Several years ago, after the detonation of a relationship, I did quite a bit of online dating. And I noticed something: for men in that weird environment, the tripwire was height. Women cared about it a lot. They endlessly complained that men lied about it. And almost no woman wanted, it seemed, to date a man shorter than she. This got me thinking.
When it comes to size, I won the lottery. I am an honest 6’2” tall. I am also well over 200 pounds in weight. This puts me in the 96th percentile of American men – I looked it up. In other words, if there are 100 men in a room, I’m one of the biggest two or three. I’m about one standard deviation too small to play in the NFL, but not by much. I have the size to play as a linebacker or a running back, but not quite enough to be a lineman. I’m big.
To put it another way, in the television series Reacher, the solitary, colossal ex-military adventurer the show’s about is played by Alan Richton. We’re the same size, although not the same proportions, sadly. So, the guy on the left is 5’9”, which is actually taller than the average American man. The guy on the right who plays Reacher is my size. See what I mean?
Being big is a complicated thing. So, I’m writing about it this week.
Until I was about sixteen, I was only about 5’6” tall. I grew up in a small, rural town with a lot of big kids – think of farmers – and I got beaten up quite a bit. Part of that was because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, you will be shocked to know, but it was still pretty nasty. For instance, I remember being pinned to the ground and having dandelions ground into my face. I remember having some bigger guy spit a mouthful of water on me while a bunch of cheerleaders watched and laughed. This was almost fifty years ago, but the memory still stings.
Then I started to grow. And I kept growing. My parents had been reassuring me for years that it would happen, but they confessed to me later that they were incredibly relieved when it actually did. The bullying stopped instantly. And ever since, I’ve been a very big guy. I have very broad shoulders. I have huge hands – I can palm a basketball. Buying clothing is challenging – for instance, Patagonia doesn’t make anything that fits me. But day in and day out, I move through the world, even at 62, as a very, very big guy. For a long time, my nickname was “Bulky” or “Bulks”. Depending on the setting, he could be Herr Bulkmeister, or Senor Bulquero, or, in ancient Rome, Senator Bulkus. It all depended.
In fact, the “Bulky” character was the basis of a series of cartoons by said relationship-detonation girlfriend, pre-explosion. He was (very) loosely based on a book entitled Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir by Graham Roumieu.
Here’s what it’s like to be this large:
Implication 1: People Don’t Mess With You
Unless someone has an actual weapon, or is clearly barking mad, I am not afraid of them. I know quite well, secondhand, how many people are anxious about walking down the street alone. I’ve seen the meme about women preferring to run into a bear in the woods rather than a man.
I have no idea what that’s like. I am honestly not afraid of anyone walking the earth. Even if there are two or three of them, they see me and immediately reconsider the idea of aggression. It follows a pattern I’ve gotten used to, particularly if they’re drunk.
A couple of nights ago we went out to a Japanese place called Akira, in Aptos, California. Incidentally and amusingly, Apple just named their newest default font Aptos, which is pretty funny because the town is tiny. Anyway, I was heading in to pay the bill, and I politely held the door open for three people – two women and a drunk man.
The drunk man, because he was drunk, said something obnoxious, like, “You’d better hold that door open for me, too, asshole.” I just looked at him. Then he looked back, sort of focused on who he had just insulted, processed it, and threw his arms around me and said, for real, “Hey … I LOVE YOU MAN” and then tottered off. This is exactly how it happens. You can almost hear the gears in their brains engaging. If someone’s looking for trouble, they size me up and look elsewhere.
Implication 2: There’s an Unspoken Big-Guy-to-Big-Guy Code
Humans are ultimately, I think, pretty primitive creatures and not that removed from the social systems of our primate ancestors. Which means that even if he’s done nothing scary, everyone defers to and is a little tense around the gigantic silverback gorilla. Deep, deep down, they know that if he feels like it, he can kill them. They behave carefully. Not me. As a fellow gorilla, I’m very, very relaxed. Mischievious, even.
This is kind of a side effect of Rule #1. It’s kind of hard to describe, but the most macho, badass, testosterone-drenched tough guy is my equal, and someone I can not only relax around, but kind of play with. He knows it. I know it. I know he knows it. I am completely comfortable being goofy, or telling them I don’t like scary movies (Fargo terrified me) or just behaving however the hell I feel like. I have absolutely nothing to prove, so the behavioral rules are different.
For instance -- the gym -- specifically Power Fitness in Santa Cruz, California. This was a wonderful place run by a bodybuilder, and catering to powerlifters and bodybuilders. A lot of the guys I trained with were ex-military, or cops, or gangbangers. We even had the former President of the San Jose chapter of the Hell’s Angels, Frank, who was a great guy. The place was waist-deep in testosterone, and could be very intimidating, particularly for women.
I loved to deliberately bait the guys there, and I could get away with it because of my size. As a single example of some of the challenging things I did, I liked wearing my girlfriend’s spandex rowing shorts to work out. She was a rower and had a fairly big booty. Rowing shorts were simple – no pockets – fit perfectly, were basically indestructible and when I was heading to the gym, I could just steal a pair. Which I did. And told everyone whose they were. This was a deliberate flaunting of the gym macho code. It was a lot of fun.
Implication 3: The Weaponized Handshake
As I’ve noted before, I have huge hands — real meat paws. If someone wants to have some kind of macho competition, it usually starts with a game of Experience My Crushing Handshake. This is beyond stupid, but if they insist on playing, I win every time. Not only can I exert a lot of force, but my huge farmer’s hands, a gift from my father, help make it clear that whatever they thought they’d accomplish, they need to think again. My hands are very broad – almost square – which gives me a ridiculous leverage advantage in a game of EMCH.
Implication 4: You Are Never Completely Comfortable Indoors
This one is a little hard to explain, but indoors, I always feel a little awkward, and self-conscious. One reason I love the gym is that I’m just another lumbering monster in there, but elsewhere, it’s a different story. I always feel like people are staring at me. And I’m always worried I’m going to bump into someone, or something. I often do.
If I talk to someone, particularly a woman, their face is in my chest and I have to bend down to hear them, especially in a crowd. I can’t just plunk myself down on furniture until I check to see how sturdy it is. In my own living room, if I don’t duck I hit my head on a light fixture – we have an old house, with lowish ceilings. I have learned to move slowly and carefully.
A lot of regular, day-to-day, part-of-life implements don’t really fit me or work for me. A teacup disappears in my hand, and I look like a lunatic when I’m using it. Given the size of my hands, if I use the keyboard on a laptop (I use a MacBook Air) I resemble, I think, an ape peering into a hand mirror. Same with cell phones. My shoes don’t fit into shoe racks, not really. And standard-issue airline seats are awful. If I’m on the aisle, the trolley bangs into my shoulder every time it goes by, and to use the lavatory I have to kind of do the limbo. This is even worse on commuter planes. I hate flying.
Implication 5: You always look sort of sloppy
Because I’m so big, it’s very hard to find clothes that fit. Further, expensive or finely-made clothing looks dumb on me, or perhaps I think I look dumb wearing it. An expensive cashmere sweater that looks great on a smaller, slender guy, looks ridiculous on me. Same thing with a nice pair of shoes. Take a really nice pair of men’s dress shoes, then imagine them in size 13, if they even make them that big. It looks ridiculous. I feel ridiculous.
As a result, I wear the same stuff I did when I was about 23. I’m most at home in clothing you could wear to change the oil in the car, or weed-whack a pasture. It may look sloppy or like I’m visiting to fix the plumbing, but I know that if I rip it or stain it, it’s not a big deal, and more importantly, it doesn’t look like I’m playing dress-up. I suppose if I were still practicing law, and had to wear a suit every day, I’d figure this out, but day-to-day, I kind of look like an unmade bed.
I always envied guys who were more normally-sized, and looked pulled together, sort of effortlessly. For instance, there’s a whole bunch of videos out there detailing what’s called, apparently, the “Black Wife Effect”. It’s a TikTok thing. The basic idea is that when a white guy marries a black woman, he develops a more creative, outgoing, edgy style of dress. Hoodies, sunglasses, jewelry, a much more urban, complicated, cool style. They used to be dorks, and now they look great. I would look like a Saturday Night Live skit.
Implication 6: Women Really Like It
This is another lesson learned from dating, which is that I got an absolutely amazing amount of undeserved mileage out of my size. Typically, women did not believe that I was actually 6’2” until I actually showed up, at which point they would get this happy little smile going. For some deep-seated evolutionary reason, they absolutely loved feeling small, and feeling safe. I heard a lot of stories over a lot of dinners about how many men had exaggerated their height by several inches. Not me, man.
This had some interesting secondary implications. I have a deep-seated, longstanding love of dive bars, places no woman in her right mind would ever go into alone. I’ve written about it. But man, they could go into them with me, and they really enjoyed it. It was like a real-live version of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. No matter what kind of scary, weird person was roaming around the bar, they were completely safe. It was like Being One of the Boys, but with a security detail.
Implication 7: You Can See Through Costumes
A lot of what makes would-be tough guys intimidating is their getup. I have known my share of truly scary men, and the thing is, they never telegraph it. And the guys who do are always fakes: the biker with the Nazi helmet, or the guy with boots, jeans and a cowboy hat or the whatever. As Tom McGuane wrote once, the guys with the big hats are always the prematures.
Being big also sensitizes you to the truly frightening people. Because you’re not fooled by appearance, there is a kind of sixth sense about who out there could be really, really bad news if they felt like it. For example, many years ago, when I was a litigator, I worked with the late Dick Sprague. Sprague was about half my size, and probably never lifted anything heavier than a book in his life, but he was legendary in Philadelphia for being brilliant, relentless, and when necessary, very, very mean. If you were famous, rich (Sprague charged insanely high fees) and in really bad legal trouble, Sprague was who you hired to get you out of it. I remember standing in his office once getting my leash yanked after screwing something up, and being very frightened. He looked at me like I was food.
And for all us big guys, our patron saint is a special, deeply meaningful person: Mongo, of Mel Brooks’ classic, deeply offensive comedy Blazing Saddles. For all the thought, introspection and emotional excavation around the topic of being large, the reality of it all comes down to one simple, elegant, heart-rending observation which speaks to all of us: “Mongo just pawn … in game of life.”
Hmm, I never noticed you were BIG--hmm I'm not sure what that says about me! Blind? You are perfect Peter, whatever your size--and you know it!!! Ditto me too.