Big Me: Chapter One

"So, uh," Carol said, "Do you need some clothes, or what?"

It was a dumb question and as I stood there towering over her, the tip of my penis dangling like mistletoe over the top of her head, I let the frustration well up in an eye-roll before suppressing it with a long breath, which shook the pictures displayed on the shelf. Of course I needed clothes. "Yeah," I said, "But I don't think Big Pete's Big & Tall will cut it.

"Where did the Incredible Hulk get those purple jean shorts?"

Carol laughed but I wasn't really joking, and I thought about pinching her. Realizing a simple pinch would snap her arm like a tortilla chip, though, I settled for glaring angrily at her. After a few short phone calls to local merchants, she shrugged her shoulders at me.

It was only because we sprung for the two-story condo with high ceilings that the public hadn't yet seen my birthday suit, which I'd been wearing since the transformation lay waste to my favorite pearl-snap shirt and the only pair of jeans that makes my package look formidable in any way. Speaking of--

My penis, I measured, was now around a foot, give or take, in length--but, taking proportion into account, it was still nothing to brag about. Brobdingnagian me hadn't lost his sense of shame, so I refused to go out and told Carol to leave and not return until she had found me something to wear. She grabbed her keys and left in a huff. I just stood in the living room trying not to bump into anything.

When Carol returned three hours later, she carried a huge flat box. "Well," I said.

"It's all I could find."

I got ready to scold Carol, and she produced a massive American flag from the box, the sort that fly outside of car dealerships. She said she had bought it from "Slick" Danny Barfield at Barfield Motors. "It'll have to do," I said,"until we find something more permanent."

Carol cut a hole in the middle of the flag, and stitched up the sides where my hips would go. It looked a little like a hospital gown when I put it on, only brighter, and more disrespectful.

With some makeshift raiment covering my shame, we decided to go into town to continue our search for proper pants. After a few unsuccessful attempts at wriggling my way through the front door, I looked at Carol. "I'm just going to have to, you know... Go through it."

Carol thought about protesting, but didn't. There was no other way.

So much to the chagrin of the folks at Valley View Condominium Homes, I got a running start and smashed my way through the front of the building--which, to be perfectly honest, felt pretty good. Almost like I was finally acting like a giant. The trip into town was a bit less vindicating.

As we walked through the streets, eyes fixed constantly to my heaving, star-spangled back, a veteran took exception to my choice of clothing and spat whiskey on my ankle. "You goddamned liberal queer!" he yelled, tilting his head dramatically from his wheelchair. "Go back to Russia." Carol tried to politely explain our situation, and when that didn't calm him, she gave him a push in the opposite direction and he rolled away, flailing his arm.

We roamed around aimlessly for a few more blocks, and as a great crowd began to form behind me, realized that neither of us knew where we were going. As we turned to go home, a throng of dead-eyed rubberneckers staring up at me with camera phones in hand, a little girl on a big wheel came barreling toward me. I stood still for fear of crushing her.

She seemed oblivious to my presence as she rode between my legs. Then, from somewhere beneath my flag-gown, I heard a dreadful, piercing scream.

I knew immediately what had happened. The first casualty of my being a grotesque leviathan was the innocence of the girl's eyes. She saw an awful, awful thing that day, and when I saw the crowd, simultaneously reaching for their cell phones, pointing and screeching about a 22-foot anti-American pervert on the loose, I felt the urge to climb a tall building. "We better go," I said, and Carol agreed. A fat man I took for the girl's father put his phone away and began frantically punching the side of my knee. "You communist pervert!" he said. "I'll kill you!" I glanced down at him, and chuckled at his threat. For a moment, I thought about kicking him, going on a real rampage. But I was tired, and his punches didn't really hurt. The sirens began to wail then and, accepting begrudgingly that I couldn't really hide, I stood silent, my knees together, hoping no one else got a good view of my crank.

This was red letter day for the police department, whose greatest responsibility, generally speaking, was keeping drivers at a reasonable speed and removing unauthorized signs--advertising garage sales, lost pets, and once a prostitute--from utility poles. The officers had dusted off their previously untouched SWAT gear and fired up the cavalry by the time they arrived, careening onto the scene to find Carol and I standing in a pond of curious onlookers. "Put up your hands, Freak Show!"

I put on a brave front for the crowd, beating my chest and doing my imitation of Chewbaca that everyone likes so much, but it was then, as I knelt in the streets listening to the cops argue over how to detain a 22-foot perp, that I knew for sure. Being a giant sucks ass.