Gynecomastia!

There exists no joke crueler from God than breasts on a man. The mind strains to imagine an equivalent rebuke of reality. Lovecraftian horrors that lurk at the darkest corners of reality cannot hold a candle to giving a fully-grown man a pair of supple, pillowy tits. If you’ve ever made fun of a mans breasts in an attempt to belittle or insult them; you’ve won. No matter how much they may have laughed or shrugged it off, I am here to tell you: they are still reeling. You’ve hurt them so pointedly, so deep within their soul, that there is no coming back from that pain.  And really, what could you even hope to do about it? Exercise? Your breasts will cause you immense discomfort. Your breasts will slap and bounce, they will audibly call attention to themselves. You know the noise: like tossing a slice of Virginia ham in the air and letting it fall on the kitchen counter. Over and over and over. Oh, is there is a brand of clothing that will correctly fit your torso and cloak your rack? A nice button-up, or polo? I’m sorry, there is not. You might as well wear a crop top. You are beholden to your breasts, as I was. For a majority of my life, as a morbidly obese man, I was the owner of some fantastic B-cups, and as such, I feel it is my duty to explain some of the finer details of what it is like to be a member of the B-Cup Boyz Club.

To begin, imagine a rack. A pair of spaniel’s ears. Some maracas. Chebblies. Slammers. Gazongas. Coconuts. Headlamps. Dinner buckets. Liberty bells. Awoogas. Dueling banjos. Corkers. Tattlers. Sugar plums. U-boats. Cha-chas. Umlauts. Baps. Mary-Kate and Ashley. Tatty Bo Jangles. Cannon balls. The Pointer Sisters. Goombas. Whatever you want to call them, as long as it’s the most wonderful rack you’ve ever seen. However big or small you fancy. Imagine that rack glistening poolside in the warm July sun. The delicate curves. The ebbing shadows. Droplets of water cascading from nape to nip, singing quietly as only they can. Even when faced with the vast absurdity of the cosmos, here, right now, with these breasts, everything is right in its place.

Now pull back that camera. Zoom way, way out. That rack is actually on Bill: a 425 lbs. man who constantly wears a black hoodie, even during the height of summer. Imagine Bills rack beneath that canopy of hot, suffocating fabric, as Bill stands in line for funnel cake at the boardwalk in the middle of August. Imagine those mammaries covered in a slick, matted tuft of hair. The few rays of sunlight that reach skin are trapped to create a hot-box of oil, sweat, and bacteria. His pores struggling to breathe. Even more, beneath Bill’s breasts are dark, slick crevices of skin, and with even the slightest movement they squelch and leak fluid out the sides. There is no holster to absorb the moisture or keep them perky. They simply droop in perpetuity, victims of gravity. They exist to spite you and you alone. When Bill gets a moment alone he may dab his breasts with a rough paper towel. The skin has been damp and warm for so long there’s a red, blotchy rash forming beneath his rack. At night, he lifts each breast up, slathering it with a soothing ointment. It stings for a moment. In every article of clothing, his breasts take the spotlight. A Pink Floyd band tee? Distorted. A simple striped shirt? Warped. A classic pocket tee? Disfigured.

This is the reality of a breasted man. But there were some silver linings. 

Take this benefit, for example: they were warm. Was there some actual live tissue in there with blood flow? Couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is you could put your hands beneath them if you were cold. You could steal things with them, too. Maybe hide a stick or two of gum beneath your breasts. A pack of Magic: the Gathering trading cards, perhaps. If you’re really feeling real dangerous, you could smuggle some drugs under them; a bag or two of that zooted-up ganja. Mephistopheles’ Seaweed. Hypothetically, if you had a USB stick that an ex-KGB assassin was after and you were the only person on earth the CIA trusted to keep it safe— you could put that bad boy beneath your bad boys. Some nights, during the Toonami hours of Cartoon Network, I’d sit on my bed in the quaint little eastern Pennsylvanian neighborhood I grew up in and I’d squeeze my tits together. I’d give ‘em a little slap here, a little slap there. Bonk ‘em. Flick those nips. Maybe I’d even drool on them. Who knows. Anything to pass the time. Another cruel joke: no real pleasure in any of those acts.

I never took the time to name them and looking back, doing so may have added the slightest bit of levity to the situation, but it’d be like pissing on a four-alarm fire. But, for posterities sake, the left would be “Peaches” and the right “Cream”. No, if I could go back and do anything over, after all this time, what I would do is much simpler: I would cut them off myself. I would not wait twenty-something years to have (another) breakdown in the alley behind a CVS Pharmacy because I caught a glimpse of myself in my favorite CATS shirt and realized I looked like an old babushka with sagging skin wearing her nightgown, roaming the streets of Chicago. I would buy a handle of Cutty Sark blended scotch whisky, find the sharpest Japanese chefs knife I could, put on some “Pet Sounds” and see how far I could make it before I passed out or finished the job. Worst case scenario, well, I die of massive blood loss. But after that, worst case scenario is I somehow get myself to the emergency room with half of one of my tits hanging off my body, and they just go ahead and wrap it up for me. I understand that may sound extreme, but at that point in my life, it was a real consideration. There’s something particularly nefarious about having weight-loss surgery, losing over 300 lbs., having a first cosmetic surgery to remove the excess skin around your abdomen and gut, and then still hating yourself because there’s a pair of dead jellyfish hanging off my chest. You had to be there, I guess. 

Out of all the ways being morbidly obese affected me, having tig ole bitties as a man cut the deepest. In tandem with my shoulder-length hair, I was simply indecipherable as a gender, which made me an enormous target for mischievous adolescents and their ilk, as demonstrated by two of the worst days of my life that I surely have come to terms with all these years later.