next to the mom, and I’d be so flustered, so anxious to fill the blank canvas of the moment with bright, colorful acrylics that I’d end up staring at her and the baby and saying something like, “I prefer skim,” or “He’s so cute, the part of his face that I can see!” or “Why do people say suck like it’s a bad thing?”

  I couldn’t help it. I wanted to. I did.

  A year or two into the marriage, and I’d managed to keep this condition hidden from my wife. But then the truth came out, during Sunday school one morning at a church that was charitable enough not to excommunicate me when I used the word afterbirth to make what I believed to be a nuanced theological point.

  The look of horror on my wife’s face reminded me of something, a look I had seen on my mother’s face at a Shoney’s many moons ago.

  “It’s a disease,” I explained to my wife, later. “It just came out.”

  “Words don’t just come out.”

  “My brain picks its own words. I can’t control it.”

  “Try,” she said.

  “Afterbirth,” I said. “See? It just happens. Placenta! Vagina! Virginia! Dead puppy!”

  We had spent that particular Sunday school class discussing the Book of Ephesians, a book that contains almost no references to placental matter.

  “Why do you do this?” she said.

  It’s the guileless, childlike part of my brain that desired to speak, I explained. The other part, the one designed to stop suspect words at the security gate of my mouth and request identification, was easily fooled by words like afterbirth.

  “Let me see your papers,” the security guard says.

  “I have them here somewhere,” afterbirth says, searching his pockets, then finding an old coupon for a Dairy Queen Blizzard. “Here it is!” The security guard inspects it carefully, hands it back, waves afterbirth through.

  Soon came other words and comments and remarks too delicate to mention, pouring forth from my imprudent lips at staff meetings and dinner parties. Words like vulva. Again, nothing you wouldn’t find in a high school health class, but still. Because now everybody at the fancy dinner party is thinking vulva, vulva, vulva.

  You were not like this before we got married,” she said.

  “I was lusting after you,” I said. “I’m way more focused when I’m lusting.”

  I’d spent so much energy putting distance and education between my father and me, learning words and theories that reordered my brain, forever altered the way I dressed, looked, talked. And yet I sensed a deep and long-forgotten pattern, emerging across my person—that my soul was still tethered to Pop’s across time and age, as yet unbroken.

  Perhaps we were not so different. What other exciting revelations would adulthood and marriage make known? Might I suddenly be overcome by the unexplained desire to coach a sports team while wearing shorts cut short enough to frighten small children? Might I wake up one morning to find myself soaked in coyote urine and wanting to climb a tree with a weapon of some sort?

  I would embrace it. This wasn’t a disease. It was a gift. It bound my father and me together. My mouth may be my destruction, but it is also my birthright. Some people inherit land and bullion and horses, but not me. I inherited the ability to say hemorrhoid at a baby shower.

  “Stop,” my wife learned to say, when it’s about to happen. She could sense it.

  Like all heroes, I learned to control this amazing power.

  We were at a family funeral, gathered at the ancestral farm to mourn the passing of our patriarch. The great and august man was buried in the sacred earth of a North Mississippi hill and we were back at the house disabusing ourselves of woolen slacks and hateful neckwear, preparing to baptize our heads in buckets of wine and chicken.

  Knock, knock.

  It was a family friend, bearing one such bucket. My grieving father met her at the screen door and transformed instantly into a garrulous, chipper troll. Pop remembered this woman and dressed her down with questions of family, engaging her with the intensity of a French furrier scrutinizing a fresh mink pelt.

  “I believe you’ve gained some weight,” he said to the nice woman. “Seem like your legs is thicker.” The remark, as sudden and surprising as a summer tornado, sucked the air from the house.

  I tried not to look at the poor woman, who’d believed she had come here to assuage the bereaved, only to discover that it was a wake for the body she once had. The woman soon left, I assume, to pilot her car into a nearby ravine.

  We gathered around the old Coldwater table one last time, ate, drank.

  “Why would you say such a thing?” Mom said. “That poor girl.”

  “What?” Pop said. “I like big legs.”

  My wife looked at me.

  I said nothing.

  “She had some hocks on her,” Pop said. “Didn’t she, boy?”

  “I’m more of a breast man, myself,” I said, reaching into the bucket.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Gamboling Problem

  My new wife was very progressive. For example, when I was about to say things about bosoms or afterbirths, she had a very progressive method of dealing with it, which is, she would hit me. Or when I asked her to bring me something—a beer, for example—she had this fun thing she would do where she would not do it. She’d spent many years waiting tables and continued to do so a year or two into our marriage, so I guess she’d reached her quota on bringing beers to people who really wanted beers.

  “Um, are you crippled?” she would say.

  If I was in distress, she might bring me the beer, but in general, she made it a habit not to bring me things, which made me stop asking her to bring me things, which made her happy, and her happiness was important to me, in addition to beer, which I often had to locate myself, using a special device reserved only for emergencies, known as my brain.

  This was fine, but also unexpected, because I had come from a family where women brought things to men. If you told a roomful of my male relatives that dinner was ready, they’d walk to the unset table and sit like dutiful children, waiting for the meal to be chauffeured to them by the nearest woman. If these men were in the living room watching football and desired a glass of tea, they’d announce this need into the air, as if calling an au
dible at the line of scrimmage.

  “Tea!” Pop would say. “Woman, brang me some tea!” And Mom, no matter where she was, would brang him that tea. Or cake, or pie, or whatever.

  I grew up believing this was the way of the world, that women did things for men, and that men let them. And perhaps this really is true in places like Iran.

  I can remember one especially tender moment during graduate school at the home of a girlfriend, as we shared a sofa and watched a movie. She was a fibers artist, a muse to many, sensitive, fractious, heavily medicated. She sat up, for what reason I know not, maybe to fashion a handbag from an afghan or to construct a bottle tree from her prescription vials.

  “Hey, could you bring me a glass of water?” I said.

  It should be noted that I had not yelled my demand from another room and hadn’t addressed her as “woman,” but she still looked at me like I’d asked to wear her grandmother’s panties on my head.

  “Get it your goddamn self,” she said.

  Things didn’t work out. And despite the fact that I was sure this woman would have inspired me to write many fascinating tales of psychological terror shortly before murdering me with a darning needle, she did teach me an important lesson, which is to wait thirty minutes after your lover takes her meds before asking her to bring you a glass of water.

  In the early years of my marriage, I told myself to be more sensitive to the balance of power in our little two-person family. I’d never lived with a woman besides my mother, and I had no other template for how to behave around one who hadn’t birthed you. It’s a shame. Men with older sisters know things the rest of us don’t, such as how to read their moods like the weather across a pasture and how to sense if they’re about to burn you with a curling iron.

  I did work hard to ask less of my wife than my father asked of my mother, but I would learn, in time, that it wasn’t enough. I’d need to do more, ask less.

  The childless season of our marriage was tender, sweet. We owned a television, but it picked up no stations, and we rented only the occasional movie, spending most of our time playing cards and board games and Pictionary, which, with two people, required more than love. It required imagination. It was in this season that we learned to make each other laugh: her, by playing games of memory with such frightening speed as to make me worry that she might have a brain disorder, and me, with my unsurpassed enthusiasm for deforming my body in the service of charades. It was a good marriage, I thought.

  At the time, all I really asked of my wife was that she manage our checkbook and prepare the occasional taco. I did not ask for the bed to be made, although she did it anyway, as if to prove a point. I did not ask her to wear pearls to dinner, or even to cook every night. I liked leftovers, begged her not to throw them out. And I didn’t ask her to stop texting her sister about their diarrhea, because I knew diarrhea was important to her.

  I didn’t even ask my wife to make sex with me every night, as would’ve been my preference. Or really even every week. Sometimes, I forgot what she looked like naked.

  “Stop it,” she would say. “We had a meeting just two days ago.”

  That’s what we called it: a meeting.

  “I think we need to schedule a meeting,” I’d say.

  “But we just had that other meeting.”

  “That was two months ago,” I’d say.

  “Days,” she’d say. “Two days ago.”

  After she got home from the restaurant, she did the bills, and when I got home from the university, I did the lawn, and so on and so forth, but there was something I had begun to ask of her, a simple request that she refused to honor. Each time, she denied me.

  I wanted her to dance with me.

  “Um, no,” she would say, whenever we found ourselves at a bar or a party or a festival where tribal rhythms had lured my buttocks into sinuous articulation.

  “Come on,” I’d say, my pelvis having begun to undulate against my will.

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I can’t help it. My body does things.”

  And her body would do other things, such as slink away in horror.

  One thing’s for sure: Dancing isn’t what it used to be.

  “Oh, we had all kinda dances,” Pop would say, when I was younger. “We used to dance all the time.”

  “Like, in pairs?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah, man. That was how you did it back then.”

  He told stories about dancing at Hernando’s Hideaway and barns and honky-tonks and lakeside pavilions between Oxford and Memphis. What I wondered was, How did you know how to dance? My grandparents didn’t dance, I knew that much. Our family’s particular brand of Christianity believed such behavior would lead to sex, which, of course, it does, if you do it right.

  I attended my first real dance in the seventh or eighth grade, where it was explained that it might be permissible to dance with a girl.

  “How?” I asked Mom.

  She went over to the console, turned the radio on. It was George Strait singing about his many ex-lovers in the Republic of Texas. She showed me where to put my hands, and when the rhythm swung around, she started to move. We swayed and pitched gently, two boats in a safe harbor, and it was nice.

  “How do you know how to do this?” I asked.

  “Your father,” she said.

  I found it hard to imagine this man, a teetotaler who no longer owned any records, doing anything with his legs that did not include battering the walls of a medieval fortress. But every June, according to Mom, when he took all of us to the Mississippi Road Builders’ Association Convention at the Broadwater Beach Hotel in Biloxi, they’d slip off for a little strutting in the ballroom.

  “He can cut a rug,” she said.

  He never struck me as the rug-cutting type. Tree-cutting, yes. But Mom spoke with great awe of his ability to turn, twist, swing.

  “And he’d whisper in my ear,” she said.

  “What’d he say?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, with more love in her eyes than I was used to seeing when she talked about my father. It felt good, knowing they danced. I’d heard them fight. I’d seen him demand glasses of tea. I’d seen her send him to hell with a look. But as long as they danced, I felt, things were pretty good.

  That night, I went to the dance at McLaurin. It was pretty amazing. The girls put their hands on our shoulders, and we put our hands on their hips, and we rocked slowly to Phil Collins’s “A Groovy Kind of Love,” each couple like a pair of metronomes with giant baby heads. From a distance, we might’ve looked both beautiful and sad, a gymnasium full of elderly midgets trying to pass wind.

  It would be many years before I’d learn to dance with anything like style. Some of the girls in my high school could do things with the lower halves of their bodies that made you believe their buttocks were powered by some sort of generator, and some of the boys broke it off fierce, too, as we used to say. They did the Worm. They did the Moonwalk. They did This Thing with Their Heads Like They Were a Malfunctioning Robot. I tried to do that last one in front of a mirror and looked like I’d hit an underground electrical wire.

  The same year of my first dance, we took a field trip to New Orleans, where we were to be inspired with the biology of the Audubon Zoo. Instead, it was the anatomy of the French Quarter that consumed our psychic energies, hypnotized as we were by the pair of mechanical legs that snaked out of a hole in the wall of a Bourbon Street teat facility. Our teachers marched us from Café du Monde to the Ripley’s Believe or Not! Museum to see a shrunken head, but our eyes were detained en route by the Polaroids outside a strip club, depicting the very unshrunken breasts of naked dancers in various attitudes of sexual degradation.

  “What are they doing?” we asked our teachers.

  “Gymnastics!” the teachers said.

  Walking through the city, my skin absorbed a strange music—funny, old, cartoonish, a sort of Americanized theme for The Benny Hill Show. They called it “Dixieland,” but at the t
ime, I had no name for it and was forced to define it simply as “not Phil Collins.” Something in the music made me want to move.

  On subsequent visits to the city over the next decade, I was further exposed to the alluring contagion of this sound, until such time that I rounded a corner in the Faubourg Marigny and was confronted by a jazz that sounded less like Pete Fountain and more like the Isley Brothers played at very high speeds. Where Dixieland musicians looked like porters at the Hotel Monteleone, this band, standing in the middle of the street in wading pools of their own perspiration, looked more like Public Enemy playing battered instruments that had been run over by a school bus. Rising above it all was the colossal floret of a tuba whose sound throttled my intestine, the call of a drunken elephant seal in rut.

  Immediately, I started to dance. Right there in the street, with Holy Ghost Power. It was a new kind of dancing, not really like dancing at all, more like fighting off an invisible swarm of bees while simultaneously trying to complete a walkathon and a bowel movement.

  “What is this glorious sound?” I said.

  “A funeral,” they said.

  After that, I was a dancer. I danced everywhere, at college formals, at bars, in buffet lines. At least, some called it dancing. Others called it assault. Furniture became a tool, a prop, a weapon. I made love to the music. Occasionally, the music made love to me. Sometimes, the music and me got in a fight, and then we would make up, and then we would make babies. Most of that’s a metaphor.

  Sometimes, I had friends who would dance with me. Old black women liked to dance with me, at Field’s Café in downtown Jackson, where they taught me how to Walk the Dog, which is more like Riding a Burro. Also, crazy drunk white girls would sometimes dance with me, although the sober ones almost never did. I never understood why. Mostly, it was other sober white guys who danced with me. There was one guy in college who danced with me a lot. We did a pas de deux to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” that made a lot of people pray for us.

  Dancing with your hyperdramatic man friends is one thing. But I knew a day would come when I’d get to dance with my wife, a woman I’d seen dance on many occasions. Granted, it was ballet, which some consider dancing. And which others consider boring. But not me. When she danced, it was magic.