Garth Kaminski ascended to the throne on March 7th, 2020, the day on which the lead story on all the major television networks declared that Josh Hannon had died and on which the top trending Twitter hashtag was #worldsfattestman. Weighing in at an estimated 512 Kg, Garth was now the king of all fat men, and once the official declaration went out to all his gawking subjects, he would issue his first decree: Garth was not fat; he was metabolically challenged. It was important that people observe this semantic tweak; it was a matter of human dignity.
To clarify, there was no throne. That was merely a figure of speech. Garth passed all his time sprawled on a king-sized bed in the second story bedroom of a typical suburban house. Bespoke is how Janie described the bed. Janie had consulted her brother, a mechanical engineer, who helped her design and manufacture an appropriate bed for her husband. Teak slats laid over a titanium frame. As a precaution, she’d installed a load-bearing post underneath in the living room but had said nothing to Garth as she was sensitive to his concern for his dignity. The bed was hinged in the middle and came with a hydraulic lift that could raise Garth’s torso by 35 degrees in case he wanted to watch the 4K TV that was mounted on the far wall. In fact, it was while he lay inclined at 35 degrees and watching CNN that he first learned he had ascended to the throne.
Elimination was an issue. Janie’s brother went so far as to consult a contact at NASA regarding human waste management during long space flights. Did they simply use adult diapers? Or did they fix special bags direct to the anus? What about chafing and disinfectants? These were concerns that had never occurred to Janie until her brother—with his engineering brain—started to examine the challenges of LPBD (large person bed design—an acronym he coined and which has subsequently appeared in at least two academic journals). In the end, Janie’s brother came up with a NASA-inspired modified colostomy bag inserted directly into the anus and held in place by a combination of Velcro straps and ostomy adhesives. The bag dangled through a hole in the middle of the bed which was easily accessed from the side. Janie simply pulled open two teak panels, like the doors to her kitchen cupboards, and it was an easy matter from there to reach in and replace the bag.
On the day of Garth’s ascension, Vinny from Vinny’s Pizzeria phoned to congratulate him. Garth was Vinny’s best customer and had a standing order for three large pizzas delivered every day at lunchtime. Gus, the pizza delivery boy, had a key to the front door and was free to enter on those days when Janie was running errands. Gus would stand at the bottom of the stairs, holding the three warm boxes, and shout that he was bringing up the pizza. Gus would bound up the stairs and, as he entered the bedroom, would make retching sounds. Garth thought this was hilarious and the two of them—Garth and Gus—would laugh at the running joke. Bringing up the pizza.
Vinny had an ulterior motive for his phone call. He wanted to use Garth’s name and image (from the neck up) on menus and promotional materials in exchange for a free lifetime supply of pizza. Vinny didn’t mention that, before making his offer, he had consulted an actuary who assured him he wouldn’t be on the hook for more than a year or two. Garth was still a young man and it filled him with a voracious delight to contemplate another 50 years of free pizza for lunch, joking with Gus, licking tomato sauce from his fingertips, tossing the empty boxes onto the floor beside his bed. Janie had a more clear-eyed view of her husband’s prospects. Yes, she loved the man, loved the man desperately, but she had read all about morbid obesity and understood that, at his current weight, Garth was unlikely to survive his thirties. Janie snatched the phone from Garth’s hand and announced to Vinny that she was Garth’s wife and manager. The offer wasn’t good enough. He could call back when he was serious. She hung up on Vinny.
Husband and wife exchanged pained glances, Garth because he’d just been denied free pizza for life, Janie because… It was more complicated for Janie, and Garth didn’t seem to understand why. When they were first married, Janie weighed 55 Kg and fit into a size six dress. Garth weighed 135 Kg. While people acknowledged he was a big man, they called him jovial, large hearted. Older people sometimes compared him to Hoss from Bonanza. Now, nearly 10 years later, Janie could still fit into her wedding dress. But Garth? It was like he was possessed. Only there was no exorcist to cast out his eating demon. Janie understood that, at 512 Kg, her husband wasn’t just fat; he was terminally ill. Her soul mate was dying and there was nothing she could do about it. All that remained was to grieve.
There was one small hope left to Janie. They might have a child together. That way, when Garth died, at least some part of him would live on. However, when he passed the 400 Kg mark, he developed erectile dysfunction. The family physician had prescribed the usual pharmaceuticals, but because they are fat soluble, they had no effect on Garth and ultimately made their way through his catheter and into the city’s sewage system. Not long after this, Garth’s genitalia disappeared altogether within a great fold of flesh. The doctor was concerned that the genitals might become gangrenous and have to be removed.
As Garth’s weight burgeoned, so did the medical consensus that his situation could no longer be managed at home. He would have to be transported to the local hospital. He needed gastric bypass surgery. He needed liposuction of the lower stomach and upper thighs to ventilate the area around his genitals. He needed the supervision of a registered dietician. And perhaps most of all, he needed what could best be described in the non-clinical terms of Marvin Gaye as sexual healing. He would get round-the-clock support from a sex therapist.
To facilitate the transfer to hospital, Janie’s brother arranged for contractors to remove the exterior wall of the second story master bedroom and he equipped the bed with special slots so that a forklift could hoist it from the house without disturbing Garth. The first attempt failed because the front wheels of the forklift sank into the soft earth of the petunia bed underneath the bedroom window. Janie did love her flowers. Her brother knew it would upset her, but there was no choice: he had to excavate the petunia bed, pour in a metre of clean fill, and overlay it with highway grade concrete. It took a week before the fresh concrete was approved to support a forklift and a 600 Kg load, but their patience was rewarded: the bed removal went without a hitch. The forklift transferred the bed to a small flatbed truck in less than five minutes. The truck driver threw canvas straps over Garth’s chest, stomach, and thighs, and ratcheted them tight to hold Garth in place as they trundled through the city streets to the hospital.
It was a beautiful June morning, warm, but not so warm that Garth might break into a sweat. That would have been awkward. When a man of Garth’s size sweats, the stench can be terrific. On the trip to the hospital, a paramedic sat on the flatbed, monitoring Garth’s vital signs, motioning the driver once along the way to pause as a precautionary measure. Reporters gathered at his house to witness the transfer, while more waited for his arrival at the hospital. A helicopter even followed the route, providing aerial shots for a human interest story that would hit the evening news and, god willing, global syndication. But before all that, and priming the news cycle pump, was a gush of selfies and smartphone video clips across every social media platform ever invented and, accompanying it all, the usual divisive commentary:
#worldsfattestman
@fukbunny an example uv tru heroism
@scheissorama heroism? lmfao its his own dam fault he got that big in the 1st place
@lukesrighthand hey @scheissorama dont b such a fat h8tr – its a disease – ur the kind of person who wd laugh at cancer kids
@gamersdiaper @lukesrighthand disease? rlly? i hear the guy orders 3 lg pizzas, 2 big bottles of coke & a box of ho hos for lunch every day – his disease is being stoopid
@lukesrighthand @scheissorama @gamersdiaper ur a coupla dickwads!
@perdueprof #worldsfattestman symbol of Late Capitalist Consumerism. We are all Garth!
@gamersdiaper hay @perdueprof you some kind of liberal elitist faggot?
Janie knew how people talked about Garth on social media and it broke her heart, the absence of empathy, the absolute refusal to imagine what life might be like for someone who endlessly suffers, but today she directed all her attention to Garth’s safe transfer. She had nothing left for the frivolous remarks of people who didn’t know her husband and didn’t care.
When the flatbed truck halted and the driver killed the engine, the first person to greet Janie was the ED specialist, a youngish man with a bounce in his step and smile on his face, the perfect man for publicity shots. While he shook hands with Janie, the truck driver released the canvas straps and the deep grooves in Garth’s flesh vanished as the underlying displaced fat migrated home. The forklift roared to the end of the truck, back and forth, back and forth, until the tines of the fork lined up with the slots in the bed frame. Press cameras momentarily blinded Janie as she rushed to her husband’s side. This was the human interest story of the decade. Not since that kid fell down the well in Omaha or Nebraska or wherever had people been so fascinated by a news story with a human interest angle. It even made the Tonight Show’s opening monologue. A comedian in a suit comes out from behind the stage curtains, smiles at the camera, and claps his hands together. “Don’t know if you folks have heard about a fellow named Garth Kaminski.” He motions to a screen offstage. Cut to a photo of Garth, the one for the Vinny Pizzeria ad. Back to the comedian. “Garth Kaminski is the world’s fattest man. In fact, Garth is so fat…” On cue, the audience shouts: “How fat is he?”
The ED specialist waved over two orderlies who had been lingering by the oversized revolving door and they began to set up what the ED specialist called a pavilion which was, in fact, one of those nylon dining shelters that campers set up over a picnic table to keep mosquitoes from pestering them while they chow down on their fire-charred wieners. Only, in this case, they were setting it up over Garth’s bed to keep out nosy reporters while they removed his human waste bag, cleaned the extraction site with antiseptic wipes, and outfitted him with a customized adult diaper. Bespoke is how Janie described it. The whole process, from cutting a hole in his bedroom wall, to wobbling over the front lawn on a forklift, to the bumpy ride on a flatbed truck while gazing up at a helicopter, and now this—he flicked a finger to indicate the nylon walls of the dining shelter—the whole process overwhelmed him.
Janie laid a hand on her husband’s forearm and called him “Dear.”
Garth groaned.
“We’re doing all this for you. For your dignity.”
Garth rolled his eyes and guffawed. “I’d say that sail has shipped.” With a grunt, he flung an arm sideways and punched a hole through a nylon seam in the dining shelter. When he pulled his arm back to his chest, the motion brought down the whole flimsy structure. A wind caught the tent and it billowed like a giant scrotum and, breaking free of its frame, scudded down the drive and into traffic. The press had a clear view of Garth lying in his modified adult diaper and looking for all the world like a giant baby wrapped in swaddling clothes.
“Help me,” he called. He rolled onto his side and began the arduous process of moving his legs over the edge of the bed.
“Are you sitting up, honey? Is that what you want?”
Janie’s brother stepped behind Garth and got the orderlies to help him shove the massive torso into an upright position. Like football players, the three men lowered their shoulders and pressed into the flesh. When they were done, they remained to left and right and behind, like a tripod keeping him from toppling back onto the bed.
“You want human dignity? I’ll show you human dignity.”
Janie raised her eyebrows but knew better than to comment.
“I’m gonna walk through the front door. On my own.”
“Oh, honey.”
“Don’t Oh, honey me. Help me up.”
The three men shoved from behind while the ED specialist and the forklift operator each took an arm and pulled. A murmur riffled through the crowd of journalists and curious onlookers as they asked amongst themselves what was happening. What was Garth trying to do? Was he going to walk through the front door? Someone gasped in wonder. Garth stood for a time, gathering his strength, then took his first step.
The hospital’s front door was an outsized revolving door on continuous rotation. Each section was large enough to accommodate at least two caregivers and a patient in a wheelchair, or even on a gurney if the need arose. Although the door rotated, the rate of rotation was slow enough that even a morbidly obese man shuffling in a bespoke adult diaper could enter without being struck from behind by the following partition. For an ordinary 90 Kg man, the distance from bed to revolving door was 20 paces, but for a 512 Kg man with limited mobility, it was more like 200 paces. Most onlookers found it embarrassing to watch. Some even turned away. In subsequent viral videos, you could hear clapping and cheers. The editor of a more cynical version overplayed a track of the Vangelis theme from Chariots of Fire and made it seem as if Garth was shuffling in slo-mo along an English beach. In fact, there was no sound; the onlookers were struck dumb by the awkwardness of the scene. Garth grunted and puffed. Pink blotches blossomed all over his body. Sweat gathered in rivulets that trickled along the folds of his skin.
Janie tried to follow her husband into the revolving door but there was no room. She would follow in the next section, like a seed in a spinning orange slice. After the partition passed, she stepped into the next section. She didn’t see Garth stumble because she was distracted by a camera flash. When she reopened her eyes, Garth was laid out on the floor in front of her, separated by a pane of Plexiglas. She banged on the glass and called his name. “Yeah, I’m all right.” His voice returned to her muffled and distant-sounding. The partition pressed flush against the soles of his feet and stopped. The revolving door’s motor continued to whir but the door no longer revolved.
“Garth?”
“Yeah?”
“Garth?”
“I can hear you.”
“Can you get back on your feet?”
“I dunno.”
Garth had fallen onto his back. Given enough space, he could have rolled onto his stomach and, from there, worked to a kneeling position. But there wasn’t enough room in his section of the revolving door to roll over onto his stomach. Instead, he lay on his back like a flipped turtle and flailed. In fact, it would be an overstatement to say that Garth flailed. He wriggled his fat digits until even that small movement left him exhausted. Then he fell still.
The motor for the revolving door gave a final screech and a puff of smoke rose from the floor at the door’s axis. The two orderlies shoved the door in the reverse direction but it had locked in place.
“Garth?”
“I wanna cigarette.”
“Honey, you don’t smoke.”
“Pan-seared cats.”
“What?”
“I wanna fuck the stock market.”
Janie turned to the ED specialist and, with a pleading look, asked what was wrong with her husband. Later that evening, a clip on CNN seemed to account for Garth’s odd behaviour. A hard-hitting reporter button-holed one of the hospital’s anesthesiologists who, in a breathless voice, explained the ins and outs of hypoxia. The revolving door had stopped at such a position that it hermetically sealed Garth inside a Plexiglas column. He had a limited and dwindling supply of oxygen. The anesthesiologist spoke in abstractions and hypotheticals, never referring to Garth by name, but speaking instead of “the victim” and “a man finding himself in such circumstances.” With dwindling oxygen, hypothetically speaking, a victim finding himself in such circumstances might behave as if he is high or even crazy. Eventually, he would replace all his oxygen with CO2—carbon dioxide—a mercy, really, as it would put him to sleep before it delivered a painless death.
Janie pounded her fists against the Plexiglas pane, then turning to the crowd, cried out for someone to do something. No one, not even her brother, the mechanical engineer, could make so much as a hairline fissure in the Plexiglas for the simple reason that, as a subsequent inquiry revealed, it was a bullet-proof material designed to thwart potential terrorist threats. Janie crumpled to the floor, pressed her face to the glass, and told Garth how much she loved him. A videographer got a tight shot of her tearful good-bye.
Johannes Platz ascended to the throne on April 18th, 2020, the day on which the lead story on all the major television networks declared that Garth Kaminski had died and on which the top trending Twitter hashtag was #worldsfattestman.