The World's Largest Man (10 page)

W
e won bowl trophies and whipped many teams across the county. Pop soon became a vaunted member of the fraternity of coaches, a real bootstraps kind of hero. And I am grateful for what he did. It was fun, all the healthy camaraderie, the sleepovers after games, the time spent with my mother in the hospital while suffering from mild brain-bleeding.

I toughed it out, fought through phalanxes of giant corn-fed children, tried my hardest to do something right. I could barely understand the cryptic metaphors Pop used in his coaching.

“Eat his lunch!” Pop would shout from the sidelines.

“Eat his
what
?”

“His lunch.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let me hear some leather pop!”

“Leather?” I would say. It sounded like something he'd pried out of a dictionary of nineteenth-century hobo slang.

“You know,” he'd say, clapping.

None of us was wearing leather, as far as I could tell. Should we be? Did he want me to carry some kind of a whip?

“Take a two-by-four to him, Junior!”

“To who?” I'd say. “There's eleven of them.”

“Yo deddy crazy,” my teammates would say, and I didn't disagree.

If pictures are worth a thousand words, the look on my face in team photos of this era says something like, “I am uncomfortable and hot.” My face is strained and stiff, the countenance of a fatalist who is suffering from a high-fiber diet. I seem to be making private signals to the camera, suggesting my location and how a well-trained team of SEALs might extract me.

Over the next four years, I tried to quit football approximately eight hundred and forty-two times. There was one rough game where a fullback, who seemed way too old for
junior high, had abused me. His age, of course, was an assumption of mine, based entirely on his lush and rather full mustache.

“I think he collapsed one of my lungs,” I said.

Pop, as ever, pretended not to hear. “You coulda eat his lunch.”

I dreamt of being in a terrible car accident and losing the use of my limbs, which, I believed, would make it easier to quit. During a physical in Jackson, I got the brilliant idea to have a physician sanction my unfitness to play.

“Our other doctor said I have a heart murmur,” I said. “I could die.”

“You won't die.”

“But I might die.”

“Not from that.”

“But one day.”

“One day, yes,” he said, putting a credentialed hand around my vitals and making me cough.

Back at home, I kept trying. “It's just . . . there are so many extracurricular activities I could do,” I said.

“We got to get you a multivitamin, firm you up.”

“Like maybe the quiz bowl team.”

“Make a muscle,” he said, groping my bicep.

With my other arm, I extended an envelope. “Did you see this invitation I got to join Mensa?” I asked.

“Men's who?”

“It's for geniuses,” Mom said from the kitchen. “My baby is a genius.”

Pop looked toward the sound of dishwater, confused. “Your momma's gone crazy,” he said.

“It just seems like maybe I should focus on things besides football,” I said.

“You mean, like baseball?”

“Like maybe the chess team.”

Something inside him turned to ash. You could see it. He stared into the middle distance, as though reaching back through memory for some tenuous relationship between chess and balls.

Soon, I spiraled into a whorl of decadence with the chess and science clubs, learning very different kinds of offensive moves and establishing control groups and reveling in the empirically verifiable company of other disappointing children. Pop and I didn't speak for weeks, until that night when he came knocking and told me to find my cleats.

W
e arrived at the Center City Complex of Pearl, Mississippi, and I remembered that I did not very much like Pearl—a community best known for its excellent marching bands, violent dogs, and high rates of venereal disease. Their peewee teams were notoriously nasty, unmannered, and good. We didn't know why they had always been so much better and stronger and faster than us, but we suspected it had something to do with having stepfathers who abused them. The only consolation, for those of us from outlying rural communities, was that they would all soon be in prison.

Pop opened his door, got out. It was night. The halogen glow formed a dome around the park, over which moved low gunmetal clouds. A gust of wind blew off Pop's baseball cap, and his hairflap came unmoored, rose to attention.

“I got your pads in back,” he said and walked toward the lights.

I found all my old gear, the ancient jockstrap that smelled of spring meadows. I undressed right there in the grassy glen, preparing to don equipment that I had first worn four years earlier, when I was not yet the size of a Viking warlord as I
was now, owing to a strict regimen of Cool Ranch Doritos. I had grown as big as Pop, but not in the right way. Not with the muscles.

A quart of sweat later, I made a jarring lurch onto the field, like Dr. Frankenstein's hopeful monster duct-taped inside a protective barrier of sofa cushions. My knees refused to flex, and my shoulders had grown too large for the shoulder pads, which now perched atop my clavicles rather than astride them, giving the effect of small and functionless wings sprouting from my neck.

I joined my teammates, most of whom seemed too small, stunted even.

“Who are you?” a small uniformed boy asked, looking up.

“I'm Coach Key's son,” I said.

“You're big,” he said, poking a finger deep into the fatty tissues around my exposed gut. More of the younglings gathered around me, as children are wont to do with Jesus and clowns.

“How old are you?” they said.

“He's tall as my uncle.”

“What grade is he in? Hey, what grade are you in?”

“He ain't got no grade,” Pop said, strutting over. “He's homeschooled.”

It was strange to hear my father lie so imaginatively.

“I'm in high school, and I have a driver's permit,” I wanted to say. But I knew it would blow Pop's cover. Then, during warm-ups, the taunts began.

“Ain't he a big one?” I heard, off to my right, from the Pearl side.

“The big ones is always stupid,” another said.

“Hey, boy!” they said. “I bet you too big even to fit in the short bus!”

They howled. The Pearl parents appeared to believe I was slow of speech and had something of a gland problem.

“Good luck tonight, hon!” a tattooed mother said. “He's about to bust outta that uniform, ain't he!”

I said nothing, just stared dumbly, which only strengthened their belief in my retardation. I ignored them, tried to be the bigger man. I
was
the bigger man. Bigger than some of the parents, even.

“Grab a knee,” Pop said.

It was almost time. My teammates looked up to me, and I looked up to Pop, and Pop looked at a point approximately thirty degrees above the horizon, as though he'd sighted a large formation of ducks he wished to murder. It started to rain.

“Lead us in a prayer,” Pop said to me, and I did as I was told.

I
was disoriented, at first, by the giant-headed children raging around below me in the rain. Then, four plays in, I got steamrolled by a child I hadn't seen coming and landed sideways in orange mud. My teammates gathered around me, their dripping helmets wreathing the dark sky. One of them kicked me.

“I think Coach Key's son is dead.”

I elbowed myself to a sitting position. My small attacker was the size of a ferret but appeared to be feeding on amino acids and gunpowder.

“I tole you he was dumb, Rusty!” his teammates said to him, high-fiving. It was embarrassing, getting whipped by a fifth grader named Rusty.

What happened next would become the stuff of peewee football lore.

In short, I sort of became an enraged gorilla. At fullback, I folded up children like bad origami, including Rusty, who soon took to running in the opposite direction, shrieking. I chased down the largest players, knocked them into a new day of the week. I started calling the plays, took the handoff, ran
over as many athletes as possible, which required several awkward turns and parabolic vectors, before entering the end zone. On my second—or was it my third?—touchdown, I dragged at least four defenders across the plane, along with one of my own pocket-size teammates, who had become excited and was riding me like a homecoming float.

“It feels so good!” he said.

“It does,” I said.

I ran around children, over them, under them, and, at one point, fulfilled a childhood fantasy by throwing and then catching the very same pass. I made their running backs drop balls merely by barking at them.

“He's got the rabies,” they said. “He's an animal.”

And I was. I played with abandon, both because I knew it would be my last football game ever and also because, owing to puberty and the shrinking properties of cotton, my jockstrap finally fit.

“Thatta way, boy!” Pop said. “Stack 'em like cordwood!”

Ah, yes! The metaphors—they all made sense now. I started inventing my own.

“I just ate a tree!” I said to a fallen Pearl athlete. Or, “I'm about to grow a new head!”

“That don't even make sense,” Rusty said, from across the line.

People were starting to talk. I saw them pointing, whispering. I knew there might be inquiries made about the depth of my voice and the hair on my arms and the date on my birth certificate. From what I could tell and hear, it was believed that I was either in high school or the greatest athlete in the history of Mississippi youth sports.

By the time the game was over, the field was littered with bodies. Children cried in pain or wept in joy, depending, rolling around celebrating and/or lamenting in the soupy carnage.
Parents and coaches were on the field to tend the wounded. Referees shook their heads. The score was 63–0, and—I am not making this up—every point was mine.

Pop put his hand on my shoulder, and we beheld the spectacle of the battlefield together, where an alternate history played itself out, unraveling backward like reversed game tape, a glorious past where I had not quit, where I had inherited the best qualities of this beast on the grass that was my father.

“We whipped 'em good,” he said.

I couldn't help thinking that he'd wanted me to play, to feel what it was like to be him, at least for one game. To him, it wasn't cheating. It was fathering.

Pop knew what was coming, and we got out of there quick, while children tried to get my autograph or a lock of my hair, and league officials loitered to get a look at the young Sasquatch. On the way home, we spoke little. My ears rang like they always did after games, but now it was from all the cheering. To my knowledge, nobody ever pressed the matter. Pop was allowed to continue coaching and did so for many years.

There in the truck, in the dark, plowing through fat gems of rain, Pop spoke first. “I sure would like you to play again,” he said. “In high school at least.”

“Pop,” I said, “I hate football.”

“A man likes to see his boy play.”

I had terrorized many young children on that field, had eaten many lunches, had perhaps ruptured important organs and caused internal hemorrhaging. It felt great. Somehow, even then, I knew that this sort of triumphant feeling could never be achieved at our nation's many science fairs.

“It's fun to whip a little ass, ain't it?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “It kind of is.”

And for once, it was no lie.

S
ports taught us a lot as young southern men, mostly how to hurt each other in exchange for the praise of our fathers. I would eventually possess the skill to play one or two sports at the college level, or at least the barber college level, but I had a condition that kept me from excelling as much as I would have liked, what psychologists call “large buttocks,” which led to “chafing,” which led to “depression.”

I was better at baseball than any of the other sports we tried, due to the great deal of standing around doing nothing. My greatest skill was insulting players from the other teams, which, in Mississippi, was considered a necessary baseball strategy. I might not be able to run faster or hit harder than you, but I could say things about your mother that would make you want to shove your bat up my rectum, which was one way to distract you from hitting the ball.

Some players, their insults were just silly:

“Hey, batter, batter!”

“We need a pitcher, not a glass of water!”

“Nice swing!”

I felt my contributions should be more original, so I tried a fresher invective, focusing on how their moms smelled like Doritos and how their girlfriends probably looked like walruses, and my teammates thought it was hilarious because it often distracted the batters and runners and such, but then I would look in the bleachers and see their girlfriends and would feel a little sadness because sometimes they actually did look like walruses.

That was the price of winning, I guess. We needed to win. We did what it took. Sport has always been an important part of southern life, along with other beloved traditions, such as quilting and racism. Racism, we were especially great at that, too.

S
atan created the niggers,” I heard a man say on TV one day, during some sort of parade. He wore what appeared to be a heavy white caftan and a large conical hat, also of white. “And the Lord Jesus Christ created the whites!” the confused man said.

“Is that true?” I said, looking to both my parents for an answer.

“Absolutely not,” Mom said. “Nobody in this family's racist.”

We heard the word
nigger
a lot, but not as much as the flags in our house might have suggested. Pop was not all
nigger
this and
nigger
that. We knew: This word was dangerous. If you said it up in Jackson, it might get you shot. If you said it out here in the country, it might make somebody think you'd had sex with your sister. Mostly, the word was used by old people suffering from dementia and young men suffering from mullets, the sort of men who believed in protecting their heritage and
defending a noble agrarian ethos so that one day their children's children could wear a Confederate flag bikini down at the lake while listening to Iron Maiden and smoking a joint the size of a grain silo.

I almost never heard Pop use the word, but that didn't mean he was in love with African Americans as a people.

“The blacks are ruining this country,” he and other family members might say.

Or, “The blacks are ruining this town.”

Or, “The blacks are ruining this movie.”

All this ruining of things, I thought, must take a lot of work. I started to imagine all sorts of things the blacks could be ruining: railroads, salads, tariff legislation.

“Fucking and killing, fucking and killing,” a man had said at the deer camp one day. “It's they goddamn way of life.”

I knew God had made black people, the same way he'd made clouds and hammerhead sharks, and there didn't seem to be anything in scripture about not liking them, so I was confused.

“Why do we hate black people?” I asked Mom.

“We don't hate them.”

“Do we like them?”

“Yes, we love everyone,” Mom said. “It's just complicated down here.”

A
t school, it was difficult to see exactly what the black people were ruining. I looked closely. They were so much like white children, having most of their arms and legs and the correct number of eyes and eyebrows and so forth. There were subtle differences. Words, for example. What I called an
aunt
, they called an
auntie
, and what I called
fat
they called
stout
, but then so did some of the whites. The boys were Willie and Bobby
and Marcus, easy enough, but the girls had names like Toshica and Lachunda, which sounded like the names of Japanese motorcycles or distant rivers in tribal lands.

When our school cafeteria served chicken, many of my black classmates expressed a clear preference for dark meat and also dark milk, which they called
chocolate
, as did we, which seemed fine. Occasionally, this one black kid would take his carton of chocolate milk and just pry the whole thing open, making a little square bowl of it, and then take the dry cornbread muffin we'd all been given and drop it into the milk and pulverize it with a fork and then eat it, which did not make me want to hate him or his people, but did make me want to stop eating for a couple of weeks, so I guess the only thing I ever actually saw a black person ruin was my appetite.

In my daily life, it appeared that black people and white people got along fine. At school, we ate at the same tables, refreshed ourselves at the same fountains, relieved our bladders in the same troughs, where we enjoyed a special brotherhood experienced only by those whose jets of urine had commingled. We knew instinctively that all of us were alike on the inside, that the only true test of a man's character was the muscular strength of his urethra.

Then I learned what people outside our state thought of us.

“They're making a movie about Mississippi!” somebody would say.

And the movie stars would visit and they'd eat and it'd be great fun until the movie came out and we saw that they believed things about us that couldn't be true, like how all of us talked like Foghorn Leghorn and the state lacked even a single building with effective air-conditioning. We'd watch
NBC Nightly News
and get very excited when we heard Tom Brokaw say something about us. Sometimes it'd be a story
about how poor we all were, or how dumb we all were, but it usually had something to do with how racist we all were. The message was clear: If anyone was ruining anything, it was the white people.

T
his one time, on the bus, a black girl gave me a love note.

“You got a nice butt,” the note said. “Big and round.”

It had never occurred to me that my buttocks could be an object of beauty. Did people from Up North know such things could happen in our state? Why couldn't they make movies about these sorts of things, and not church bombings? Could my buttocks truly be the catalyst for racial healing?

I approached her, sat down. Her name was Shalanda, a name that had long fascinated me, so I decided to start with that.

“I like your name,” I said. “It sounds like the name of a river in a fairy-tale land.”

“A fairy-tale
who
?” she said.

“Like with elves.”

“Elves? What you talking bout,
elves
?”

“Mythical creatures.”

“I ain't no creature. Seem like
you
the creature.”

She was very angry to have written such a flattering note. I sat down. And I kept sitting down, this time next to solitary black boys in cafeterias. Mostly they stared at their food. I had so many questions. Had they experienced prejudicial cruelty in my new homeland? Did they shoulder the weight of histories I did not understand? What was their position on the appropriate size of buttocks? Mine, for example?

I was usually a pretty good talker, but these boys, they had no interest. I decided they must have been able to detect the radiating fumes of racism emitting from my clothes and hair, the lingering odors of home. I wanted to build a bridge across this
gulf of injustice, but they were sphinxes to a man, closed off: riddles, wrapped in enigmas, stuffed inside a carton of chocolate milk.

And then I met Tom.

W
e hit it off immediately. We liked the same movies, the same breakfast foods.

“You like Pop-Tarts?” I said.

“I eat them every day,” he said.

“That's amazing.”

He was the first black boy I'd ever heard say things like “wow” and “indeed,” which may sound strange to people from progressive places where white people and black people all sound like they work at American Apparel, but in Mississippi, it was no small miracle, like Dorothy meeting a Munchkin who also sang songs about rainbows.

“Can Tom spend the night?” I asked Pop.

I'd probably had a dozen different friends over at some point or other. Pop almost always said yes. He knew a boy needed friends. But this time, he sort of looked at me funny, then away.

“Absolutely not,” he said.

“But he's got braces!” I said.

What was crazy was, Pop didn't walk away. He seemed at least willing to engage. The drawbridge of the fortress of his soul came down. It might not happen again for a thousand years. I accepted the offer and leapt over the moat.

I launched a barrage of moral confusion and outrage, all these feelings about race and class and Christian love. I recited scripture, delivered a homily. He was the one who took me to church. If he didn't like what I was saying, it was his fault.

He said nothing.

He stood there. He thought. It was painful, watching him
think, forcing him to do something so unnatural. He made a face, as though he were passing a kidney stone.

“The thing is, son, blacks is different.”

“But Moses was married to an African,” I said, proudly, righteously.

I'd read something about this in a Bible tract, about Moses being married to an Ethiopian, or maybe it was an Etruscan, or an Ecuadorian. Point was, this celebrated Jew, who we were led to believe was also an upstanding Christian, had a thing for brown women.

“Moses can marry whoever the hell ever he wants to,” he said, “but ain't no black boy spending the night in this house.”

I didn't get it: Pop was Tom's coach. Why was it okay to coach a kid, but not let your boy be friends with the same kid? He jabbed a finger at me, hard. The message was clear: Stay away from the black boys, and stay away from his finger, which might be loaded. I stormed off, and that was it. The drawbridge was raised, the fortress forever closed.

I'd like to say I got angry, that I burned my Ole Miss Rebels flags and finery in a righteous bonfire in the pasture, replaced them with posters of N.W.A and Public Enemy, and announced my plans to marry a girl like the girl who married dear old Moses, but none of that happened. All that happened was, I was sad.

Mom was right. It was complicated.

Tom and I grew distant, as friends who aren't allowed to be friends often will, and that baseball season ended in a hot, pitiful denouement.

Mr. Brokaw had been right.

“Your father just comes from a different time,” Mom said, as though Pop had recently been thawed from Paleolithic ice and was now wandering the backyard hunting woolly mammoths
with a rock. And then suddenly, the next baseball season, he evolved.

L
et's take a ride,” he said.

It was a Friday, early spring. I climbed into the Caprice Classic next to him.

On the dash he pitched a copy of
Sports Illustrated
, turned to the “Faces in the Crowd” section, a monthly lineup of amateur athletic talent from around the nation, including one Roberto Ventura, a young black man from a strange institution up the road: the Piney Woods Country Life School. We knew it simply as Piney Woods, a historically black boarding school for students from places like the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands who'd been sent to the American South for some unknown purpose.

Ventura had thrown five no-hitters in a row for Piney Woods and owned a fastball that made white men construct idols in their hearts.

“There's more where he come from,” Pop said.

On the way there, he told me what he knew about the school, that it was mostly orphans and fatherless children, some left on doorsteps, others snatched from the unforgiving maw of juvenile detention centers across the crystalline waters farther south, which may or may not have been true, but that's what he'd heard, and that's what he believed.

“Them boys deserve a baseball team much as anybody,” Pop said.

These fatherless children, many of whom weren't actually fatherless, I would later learn, were black, right? Was Pop suddenly overcome by kindness? Was he on some sort of a drug that caused unhealthy inflammation of the conscience? What would practice be like? Would he accidentally go calling one a
nigger
? And if so, would I be forced to beat him to death with one of the good Easton bats, or would the players beat me to it?

O
ur first practice took place at Burnham Field, a wedge of turf scratched out of a weedy plateau of farmland in what looked like the perfect location to burn a pile of bodies. Pop and I got the field ready, moved the livestock off the outfield, drew baselines with bags of lime, and waited for our new team to arrive. Across the road, high on a hill, a horsehead gas well nodded up and down, blessing our efforts.

The Piney Woods van pulled up, deposited several skinny black boys, and a few very large ones, and drove away. They must have been worried, traveling from their Arcadian grounds to this godforsaken field, full of rat snakes. They looked around casually, but warily, as though they might be marched to a ravine and shot.

“You can call me Coach Key,” Pop said.

They just stared.

Pop handed out a few leathery mitts, but the recruits quickly tossed them aside and produced some sort of large orb and began to kick it.

“What are they doing?” Pop asked me.

“Playing some kind of game,” I said.