The Return of Pig-Man Joe
Word about town suggested Joe, post surgery, was now a man to be reckoned with. That would be good if true , but I have to admit it would take a lot for me to believe it.
Joe was born fat; not baby fat or cute fat or even he’ll-outgrow-it fat, just simple, out-of control, extraordinarily, hippopotamus-like fat. He was born this way despite the fact that his mother had been an Olympic runner and his tall, gangly father a damn good basketball player, so people always found it a fairly odd situation.
Joe’s right leg was two sizes larger and three shades darker than the other and carried with it a couple of large sores which had to be drained after every other class. Because of the sores, a terrible tendency to sweat underneath folds of skin, and despite Joe’s best effort to be otherwise, he stank.
In the sixth grade, which is when Joe and I became friends, he officially weighed three hundred ninety seven pounds, even though I knew that to be a conservative amount.
All the kids in the school called him different things: Big 50, Rhino, Monster Man, Buddha. But the one I hated the most, the one that stuck the most, was Pig-Man Joe. We talked it about it one day, on the way to gym class.
“You hear what they callin’ me now don’tcha’?”
“Don’t worry about it Joe,” I said. I carried all of our books while he got about on a motorized wheelchair we called “The Mach 5”. It wasn’t exactly fast and he didn’t exactly look like Speed Racer, but it was better than dragging his club leg up and down the halls.
“Pig-Man,” He said and shook his head.
“Pig-Man?”
Joe nodded slowly, which he did frequently, having to take deep breaths between and around his words.
So I continued with, “Who cares? Wait until the science fair next month. You’ll show everybody.”
He nodded again, took a sip from a long tube attached to a bottle kept in a side pocket of the wheelchair.
But Joe never made it to the science fair. He spent the night crying in bed after boys from the football team destroyed his invention. I came over to cheer him up, but it did no good. Joe was never the same after that, deciding to spend most of his time locked in his room.
By the tenth grade, Joe was 532 pounds and could no longer go to school. His parents decided to take him to New York, to a center that dealt specifically with the morbidly obese and away from our town and people that didn’t.
I talked to him the hot summer day they left and remember saying, “I guess this is it?”
“I guess it is.”
“I hear the hospital you’re going to is world renowned for helping people lose weight.”
“So they say.” He shrugged and examined the flow meter on his oxygen bottle.
“Gonna miss you big guy,” I said. I heard the home aid workers chattering outside his room and decided not to hug him. “Stay in touch alright?”
“Okay,” Joe began. Then he looked at me, much in the same way one might look at a comet. “Stacy...”
“Yea Joe?”
“If I wasn’t like this,” he said, taking a deep breath, deeper than normal. “Could I be..”
“Be what Joe?”
“Be..be..”
Before he could finish, six large men bounded into the room with a steel cage backboard. Joe, who was naked save for a pair of dingy cut-off khaki shorts, struggled to sit up in the bed. One of the men, portly in his own right, tried hard not to snicker at my friend’s breasts and stomach, which draped over his thighs. He said, “Joe, you ready to go?”
We both nodded.
While they readied the board, I whispered this to Joe, “What were you going to ask me big guy?”
“If I could be your boyfriend?”
I laughed loud, then quickly covered my mouth. His face sunk into his chest and his eyes watered. It would be the last time I would ever see or hear from him again. Or so I thought.
