The World's Largest Man

by Harrison Scott Key

  “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.

  CHAPTER 11

  Fight School

  What 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.

  You 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?

  First 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 nos
e 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.

  Pop 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.

  Can 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.

  Ah, 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.

  The 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.

  I sat behind him in English. We’d never had bad blood. The teacher was not in the room, and he was focusing intently on a piece of paper, drawing with a pencil.

  “What are you drawing?” I said, trying to be friendly.

  “A picture of your mom,” he said.

  He held it up. It looked like a manatee wearing a wig.

  It was even more hurtful because Mom had, in fact, been his teacher only a few years before. He knew my mother. He knew that she didn’t at all look like an aquatic mammal. And you know, maybe it was my hormones, or a bad reaction to the cafeteria food, but I sincerely believed a polite request to stop drawing pictures of my mother would be just the moment of human decency that Tommy required in what must’ve been a troubled and turbulent life.

  And besides, if you just sit there and let someone draw a picture of your mother like that, while other people see it happening, many of them staring, leaning in, lusting for blood and circuses, including several pretty girls, then what would stop others from doing the same, turning every family member into an illustrated monster?

/>   “That’s not very nice, drawing a picture of my mom like that,” I said.

  “Really?” he said, putting down his pencil.

  “Really.”

  I had never noticed how large Tommy was. Did he have a gland problem?

  “You don’t like my picture?” he said.

  “I just wish you would stop drawing it,” I said. “Please.”

  Pop had said to say please, but the way it came out, it sounded more like a taunt, more like, Could you remove my head with your bare hands, please?

  Tommy grabbed my neck with his left hand, lifted me out of my desk, and drew back his right in a fist. He stood there like a cocked pistol, his fist pulled back, vibrating with desire.

  “I’ll knock hell from you, boy!” he said.

  I tried to look casual, as though I’d woken up that day having planned to be choked in public. I looked like someone waiting to be seated at a restaurant who just happened to have an enraged hand attached to his throat.

  “Just try and hit me!” he said.

  But I couldn’t really talk.

  “Just try and hit me and you’ll see, boy!”

  I tried to communicate with my eyes, making them friendly, but also deeply sad at the brokenness of the world, perhaps how the Lord’s eyes looked to Pilate. If my eyes were saying anything to Tommy, it was something like, “puppies” or “flowers” or “Christmas.”

  He let me go. We sat down. The teacher came in. Nobody said a thing.

  Later, I slipped out of study hall and walked to my mother’s classroom. I had no plans to tell her what happened—it’s just, I thought it’d be nice to go somewhere in the building where nobody wanted to see how far my windpipe could bend. Her door was closed, and I peeked in to watch my sweet mother teaching those children, who now seemed so young, so eager, their eyes wide as spring flowers. Mom’s back was to the door, and I saw her doing something I’d never seen before: screaming. Actually, it was more like shrieking. She shrieked at her students.