The World's Largest Man (11 page)

“It's the queerest thing I ever saw.”

“I think it's called soccer,” I said. “I saw it in a movie.”

T
heir names were Clive and Ricardo and Philip and more, and they came from faraway lands like Trinidad and Chicago. They were of many colors, with blue and brown and bright green eyes and some even with hair the color of spun gold, and they spoke a West Indian vernacular both alluring and alien, stacked
with blank verse and rhyming couplets and what seemed like nonsense words. I'd experienced this confusion once before when a Scot had visited our church: I understood nothing she said, but hadn't let that stop me from asking her questions, so I could misunderstand her even more, which I found pleasurable. This was how my teammates from Piney Woods sounded, somewhere between that Scot and Bob Marley.

“The batty booty moody fruity,” one might say.

“Ah, it do! If the lickety rickety stick to the trickety dick.”

“And the moody fruity don't bippety boppity.”

“The lady got some grady.”

“Dat's for shady!”

“You know it.”

“I do.”

“Ha ha!”

I very much longed to join in this fun dialogue about the moody fruity and the shady grady lady, so I acted like I knew what in the hell they were talking about. They'd be warming up, tossing the ball, and I'd work my way into the polygon of throwing.

“Dee elephant say the ball boy.”

“The toy in the backside.”

“Dem latrine the backside.”

“Dis for true!”

Everyone would laugh, and so I would laugh, as though I understood this story about the elephant and the latrine, and they would look at one another and laugh harder, and so I would laugh harder, and would realize they were laughing at me, and that perhaps I was the elephant in this scenario.

On the first day of practice, it was clear who their leader was: Michael, from St. Thomas. Pop called Michael to the mound to get a look at his fastball.

“Gimme dat ball, see,” Michael said, taking the smudgy orb
from Pop's hand. I squatted down behind the plate, to catch. Michael laughed in my general direction.

“Looka here,” Pop said. “What's so funny?”

“Ya boy's funny,” Michael said.

“What's funny about me?” I said.

“He got them lodge flaps on his head, like he would fly away.”

My ears. They were laughing at my ears. They
were
big, wide and fleshy and pink, like rare and precious tropical flowers, but Pop said nothing, and I decided not to be offended.

“Ready when you are,” I said, squatting behind the plate.

This was why we were here, to see which of them could pitch like Roberto Ventura, who had already been drafted by the Cubs.

Michael wound up, released the ball, and we watched it fly over the visitors' dugout. The second and third pitches flew in the opposite direction, sailing into the parking area, so far off course that Michael seemed to believe the pitcher's job was to win the game by hiding all the balls. Our best hope was that he would be able to injure most of the opposing team's batters and we could win by forfeit, while our opponents were on their way to the hospital.

“Don't worry about it,” I said to Michael. “You got a good arm.”

“Dontcha think I know dat, Dumbo?” he said.

I wanted to say something about his meaty nose, as wide and ridiculous as my ears, but did not, for one does not build a dream on slander, even I knew that. I wasn't afraid of him, really, even though he seemed to hold some secret rage. If we got in a fight, I figured any punches he threw were more likely to hit someone very far away.

In subsequent practices, Michael called me many things: Dumbo and Ears and Lodge Boy and Squash Head and other
names that made me sound like a mentally handicapped cartoon character.

“Hey, Captain Batty,” Michael said. “Ya walk funny.”

“Batty?” I said. “What does that even mean?”

“Butt. Ya butt. Ya batty. Ya got a big batty like a lady fatty maddy paddy daddy.”

“What about my butt looks like a woman's butt?” I said.

He demonstrated, walking funny. Everyone laughed, even the nice ones.

N
igger-lover!” Pop said.

“No,” Mom said. “Really?”

I stood in the hallway, listening. The story was this: The coaches had scheduled a meeting to discuss the upcoming season and schedule. Pop had arrived a few minutes late and as he entered, he explained to Mom he had heard another coach refer to him as a “nigger-lover.”

“What'd you do?” Mom said.

“I about whipped his ass.”

“Well,” Mom said, “I've heard you say that word many times.”

“Yeah, but it's different,” he said. “It's some that is and some that ain't.”

“And which is which?” she asked. “Who decides?”

He had no answer.

I
n the days leading up to that first game, he showed those Piney Woods boys how to swing and throw and catch and steal, how to blouse their uniform pants, how to slide, how to wear their baseball caps like real men, high on the head, placed there gingerly, like a cake-topper. He seemed to take
real joy in it, picking up the team from their beautiful campus, speaking to them in coarsely affectionate tones, the way good fathers will. They took to him, and he to them, and it forced me to reconsider this man, who had seemed so simple, and now seemed so complicated.

My father, a lover of Negroes.

At every opportunity, every practice, he scuttled me to the back of the line at the batting cage, at the water spigot.

“But Pop—”

“Don't backtalk me, boy.”

This got the others riled up. They liked seeing him scold me.

I tried not to get too angry with Pop, even though he had me carry the equipment to and from the truck while the others showered themselves in Gatorade and chatted in their pidgin with my father, who apparently could understand them just fine.

“You da flew in the merry on the jerry berry.”

“It's all in the wrists, son,” Pop said.

“Is da weet fleet.”

“Ha ha,” said Pop.

“And beans in ya head boy.”

“If you all win, then yeah, we might do that.”

Pop coached us with great fury, his eyes glinting with righteous vengeance, chewing his gum wildly, eager to whip someone's ass in the cause of equality. He even brought the boys home, fed them, let them watch our television.

What had happened? How had we gotten here?

Michael was now able to aim directly at the batter's heads, and we were ready to play. At that first game, the opposing parents didn't try to lynch anybody, mesmerized as they were by the curious language our team used.

“Reckon it's English?” I heard someone say.

“I swear if it don't sound like Spanish.”

“Hell, they ain't got blacks in Mexico.”

“Shit, they got 'em everywhere.”

We won that first game, mostly as a result of the other team's batters refusing to stand closer than ten feet from the plate.

B
ut I still hadn't won their affections, which I needed very badly, like so many white people before and since.

Why did they hate me so? They hung about dugouts in a loose cloud, their jocular chatter forming a protective barrier from those seeking brotherhood. Every now and then, when the game forced them to recognize my existence, they included me in their jeering, reciting poetry about my disgusting white body, but I was not invited to retort.

And then one day, I decided I would. After all, insults were my gift, too.

Specifically, what I decided to do was make fun of one or perhaps even several of them, as a way of showing our shared love of humiliating others. Why hadn't I thought of this before? These Piney Woods boys, I knew, would love it. They weren't making fun of me. They were asking me to be their friend. To make fun of them.

All I needed to do was think of some way to insult one of them. They would love it, and laugh, and teach me their secret language and handshake, just in time for the season's final crowning moment, the team pool party, when we would laugh and attempt to drown one another in racial harmony.

That moment came, though not at the pool party, but at one of our last games, dusk settling on Burnham Field. Michael was inside the dugout, making merry, Don Rickles at the Friars Club.

“Potty feece, potty feece, it no boy in the duty truck tooti
fruiti!” he was saying, or something like that. I stood on the other side of the cyclone fence swinging a bat, warming up, ready to play.

“Da way dee chirrens be tinking!” Michael said.

More laughter. This was my moment.

“Hey, man,” I said, my old swagger back.

Michael turned. “What you wan, boy?”

I could feel the tide of history heave and hold its mighty breath.

“Your mom—” I said.

“My
who
?” he said.

“Your mom—”

His eyeballs grew, expanding marshmallows in the angry microwave of his face.

“What you say, boy?” Michael said. Suddenly, I could understand him, and the violence in his eyes. My mind evacuated and my bowels alerted me of a very similar plan. And I could not remember the end of the joke.

“Your mom, she's just—fat,” I said. “Just very, very, very fat. Ha ha.”

I am guessing, by the way Michael attacked the fence between us with an aluminum bat, that he must have loved his mother very much. Someone wrenched the weapon away from him, held his arms. I don't remember exactly what he said, only that it had something to do with pulling off my genitals and putting them somewhere inconvenient.

“What's the ruckus?” Pop said, running over. I held the bat in a defensive position, preparing to bunt my way to safety. Michael threw himself to the ground, wailing.

“His mama dead,” one of the others said, while Michael cried.

“Yeah, okay!” I said, still holding my bat, not really believing them. “Ha ha.”

I waited for Michael to get up and start laughing and maybe hug me and make me an honorary black person, and I waited, and I am still waiting. Turns out, she really was dead. Drowned, they said, when he was a baby.

There would be no pool party, and no triumphant moment of festive We Are All of the Human Race togetherness. It was just Michael, weeping for his dead mother, and me, the white devil, standing over him with a bat.

T
he last time I was in Mississippi, I beheld many wondrous things.

Black boys, riding horses, carrying shotguns. A white man, in a real Honest Abe stovepipe hat and a black frock coat, decrying Obamacare, and looking really dapper, and also insane. Trailers featuring great big Confederate flags hanging like kerchiefs in the tired light of an afternoon. Cafés with at least four different colors of people, holding hands and praying aloud for anyone to hear, people the color of chocolate and plantains and yams.

And I saw a black woman driving a nice European sedan with a bumper sticker that read: “Remember Freedom Summer.”

And I remembered my own freedom summer.

What is there to say about it? It was little league, not a Disney movie. We won some, lost most. There were no riots. But we did see heads wag. And I heard things I won't forget.

“Nigger-lover,” I heard them say of my father.

He did a fine job, as fine as could be done with children who had been taught their whole lives that using your hands was a penalty. He'd done what he set out to do. He'd coached a baseball team.

In the years that followed, Pop continued to evolve. It was
no fairy tale, of course. He did not start sending checks to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But he did join a church with a black deacon and more than one black family, which is about as close to a miracle as I've ever seen, and he and my mother even went to a black church for a black wedding, a fact resulting from their having something resembling black friends, and he even moved to a neighborhood in town where black people were reported to live.

“It's some blacks here,” said Pop. “But they all right.”

“Good,” I said. “I would hate to see you join one of their gangs.”

He smiled, but did not laugh.

And he coached more black teams, and helped many of those boys in other unheralded ways. He'd had his issues with black skin, but was drawn inexorably toward boys with no fathers, black and white, a gravitational pull stronger than history.

“Your father has changed a lot,” Mom said, when I walked into the living room a few years ago to find Pop sitting in his recliner, holding a small black child in pajamas.

“This here's my friend,” Pop said.

“We're babysitting for some neighbors,” Mom said.

The South is a strange place, one that can't be fit inside a movie, a place that dares you to simplify it, like a prime number, like a Bible story, like my father.

W
hat I learned from that encounter with my teammate was that sometimes you can't get someone to like you, no matter how fat you say their mothers are, especially if those mothers are dead. It was an exhilarating thing to come so close to a real fight, the electricity that lights up the bloodstream, makes you come more alive than you were used to, even if it meant ending up in a wheelchair, which felt likely in my case.

Could I do it, could I be in a real fight?

For most of my life I've subscribed to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a homeless Israeli who, when one looks closely at his memoirs, seems to believe that if someone should smite thee, one might actually respond with the counterintuitive choice. There's much talk of cheek-turning, as though one had an endless supply of cheeks. What's not clear is, what if your attacker just keeps hitting all the new cheeks?

The first fistfight I ever saw took place at a football game between Ole Miss and Arkansas, a contest of two esteemed institutions that serve as Arcadian oases for the citizens of their respective states, where the Best That Has Been Thought and Said is both thought and said and occasionally screamed
by a drunken man who is not afraid to urinate into an Igloo cooler.

I was maybe eight, nine. We'd just left the stadium. I was smitten by the energy of the place, this paradisiac colony of learning and sport and art, when someone hit me with a turkey leg. We were in the midst of a tangled frenzy of brawling. Mom grabbed me and ran, while Pop marshaled himself as a sort of human shield between the barbarians and us, a Great Wall of Father. I heard shouting, which included some variation of “Go back to Arkansas, you goddamn hillbillies” and at least one reference, each, to “titties,” “retards,” and “motherfucking shit-ass motherfuckers.”

One man wore a bright red necktie, so I assumed this was our Ole Miss man, while the Arkansan assailant was shirtless, which I felt gave credence to his being an actual hillbilly. The barebacked fellow had assistance, too: a young woman, presumably the owner of the titties in question, who was doing her best to concuss our man with a bottle. I remember ice and blood and the hiss of punctured beers and the terrible sickening sound of human meat throwing itself at other human meat, and then they disappeared over the horizon of memory, presumably to the ground, where all real fights eventually go.

I'd gotten into fisticuffs only once in my young life, roundhousing a portly classmate in kindergarten for stealing a potato chip. There was nothing courageous about it. He was chubby and unlikable, the easiest kind of person to hurt. It wasn't even really a fight. It was more like setting fire to a wounded sloth.

I'd much rather set fire to a sloth than get in a real fight, where the blood flows like wine, and Pop must have known it. When I was ten years old, he called me into his office.

Y
ou know how to fight, boy?” he said.

All I really knew of fighting I had learned from
The Karate Kid
, having perfected my Crane Technique, a maneuver central to the movie's plot, where you stand on one leg, spread your arms, and assume the position of someone who is attempting to pass a sobriety test while pretending to be a large bird.

I always knew Pop was a fighter. It was in his body, the sheer mass of him. On television, men who were that big were usually hitting things, usually with their fists, occasionally with folding chairs. The stories I'd heard about him were incomplete, partial, obscured by history and rumor. There were tales of schoolyard fights, beatings by principals, followed by more fights, perhaps with the principal, followed by tales of guns and knives and women and gentlemen callers. I asked Pop if he'd ever killed a man, and he didn't say no.

He also once told me about a man who tried to molest him when he was a boy.

“Really?” I said. “What'd you do?”

“I took his riding crop and whipped him with it.”

I had so many questions, such as, What sort of a badass must one be, to beat a grown man with his own crop? And also, what is a crop?

F
irst thing you do,” he said now, “is ask them real nice to stop.”

“What are they doing?” I said.

“It don't matter.”

“Like, hitting me?”

“No, if they hitting you, you just hit back,” he said. “I mean if they doing something silly, like talking at you funny.”

“Like telling a joke?”

“No, no.”

Maybe somebody was getting bullied, he said, or was kicking your dog.

“So I ask them to stop?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Stop kicking that dog,” I said, as a sort of rehearsal.

“Yeah.”

“What if it's not my dog?”

“It don't matter. You said stop, he better stop.”

I liked the idea that I could just make people stop doing bad things by asking them to.

“You might even say
please
,” he said. “You know, be friendly.”

“And what do I do if he keeps kicking the dog?”

“That's when you hit him.”

“Where?”

“I'd start with the face,” he said.

He balled up his fist. It was a mighty thing to see up close, to imagine a rock like that coming at you.

“And if that don't work,” he said, “hit him in the tallywhacker. Get you some ear, pull his hair. You fighting for your life here. Stomp on his nuts if you got to. Shit, bust his nuts wide open. And if he gets up and comes at you, there's one last thing you can do.”

I waited. What would it be? Brass knuckles? Throwing stars? Did our family possess some ancient Crane Technique of our own?

“Act crazy,” he said.

“Crazy?”

“Like, pick up a piece of furniture, maybe, and throw it at him.” He explained that I should search my immediate surroundings for anything that can be used as a weapon: lamp, terrarium, potted plant. “You got to be crazy, man. If you hit him with a rocking chair, he won't ever mess with you no more, believe me.”

I thought of all the things I could do to seem crazy. Kicking, biting, homework.

I
did have some fighting experience with my brother, although Bird called it “playing,” as in, “Hey, I'm just playing with you,” while I would be on the floor, looking for my teeth. His preferred method of combat was to put a hand on my forehead and keep me at arm's length while I clawed the air with my short, malformed arms. In pickup football games, he'd tackle me with unnecessary zeal, picking me up and then throwing me to the ground in the manner of a small woodland creature you wanted to stun before clubbing to death.

If you threw a sock at him, he'd throw a rock back. If you threw a Nerf football at the back of his head, he'd throw a wooden bat at the front of yours. If you had the nerve to touch one of his Iron Maiden posters, he would place you in an iron maiden of his own devising, throwing you on the ground and folding you in half, bringing your legs up to your face, and then spitting playfully in your mouth while you cried.

Occasionally, I tried Pop's lesson on others—Bird, for example, when he elbowed me in the nose for touching his Twinkie.

“Please don't do that again,” I said, tasting a little blood on the inside of my lip.

And, out of respect for me, he did it again.

According to Pop's lesson, this was when I was supposed to go ape, and so I would hurl myself at him like a crazed monkey, and he'd catch my hand and start to hit me in the face with it.

“Hit him back!” Pop would say, now watching.

I'd swing my free hand, the left one, at Bird's face, and soon find myself being beaten with both my hands. Bird would laugh, Pop would seem a little crestfallen. My last option, I knew, was to hit Bird in the sexual area, but it's hard to know
where that is when you're being flogged in the eyes with your very own hands.

P
op taught me lessons, and so did Mom. She was a teacher, after all. She'd been teaching since 1969, all over the Delta and then in Memphis and now in a place called Star. She taught fifth and sixth grades, mostly, and by all accounts the students loved her, a hypothesis based entirely on the gifts she brought home on the last day of school before Christmas, consisting mostly of buckets filled with chocolate. Clearly, these students believed my mother was some kind of god.

What had she taught them, that they supplicated her with such precious offerings? Long division and geography and the different types of clouds and new vocabulary words, I presumed. That was nothing to what she taught me, at home. While Pop was teaching me how to bust someone's nuts wide open, Mom was teaching me to make cornbread and sew a button and frost a cake, how to take notes on a sermon and nap and laugh and dance and play records when you clean the house. She taught me to prefer the Life of the Mind, or at least the Life of Reading in the Bathtub, to the Life of the Busting of Nuts.

On slow summer days, after our morning chores were done, while Bird would wander off down the road in the truck and Pop was out selling asphalt, Mom and I would do something that Pop wouldn't really allow in his presence: arts and crafts. I don't know: I guess he found it disagreeable to watch his boy make sock puppets. Calligraphy, shoe-box terrariums, poems on the electric typewriter, we did it all, and I learned to love being a maker of things, even when those things were papier-mâché birdhouses that confused my father.

Pop was very straightforward in his efforts to teach me to
fight, while Mom educated me in subtler ways, like asking me to help her make brownies when nobody was looking or buying watercolor kits and leaving them in conspicuous places around the house, such as on my face while I slept.

“Can I go to work with you tomorrow?” I'd occasionally ask her in late summer, just as I'd done with Pop. Fall would soon be upon us, and Mom needed to work on her classroom at the little school in Star, called McLaurin Attendance Center, and I wanted to help.

“Of course,” she said.

Those days were dreamy, walking the hallways of that empty school, nobody there but other teachers—women, you see—pleasant and refreshed from their summer vacation and not yet bitter and haggard, as they would be when the students arrived. Mom set me to designing her bulletin boards, drawing cartoon animals, cutting borders, retrieving butcher paper, stapling, gluing, taping, laminating: a real crafting fantasia.

“Oh, my goodness!” other teachers would say, visiting her classroom, seeing all the work I'd done. “Your son made all this? It's perfect!”

A career in education was starting to seem like the path for me, even though I was barely in middle school. Teachers, I decided, could teach me something, such as what else about me they found adorable.

C
an I change schools?” I asked my parents, a few days before I started the eighth grade. I wanted to go to Mom's school, I explained.

“Why?” Pop said.

A child needs two things from his parents, I think, besides food and water and shelter and love, and one of those is the Freedom to Almost Die in a Street Fight, or in some other violent
way, because a boy needs danger, and Pop heaped it upon me at every turn. But the other thing I needed he could not provide, and that was the Freedom to Glue Eyes to a Pinecone and Call It Your Friend, and that is what my mother gave me. She let me do what I was good at, and that's why I wanted to change schools.

Pop didn't protest too much. McLaurin had a decent baseball team, at least.

“I guess,” Pop said.

Mom smiled. It was done.

There'd been a good deal of fighting, it seemed, at my old school, and I figured the new school to be more civilized. After all, my mother was there, and she was very civilized. I laughed at Pop's silly lessons about fighting. No need for fighting at the little school in Star.

A
h, but I was wrong.

Gone were the rodeo kings and lovely daughters of farmers, replaced by a large helping of relatively normal children and also a few highly interesting persons called “hoods,” which was short for “hoodlums,” which was short for “youth who like to play with knives at school and tattoo themselves with hot coat hangers as a way of demonstrating their need for therapy.”

At McLaurin, there were fewer Good Country People, more Angry Trailer Park People, which was fun. They had a sparkle about them. And their fighting was intense. Even the girls fought. In most fights, the boys scrapped with other boys to reclaim something that had been taken from them, usually things named Sheila or Tammy, while Sheila and Tammy also fought somewhere nearby.

“Fight! Fight!” was not an uncommon thing to hear in the hallway, guaranteed to send a tidal wave of students toward the
sound of bodies colliding with lockers, jumping and grinning to see if they could learn a new way to kill someone with a U.S. history textbook. This was the Wild West. No
Karate Kid
here. This was more like
Bloodsport
. Crane Technique? Try Switchblade Technique.

One day, I watched two boys bow up in study hall. One was short, stout, the other tall, blond, muscular. What were they fighting about? Who knew. Metallica's latest album, I guessed, or whose girlfriend was more likely to be featured on
Cops
. The Viking threw himself at the Falstaff with such fury that I worried someone might die. I tried to stay focused on my book, but it was hard when your eyeballs knew they might get to see what a small intestine looks like. Coaches came running, cheerleaders cheered. It was not unlike football.

It was pretty clear that fights were over dignity and honor and women, and since I had no dignity or honor or women, I felt safe. Nobody had any reason to want to hit me. Then I learned that some people will hit you for no reason at all.

T
he boy's name is unimportant, mostly because he is probably still alive, and probably in prison for doing something to his loved ones with a machete. Like so many other nice people in this book, I'll call him something like Tommy, and I'll leave his distinguishing features to the imagination. Let's just say, he looked like an animal, and I'm not saying which kind, but it wasn't a beautiful animal. Tommy seemed to hold a deep and shameful anger, which we assumed was because of looking like the animal.