Kitabı oku: «Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird»

CHAPTER 1 The World’s Most Enhanced Woman and Me
PART 1
‘The boobs were my brainchild’ Minka’s story

I arrived in Las Vegas Nevada, and although a glance at the calendar on my Blackberry would confirm it was 2008, on arrival at the airport, it quickly became apparent that in Vegas it always was, and always will be, 1982.

I’m barely off flight BA766, and having bid farewell to UK civility and proper tea – and having tricked myself through passport control by trying to make the nature of this particular documentary sound as dull as possible so as not to stir the notoriously scabrous US customs officials – I’m greeted by a whole land of slot machines and crap tables. In fact it feels like you’ve come off the plane and walked straight into Trump Tower. There must be people who have fluttered away their fortune before even getting their bags off the carousel.

And the airport sets the tone for the whole town – fusty, chintzy and a little bit dog-eared. This airport, like Vegas itself, was genuinely glamorous and gilded and shiny, but a rather long time ago. I’d say it was around the time Peter Duncan was doing his screen test for Blue Peter, and when Margaret Thatcher was putting together her first cabinet. The airport carpet tells the whole story. It’s an Eighties psychedelic take on the kind of rich pile variety enjoyed by patrons of a typical Wetherspoon pub in the North of England. A heavy, dizzying pattern that feeds into the sense that a visit here will be eye-catching but neither pleasant, nor pretty.

Out of the airport, I experience three seconds of dry, dead Nevada heat hitting my pale, jetlagged skin, before jumping into my hired Toyota SUV, a machine that has been air conditioned to sub-Arctic levels. In fact, they have clearly solved the issue of global warming – and the answer, is for all of us to sell our houses and move into US-built Toyota cars. I’ve never been colder. My visit to the snowdrifts of Inner Mongolia to meet the smallest man in the world, where temperatures sank to below minus 20, felt like a beach holiday compared with my commute into Sin City. In fact my travels have given me a mild phobia of air conditioning. If you are going out for a night on the tiles in Vegas, or Hong Kong, or Dubai (I’m showing off now), may I suggest you dress for a particularly harsh Edinburgh winter.

Driving into this bizarre experiment of a town is indeed a surreal experience. It goes something like this: airport, then arid desert, then rubbish suburban bit (imagine a very hot Ipswich) and finally a version of Blackpool on a combination of crack cocaine, crystal meth and a particularly strong mug of builders’ tea. It’s like nothing you’ve seen in your life. But so is downtown Kabul – that doesn’t make it a good thing.

Vegas is a debauched, energy-guzzling, dollar-shredding party that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and has been throbbing in the desert for about the last sixty years. It is the dark heart of the American dream, flying in the face of the USA’s predominantly evangelical Christian, puritanical culture. It’s like LA in that it’s a very wrong place, but like so many wrong things in life (liquorice, crushed denim, Russian pop music) it’s strangely comforting to know it’s there.

Vegas is all about scale, and inspiring awe. Just in the same way that churches and mosques and synagogues, and whatever it is Quakers hang around in, are designed to make you feel small and create a sense of a higher power, so here in Vegas you feel dwarfed by the size of everything, and the blinding brightness of it all. Driving the Land Cruiser into this adults-only playground, you are struck by a number of familiar sights – a mini version of the Eiffel Tower, a shrunk-down Venice and of course a pint-sized copy of New York City. The message to Americans outside Vegas is: shred your passport, everything that’s good about the world is right here. What a relief to know you’ll never have to worry your pretty little head about going to Paris ever again.

The huge problem with Vegas for me is that I’m not a gambler. So it’s like being a child in a pub – what’s the point? If you don’t gamble, you bypass the whole purpose of the place, rendering the experience utterly meaningless (once you’ve been to the mall, taken in the Bette Midler Show and bought an Abercrombie polo shirt designed for someone ten years younger than you, and considerably more ‘ripped’). It’s like going to Disneyland but not going on the rides, or going to Florence and keeping your eyes shut.

But then, I wasn’t here for the gambling. I’m here to meet the most enhanced woman in the world. But what does that mean? Well, it’s a polite euphemism for the female that’s had the largest breast implants on Earth. In fact, as I pored over some images of such women on the internet – by way of research you understand – it became quite clear that it was anything but ‘enhanced’. Butchered, inflated, almost exploding would be better terms. We all know that boob jobs are now widely practised across the globe. In the UK alone, the best part of 30,000 women a year build on what God has given them, resulting in varying degrees of Dolly Partonness. In the States it’s 340,000. That’s a lot of breast.

Up till now I’ve been fairly agnostic about the issue of fake boobs. I tend to adopt the crooked nose rule, which is that if you feel the way you look is abnormal, and you just want to fix that, and it will boost your confidence, it’s pretty loathsome for someone to say you can’t. I’m imagining the equivalent to the crooked nose in the chest region would be a feeling of being so small that there’s the absence of a so-called feminine figure. A bit of well-placed silicone might balance things out a bit. In which case, good luck to you.

The women I’ve come to see are not the thick end of the wedge. They are off the wedge. They are on another planet. They are their own species. They occupy a chapter of their own in the big book of human madness. Minka is one such woman. And of course, she lives in Vegas. Elsewhere, with her matching 4-litre-enhanced breasts, she might be an embarrassment, or worse, a freak. Here in the neon-lit desert, she’s a national treasure – she’s Vegas’s answer to Rolf Harris. She, along with a few other ageing, living ‘legends’, plies a trade here as a porn star, glamour model and semiprofessional tennis player. From a glance online, it’s very much in that order. And it’s time to meet her.

I’m staying in one of the Pyramids – the gold-leaf Egyptian paradise that is the Luxor Hotel. It’s a Pyramid on the outside, but rather more Travelodge once you get to your room. After having breakfast at one of the hotel’s 870 branches of Starbucks, I fired up my trusty mini space rocket on wheels and drove to Minka’s home – an upmarket residential district a mile or two from the Strip. Minka clearly likes to be near the shop. It’s a glorious, dry, sunny day. But that’s not a story here. And my attempts at weather small talk in this town are met with death stares. Granted, good weather-related small talk relies on the weather having some kind of narrative. Stuff has to happen. The weather here is like listening to a Westlife album, it’s more, and more, and more, of the same.

I’m always a bit nervous about meeting people for the first time, particularly if they are the first contributor in a new film. Meeting the people who I’ve spent weeks or months trying to get hold of, and deliberating as to whether in the world they occupy they are the right choice, that’s the scary bit. So as I walk up Minka’s driveway, past her gleaming white Mercedes-Benz E Class, paid for no doubt by her army of online fans, I’m tense. There’s a lot riding on that first moment. We have to hit it off. I’m going to spend a number of days with this person. They have to like me. They have to open up the outer and inner workings of their life to a 6 ft 5 in, bespectacled Limey they’ve never met before. Try as I might to make a good impression, it’s all futile – it’s not in my hands. The door knocker is, and I whack it. Then I ring the doorbell. Then I hammer the wood of the door with my knuckle. I always like to take advantage of the myriad solutions by which those inside a house are alerted to the presence of someone on the outside. In the same way I will select the up and down buttons while waiting for a lift, even though I’m only going up. I like the idea the lifts are working for me.

Dogs, many of them, have heard my hammering. They are yapping away. The person the other side of the door chides them and unlocks a seemingly endless series of locks. The door opens fractionally, just enough for what looks like a squirrel in a wig to bomb it through the gap, into the front yard and onto the road. I chase across the road, dodging a postal truck, and aim to get this little canine runt back to its owner. We can’t start this encounter with the death of a beloved pooch – not on my watch. Dog in hand, I hurry back along the driveway and through Minka’s ornate, fauxantique front porch. Minka closes the door behind me. There are dogs everywhere. They are all small, loud and identical. At least six, but who knows…There might have been twenty. It was in a blur of dog. But, not being indelicate, this is the perfect way to meet a woman as notoriously chesty as Minka. Because as she bent over, and tried in vain to gather her screeching flock, her breasts perambulated like two lead-filled beachballs, glued to a tanned broomstick. There is no photograph which does adequate justice to the sheer scale of Minka’s swinging décolletage. And where do you look? Hitherto I have summoned up every ounce of my Irish Roman Catholic guilt to avert my gaze at the sight of a woman’s cleavage. But now it’s impossible. This is the breasts equivalent of a twelve-car pile-up on the M1. You’re not going to not look. Minka’s hunched position and a hopelessly low-cut lycra sports tube conspire to produce a sight which makes the collapse of the Berlin Wall look a tad uneventful. Eventually she stands up. That in itself is a sight to behold.

The dogs safely locked behind a child safety gate, it’s time to properly greet Minka.

‘Hello Minka! Great to meet you!’ Minka seems nonplussed at what I thought was an uncontroversial opening remark. There’s an awkward pause. She then helloes me back. But that’s all I get. This is playing out like an audience with the Queen. Minka is very tanned, and surprisingly slim. In fact she’s tiny. Her delicate East Asian frame, complete with a waist like a serviette ring, plays host to what may be the largest enhanced breasts on God’s Earth. But does Minka want to meet me? Does she want me to be there at all? The opening vibes suggest not. This is very troubling. Minka is passive, almost not with it, and seems to have tuned out of this encounter before it’s even started. Luckily there was someone who clearly did want me there. And as I turned around in the hallway of this rather tall house, he was walking down the grand, curved staircase. In his slippers. It was time to meet Hank…

To add to the surrealism of Minka’s utterly incongruous body was the arrival of a man who would introduce himself as Minka’s ‘manager’. Curiously, unnervingly, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood screen idol Humphrey Bogart. Everything, down to the dark, slick-back hair, the full eyebrows, the massive man’s head on a tiny man’s body, and the general air of lugubriousness. Also like Bogie, Woody has a set of shoulders that seem to be in an almost permanent state of shrug. And both men even share the same watery, tragic eyes. Though the tears come from different places.

I rush to the bottom of the staircase.

‘Hi, I’m Mark,’ I say enthusiastically.

He extends his hand. ‘I’m Hank,’ he says dryly.

‘Hi Hank.’

‘I mean Woody,’ he says.

This is a confusing start. I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. His name.

‘So Woody is your real name?’

With a hint of aggression he counters: ‘No no no. I just gave you my real name.’ He then laughs nervously, like a mafia boss waiting for the guns to arrive. ‘My stage name is Woody.’

God, this is confusing. So what does he do?

‘I’m Minka’s manager,’ he says. At this point Minka, a vision in lycra, is standing, hands on hips, seeming to enjoy the early focus on her little helper, rather than herself.

‘And this lady is a full-time occupation – right?’ I’m scrambling for the right thing to say, so that this encounter doesn’t fall apart around my ears. At this point Woody – or Hank, or whatever he’s called – is tense, like a cat being held upside down in the air. I’m on his territory and I’m far from reassuring him that this will all be OK for him.

‘More or less she is, yeah,’ he concedes.

‘So this lady here is big business, right?’

A quick glance at those personal twin towers of hers, jammed into her lycra boob tube, which seemed anything but ladylike.

‘She’s a commodity,’ Woody continues, warming to his theme. ‘There’s only one like her in the world.’

It’s like he’s describing the Statue of Liberty. But did large numbers of people jump on a ferry and pay to go inside Minka? We’ll get to that later…

Woody is now firmly settling into his manager’s role. He continues to explain her unique selling point(s). ‘There’s only one like her in the world. Have you ever seen an Asian that looks like that?’

‘No, I don’t suppose I have,’ I say, embarrassed that we are talking about this woman like she is a rare Pekingese.

Woody seems to assume we are all unofficial shareholders in Minka Inc. He’s talking to me in cold, factual terms about this human being that’s looking on, which I find very awkward. I have the early sense that it’s because Woody lives in Woody’s world, a world he thinks we all live in. There’s no sense that this tall, bespectacled Limey standing in his house – and I think it’s his house (he seems to be wearing pyjamas) – might think it’s somewhat strange to refer to someone, anyone, as a ‘commodity’. And this particular commodity was, I suspected, more than just his client.

We wander into the living room. Like the rest of the house, it has its own colour spectrum which ranges from off white, to very off white. It’s that classic Martha Stewart inspired look of suburban American grandeur. Faux-mahogany kitchen units, fibreglass counter posing as marble, carpet heavier and thicker than Brian Blessed’s beard, massive, deep, low easy chairs and a telly the size of a football pitch. It’s the American dream. And it’s identical to every other similarly moneyed house in the country. Curiously, it’s not just in the malls that America rolls out its monolithic, chainstore culture. It’s often been proudly boasted that if you eat a hamburger from McDonalds, it will taste the same in Kentucky as it does in San Francisco. Similarly, a middle-class living room in Connecticut will be a dead ringer for one in Kansas City. I can prove that this is true, in an entirely unscientific manner, but born out of experience. I’ve stood in around twenty living rooms in America, and apart from the pecuniary value of the various items therein, and the layout of the respective houses, they were all essentially the same inside. Even my beloved Auntie Pasty’s house in Napa is decorated in the same way as Minka’s. Which is confusing. Maybe I’m just guilty of the interior decor equivalent of casual racism – because these homes are foreign to me, they all ‘look the same’. I hasten to add that notwithstanding decor parallels, that’s where Auntie Patsy’s and Minka’s similarities abruptly end.

Minka rushes off to an ice cooler and offers me a crisp, chilled apple. In spite of these undoubtedly unhealthy protrusions she calls breasts, she does have a strangely healthy glow. She clearly maintains her body to almost Madonnaesque standards. She is tanned and toned. And frankly just the act of standing up from a chair, given her upper proportions, is a gym exercise all of its own. We get onto her record, and whether she holds one.

‘So Minka…’ I start. How do I put this? ‘Do you have the most enhanced breasts in the world?’ That’s how you put this.

‘No’ she replies, flatly. Her voice is deep and her English, both in terms of pronunciation and grammar, is regularly upstaged by her mother tongue of Korean.

‘You don’t have the most enhanced breasts in the world. OK, where would you say you come in the order of it?’ I ask.

‘Number two.’

‘Who’s number one?’

‘Maxi. But I don’t know what happened – she got infection. But I don’t know what happened. Her boob, one is gone – I cannot find out what happened. When she’s gone, I’m gonna be number one.’

Woody is shaking his head disconsolately. ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ he mutters. Minka, the Pekingese, is off the leash, and he doesn’t like it. I don’t know why Woody is suddenly so circumspect about the facts. I suspect he’s a player in this world of large-breasted females, and therefore not one to spit on his own d-cup. Claims about who’s biggest in this arena would doubtless lead to a nasty catfight among these top-heavy women. A call later to Maxi’s agent informs me that Maxi does indeed seem to be out of the picture at the moment, whether retired or otherwise – and is thus out of this rather perverse race.

‘So Minka,’ I go on, ‘if Maxi’s out of action, does that mean you have the largest enhanced breasts in the world?’

‘Yes,’ she says without fanfare.

‘You’re number one!’ I insist.

‘Yes!’ And now, for the first time, Minka seems to be perking up – her pink lip gloss emulsioning a sincere smile. She’s warming to the attention and focus. Unexpectedly she dances towards me and grabs my arm.

‘Give me your hand,’ she says playfully.

At this moment I’m seized by a paralysis called Englishness. She pulls my hand with her veiny, gym-fit arm, her South Korean biceps gently pulsing. She then pushes my hand under the vast cantilever that is her right bosom. It’s like being asked to have a quick hold of the flat roof at Heathrow Terminal 5. Her breasts are incalculably heavy – the figure of 4000 centilitres of volume per breast doesn’t do it justice. And what’s shocking isn’t just the dense weight. Or how it looks. It’s the tactile aspect. The breast is rock hard, like a block of concrete. The kind of concrete they use to hold bridges up. In windy countries. That get earthquakes.