Monsters Don't Fit
I was maybe twenty-five when Little Bird’s grandmother quit telling the story of when they let me carry the football in the sixth grade, and all the boys who hadn’t had their growth yet clung to me like leaches, trying to stop my forward progress when I carried them with me across the finish line. Eventually, the other coaches figured out that the best strategy was to tie up my legs like the snow walkers in “The Empire Strikes Back.” She’d poke my chest and arms where the smaller boys clung to me, with this absolutely devilish grin.
To maintain order in a third-grade classroom, Mrs. McIntyre developed an aggressive personality with the children. Some people found her intimidating at the time, but endearing once they made it to the fourth grade. I adored her from the first moment and sat cross-legged at her feet, hoping for a smile. When I see Little Bird, I think of that smile. If you’re reading this, it’s because she figured out why I couldn’t write.
When Merian C Cooper had an idea for a “Terror Gorilla Picture.” He started out as a regular gorilla. The plan was to film an actual gorilla fight an actual Komodo dragon in New York. As you might imagine, that proved complicated. There was only one gorilla in captivity, and PT Barnham wasn’t giving him up.
Once he added the “Beauty and the Beast” angle to the picture idea, he kept saying, “Make it bigger!” whenever artists turned in concept drawings, even though there was no script yet. One drawing had a topless pre-code jungle babe defending a bunch of great white hunters from a ten-foot gorilla.
Bigger! Make it Bigger!
Eventually, they settled on an eighteen-foot-tall gorilla, and a brass-and-aluminum armature was designed and built on essentially a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. Having recently built a painstakingly accurate replica of the original “long face” Kong, I’m amazed at how difficult animating that must have been.
The life-size hand and head were built to this scale. The hand was specifically for the scene in which Kong accidentally “undresses” Ann, an effect achieved through very clever rear projection. It was repeated in Son of Kong, using the same arm but with white fur. The armature for that hand was used as the basis for the giant hand in “Dr. Cyclops” seven years later.
Moving to New York, Cooper again worried Kong was too small.
“Make him bigger!”
A twenty-four-foot Kong was decided on (even though they used the same giant hand and head props), with the New York miniature sets built at a 1:16 scale. Climbing the tower of the Empire State Building, Kong again was deemed too small, so his size increased by another one-half, only to shrink back down to twenty-four feet at the top, with Fay Wray rear projected in at the appropriate size. Fay worked on five movies that year. People only remember one. Her husband was a horrible person.
Trying to humanize the character, I spent many years trying to meet Fay Wray. When I finally did, we never discussed it, but I decided early on to ask her about her entire career except King Kong. I felt she was probably pretty sick of him by then, and she made so many other movies!
I was a pretty normal-sized kid until the fifth grade. That year, it was like Lon Chaney in “The Wolfman.” Hair started growing—everywhere! Even on my knuckles and the knuckles on my toes. My voice dropped, and I started to grow. I started to grow and didn’t stop.
Looking at the photo of our class trip to Washington, D.C., they put me in the top row, toward the back, so it’s not as obvious, but I look like a man among children. Fairly often now, even if I’m in a chair, I’ll slouch down so as to make myself look more like other people. In that photo, even though my arms are getting pretty swollen, you can tell my spine is making an “s” shape so my head is closer to the heads of my classmates. I had this vision of what other boys looked like in my head, and I wasn’t one of them. I was a monster.
Filming “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,” Ray Harryhausen made his imaginary dinosaur (a rhedosaurus) about sixty meters, or 200 feet long. A quadraped, he was about forty feet tall. Almost twice the height of King Kong. Noticing a similarity between his story idea and a story his childhood friend Ray Bradbury published in “The Saturday Evening Post.” Bradbury’s original title was “The Foghorn,” but both the story and the film were renamed “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” for publicity purposes, and a scene where Harryhausen’s imaginary dinosaur attacks a lighthouse, just like in Bradbury’s story, was added. The actual model lighthouse, with armature wires inside so it will topple on cue, was in Forrest J Ackerman’s house for years. Seeing these things, close enough to touch, but never daring to, had such a huge impact on my life.
At Christmas dinner, cousin Robert Wingate from Greenwood would poke my chest, arms and shoulders, “Goddamn, Boyd! What size are you now?”
His wife, Libba (Elizabeth), would kiss my cheek and say, “Leave the boy alone, Wingate. He’s just growing.
One of Daddy’s best friends was Billy Neville who ran a store named The Rogue and Good company—A Gentleman’s Habidashary. Billy could fit me in shirts and pants pretty well, but when it came to coats, he started having to pop the seam in the lining so my arms would fit, then take in the waist because, to fit my shoulders, we had to get the biggest size he had, and (at least then) my belly didn’t match my shoulders.
Eventually, it was hopeless and off to the “Big and Tall Warehouse” for me, where they still had to take in the waist because coats that fit my shoulders didn’t fit my waist. I was told the normal ratio of shoulder to waist, apparantly I was twice that. Too big, Boyd. Too big.
After the tremendous success of “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” the Japanese studio, TOHO, wanted its own monster movie. They didn’t have the time or the budget foro stop-motion, but they had a guy who made great minitures for their war movies, and a guy who made great costumes. Deciding that their monster should represent the destructive power of the atomic bomb, they upended Harryhausen’s dinosaur making him 50 meters tall and 100 meters long. Both Godzilla and King Kong have continually gotten bigger and bigger with each movie ever since.
I only met my first girlfriend face-to-face once. Then we talked on the phone for a year. That’s pretty high romance for a thirteen-year-old. She didn’t make it to fourteen. I’ve done my best to tell her story with some gentleness, while still conveying the pain that untreated teenage mental health problems can cause. It’s a balancing act. I figure I owe it to her.
I tried again at sixteen. Parking for the first time, I noticed that I was crowding her into the space between the seat and the door. She seemed pretty willing, but my bulk kept pushing her further and further away. Eventually, I just pulled her into my lap. “How’s this?” Romance was always experimental to me.
In college, I had a really tiny friend. She lived with a normal-sized girl. The normal-sized girl was a raven, so she caught my attention first, but the tiny one had these horrible migraine headaches. “Carry me?” She said one day. I could see the pain in her eyes. Exploring the Millsaps golf course at night, I carried her like Fay Wray, whispering, “Is your head better?” She lived in an apartment across the street. I carried her up the stairs and deposited her on her bed. “Thank you.”
“Do you feel better?” I asked.
“A little.”
Months later, we had a movie party at my house. Five or six people attended. There might have been drinking. One guest insisted that my pet lionfish was challenging him. My friend’s painful head returned. She excused herself and went to the room where I did my art. I found her curled up on the daybed. I lay beside her, pulling her close to me and covering her with my arm, bigger than her legs.
After the movie, her Raven roommate came looking for us. Seeing me lying on my side on the day bed, she said, “Where’s Connie?” and her little head popped up. “I’m here.”
A few months later, they were going to Europe for the summer, and my birthday was coming up. I was to keep their cat, who found places to attack me, like a furry ninja. When I trust people, I give the keys to my place. My sister and Little Bird have the keys here.
Coming home from work, tired, out of sorts, I turned on the light to my bedroom, so I could undress, and a seven-foot-tall inflatable Godzilla was on my bed, and my unmade bed was made. They were on the plane for Europe, and I laughed.
Sometimes you hear about people having a nervous breakdown. I didn’t break all at once. Like a bundle of dried pasta, I broke strand-by-strand-by-strand. If you stood close enough, you could hear them snapping like breakfast cereal.
To become as strong as I was, I consumed unnatural amounts of protein, followed by unnatural amounts of greens, and an unsafe amount of beer and whiskey to wash it down. I was never a svelte person, but I maintained a healthy BMI through my workouts. As my mind began to break, my joints began to fail, and my workouts became lighter and lighter. Math is math; I started packing on pounds that weren’t muscle.
Already shopping at “big and tall” and deciding girls just weren’t for me, I didn’t much care. I liked the food. Food didn’t betray me. We worked out an agreement.
Deciding not to die, my first task was to lose all that extra weight. At first, I was too weak to do anything but diet. In rehab, the few people I allowed to see me commented on my remarkable transformation. I had abandoned Facebook long ago, but I took to Facebook and wrote a fairly long essay about how I didn’t die, and how I lost the weight, but don’t do it the way I did it because you’ll die, and I’ll miss you.
“Wait, is Boyd a writer?”
I’ve always associated with the monsters that didn’t fit in the world, like Kong and Godzilla. Some people, like Little Bird’s grandmother and my tiny friend Connie, loved me for it and found it funny. Other people thought, “What the hell is wrong with you, son?”
The women who found my size attractive (you’d be surprised how many) worried me. Monsters aren’t sexy, honey. What are you doing?
I sent the Little Bird a picture of me in high school, in my track-and-field uniform. I was in the field; normal-sized kids were in track. "You were a monster!” She shouted.
“Oh no! No! No! I didn’t mean it like that. Please forgive me?”
I laughed. “Don’t fret, child. I am a monster. I don’t mind being a monster.”
I asked a friend to take a picture of us at Louise’s Jazz Bar for her family and to show off her newly red hair. Just like in eighth grade, I made an “S” shape with my spine and leaned in so my head would be no higher than hers. She’s just a little girl; I’m still a monster. A thinner monster, but a monster nonetheless.
The thing you have to remember about Beauty and the Beast stories is that the beast helps define the beauty. She’s more beautiful because he’s so beastly. I don’t mind being a monster. Not for a minute. I’m a kind monster. I make beautiful things. I use my shocking size to make smaller things feel safe. That’s what monsters do.
