Zoltar

I knew a guy named Billy who made a wish from a Zoltar magic genie. It was the same kind with the creepy-red eyes that was in the movie Big. It was at the county fair and Billy and I were best friends back then. The thing looked like some kind of cheap wood closet with a mannequin head stuck in it. There was a wrap on the genie’s head with a big plastic gem on it, and it had a mustache, and an earring.  His mouth moved and the head turned periodically. His head was on a metal pole that stuck in the base of the cabinet. I think there was supposed to be some clothes, or a scarf, to give the appearance of Zoltar having a neck and shoulders, but there wasn’t any, so it just looked like his head was impaled on a stake. Like the English did to William Wallace, I read somewhere.

“Shit,” I said to Billy, “that’s a real head!”

“Fuck if it is,” Billy scoffed playfully. He never believed in anything. Nothing at all. Not in the boogeyman. Not in ghosts. Not in aliens. Not in angels. Not even in God, he said once to my shock. He believed in the word fuck though. He said fuck any chance he got. I was a shit man, myself. I thought fuck was just too much.

“It is so!” I shot back not backing down. “Look at it!”

He looked at it, but wasn’t impressed. While everyone else was riding rides, making out, and eating fair fries and caramel apples, there we were, a couple of goofy teenage kids, awkwardly stumbling through life, doing nothing but looking at an old shitty make-a-wish game, debating whether the head inside it was real or not.

I dared Billy to put in a dollar and make a wish. He said he didn’t want to waste a dollar, so I gave him a dollar. He grabbed it out of my hand and slid it into the dollar feed mechanism. He frowned, closed his eyes, and he made a wish. Zoltar’s red eyes got redder and a shitty voice that sounded like my grandpa’s when he had that weird voice box thing after the cancer said, “Zoltar grants your wish!”

“Well?” I asked.

“Fuck,” he said. “It ain’t fuckin’ comin’ true. Fuck if they ever do!” A penny in a well, a four-leaf clover, a rabbit’s foot, Billy believed in none of it. It was all bullshit to him. I think he said fuck so much because he couldn’t tell a joke to save his life. But Billy had a fat mom who was bed-ridden and he was at the brunt of many of other people’s “your momma” jokes. It was true. His momma was so fat I took a picture of her last Christmas and it’s still printing. I told the jokes, too, until I realized it really bothered him, as much as he acted as though it didn’t. I could hear it in his laugh. I guess that’s how you know you’re friends with someone. When your jokes aren’t worth as much as their feelings.   

I always thought Billy would someday shoot up the school, but he never did. I didn’t know that that Saturday night at the fair would be the last time I would see him for a long time. It was October and his parents divorced. He never said anything about it. But he wasn’t in school Monday and I found out from our English teacher that he moved with his mom to Muncie, Indiana. I didn’t know where the hell Muncie was. I still don’t. I don’t know why he didn’t say goodbye. Maybe I wasn’t that much of a friend.

We had been friends since kindergarten so it was weird without him. We were best friends because we had no one else and him moving left a weird vacancy in my life. I felt something like that Zoltar with my head on a metal pole and nothing to give me the appearance of a body. Exposed and vulnerable and cast off in the corner of a fair while everyone rode rides, made out, or ate caramel apples. Billy never had any other friends that I knew about. There seemed to be an empty place everywhere I went, especially at school on lunch. Especially, the next few years at the fair, even though Zoltar never made another appearance as much as I looked for him.

I went to college and got a two-year associate degree and became a police officer. But I quit my job after a few years and started selling insurance. I drank in the same bar every weekend and dated the same kind of girls. The beautiful depressed kind that depressed me until I couldn’t take being depressed anymore. The ones that were hot and cold until they were all the way cold. The kind that stuck to my ankle like a beartrap until I had the balls to gnaw my leg off. The kind with no imagination and no spark who ultimately disappointed me in some dull way, or who cheated on me with someone far more ordinary and masculine than me. I did this over and over. But while I was at the bar, I never thought of those women that came and went. I talked to friends that were never like Billy. Your friends as an adult are far less meaningful than your friends as a kid.

It was here one night in January, when the bar was relatively empty because there had been a heavy wet snow earlier that evening that was expected to get progressively worse throughout the night, that the door opened and I saw the pale face, and a flash of red hair that had been combed much the way it was for a dozen years. Like a cowlicked Kennedy. He sat right beside of me and smiled. It was Billy.

Billy said he had joined the Army out of high school and retired after 25 years. He took a job as a claim’s adjuster for some national company after that and we talked a lot about insurance and women. We talked about girls we went to high school with and the park. We talked a little about politics and sports. But every conversation we had, ultimately ended up back in the same place. Our childhood. And deeper even still, back to our friendship over a dozen or so years that had suddenly vanished in our sophomore year of high school.

“I was wrong,” he said rubbing the stubbles of his graying chin.

“About what?”

“That wish. The Zoltar,” he said firmly.

“Yeah?” I bought us a couple of beers and he went on to tell me the story of his wish.

“I noticed the change when I got to Muncie. Like, not right away. But soon. Well, I still looked like me, goofy and such, but I started dating a girl and she was very happy. Very happy. I guess my reputation got out because after we broke up, girls started calling me. Pretty girls. Like cheerleaders and prom queens. And they were happy for a while, but I got too big, if you know what I mean, and then, after that, only the bad girls called me. You know, the ones you look at and know they want nothing more than to be in Penthouse. The ones that smoked. Not the Playboy girls. The Hustler girls. But even they said it was too much and I got a reputation. They called my Big Billy, though I was five foot nothing and a buck forty. If they didn’t call me Big Billy, they called me Oscar Mayer.”

“You wished for a big penis?”

“Not just a big penis. I wished that it would get bigger. So, I think the fact that I wished for it to get bigger, rather than for it to just be big or bigger, made it continuously grow. If that makes any sense.”

“Sure,” I agreed. I was convinced that every word of his story was true. He didn’t smile or laugh at all. And he could never tell a joke, I knew. Apart from that, he had the demeanor and tone of a man speaking of a truly terrible affliction.

“So anyway, girls my age were out of the question, and I started doing moms and fat women thinking fat women had bigger vaginas. Then I got a job doing adult films right out of high school before I joined the Army. That lasted about a year, but I got too big for that and I went to a doctor who said he had never seen anything like it and who took a bunch of pictures. He said it was probably a thyroid issue, or something. And around that time, I was having all kinds of back pains and he told me to consider getting it cut off and I said fuck no. He let me look through a catalogue of more suitably-sized penises of all colors and variations and I did for a while, but I’m weird about surgeries, let alone, one to take off my penis. So, I said I’d get a second opinion.”

He let the conversation sit there and started watching the hockey game on the TV and talking about it. But I asked him what happened with the second opinion and so he went on.  

“By the time I got into the doctor again, they said they couldn’t operate because it was even bigger and there was something about an artery, or something.”

“What size we talkin’ here?” I asked.

“Like a fuckin’ arm at this point. A big arm. Not a baby’s arm. A fuckin’ fat man’s arm. I had to bandage it to my left leg and wear baggy pants just to go to work. My back was a mess.”

“No, shit?”

“Yeah, and I was still a sexual guy, no matter how incompatible I was with other human beings. Then I read about this lady in Kansas City who was in some sort of porno Guinness Book of World Records for taking the biggest dong ever recorded, so I drove out to see her just to feel it again. And we get a hotel room and there are people from this dirty Guinness Book there taking pictures and measuring and all that. They called her Ol’ Jeezy, well what I thought was Ol’ Jeezy, but what was actually Ol’ G.C., which stood for Ol’ Grand Canyon. They said she had the deepest human vagina in the universe. But we was in bed going at it and I was wondering how the hell they know something like that, you know? And it was good and I stuck around in Kansas City for a few weeks and we satisfied each other and talked about getting married, even though she was ugly as sin. But I got bigger and bigger and one night I killed her. It was just too much. I didn’t mean to fuckin’ kill her, of course, but there is only so much a person can take, you know. They tried to get me for manslaughter or something like that, but she had signed a waiver so, you know.  And they dropped the charges and just told me to get out of Kansas City and never come back, which was alright by me.

“Hell,” I gasped, reeled in.

“So, out of options, I started dating a horse named, Martha. And we had a good relationship for a few months, but sometimes it is the things unsaid that make you know that you are not compatible, rather than things said. I didn’t much like her temperament and I don’t think she liked my sense of humor. So, we broke up and I got even bigger still. Too big for a horse. A Belgian horse, anyway. I got so big I was a legitimate tripod. And so, I went to the zoo and fell in love with a lady named Elizabeth.”

“A zookeeper?”

“No. An elephant. Sadly, my days with human women were all but over. But I learned that love was more than two legs and the same species. And I felt after knowing Elizabeth for a while that I was guilty of speciesism all my life because I had never considered the possibility of being with an elephant, or any animal for that matter, though in retrospect, I had always been strangely attracted to them. But our romance was hard. It is frowned upon in this cruel close-minded society we live in. I had to buy a season pass and hide out until after hours when we could do our thing. Such a terrible expression, if you ask me. I tried to get a job, but I was not hired. Maybe they saw it in my eyes, I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know what I know anymore.

“But it was not meant to be. Elizabeth was built small for an elephant, and forever cursed, I continued to grow. She said that it didn’t matter, she could take the pain or we could not have sex at all, but I knew I could never be what she deserved. I loved her,” he said with a tear in his eye. “I want you to know that. And if you go to the San Diego Zoo sometime, tell her I said I love her.”

“I doubt that I ever will, but…”

“Well, in case you do.”

I couldn’t help but to look him over. His pants weren’t very baggy and I didn’t notice anything noticeably taped to the inside of his leg. But I didn’t ask. Nor was I any kind of meat gazer. I let him go on. That is what friends do. They listen. And I wanted to be his friend again. It had been a long time and I never had a friend like him.

“Those were dark days after Elizabeth. I continued to get bigger and bigger and there seemed to be no end in sight. I could hardly walk anymore. I had to wheel it around in a wheelbarrow. Of course, I covered it up with a blanket to be discreet, but a man walking around town with a wheelbarrow draws a certain kind of attention. It literally became bigger than me. Someone told me to file for disability, but you know, I’m too fuckin’ proud. Others said I should join the circus, or charge people to have their pictures taken with it. Someone said I could sell space on it for advertisements in the form of temporary tattoos. Or do bachelor parties. But I knew then that was it for me. I became depressed and in my depression, I turned to alcohol. I could no longer be sexual at all and there was no device I could find to use to masturbate with. I got some offers to do porn, but two women joining arms around my massive penis to masturbate me just sounded like a bore. And it is true what they say, once you’ve had a pachyderm, nothing else will make you firm.

“I was fuckin’ fucked.  Depressed, drunk, and suicidal. So, I spent what money I had and took a cruise. And one night, deep in the middle of the Pacific, I wheeled my tree trunk penis to the side of the ship in my wheelbarrow and I threw myself overboard. I was done with this cruel world. Once I hit the cold water, I instantly felt better. It floated and I didn’t have to heave it around. My back pain went away. But being that it floated I couldn’t kill myself by drowning. It refused to sink. It was bigger than me by then and so it was like I was the organ and it was the body. It took over my life. All because I made one stupid wish when I was 15 years-old.

“But as luck would have it, I met a blue whale named Kimberly. Rather, my penis, who then called himself Chip, met a blue whale named Kimberly. And they hit it off. And Kimberly had some Barry Manilow records, some Marvin Gaye, and next thing I know is that I was in another relationship and Chip was buried inside her. They were insatiable. And I was happy, too. Riding on her back the way that I did. Free of the pain of my labor. But as the curse would have it, Chip became too big for even Kimberly and they broke up. We floated there for days. Depressed. Not eating anything, opening my mouth to drink what rain water happened to find it. Then, by a strange twist of fate, Chip and I were beached back in San Diego. And Chip was twice as big by then.

“It wasn’t long before I spotted a woman and she spotted me. She came to my aid and didn’t seem fazed by the sight of Chip, who was by then as big as van. She was kind and sweet and things turned romantic very quickly. Some might say she was easy, but I wouldn’t say a bad word about her. She was a big woman, but after being with Elizabeth and Kimberly, you know, things are relative. She wasn’t too pretty. In fact, she was ugly as sin. But I was shocked that she could take it so easily. And I felt that while giving it to her she had room for another two or three of me. Or perhaps, there was room for a car to park, sideways in her.  Best yet, she smelled like Elizabeth and Kimberly, a zoo that was dumped out in an ocean of fish.”

He took a long and deep sniff. I drank my beer and stared at him, amazed by his fantastic story. He had no particular expression upon his face. He looked at the hockey game, and only occasionally back at me. I wanted to laugh or cry, but I didn't do either. I sat there drinking another beer in disbelief. I hadn’t forgotten about Zoltar, but I never really gave much thought as to what Billy might have wished for. But then, suddenly, he cut me down in midst of my contemplation to finish his story.

“You know I thought I recognized her as I lied there on the beach. I recognized something in her droopy, watery eyes. Something I hadn’t seen since I moved so suddenly back in my sophomore year of high school. Then, as I was parking inside her, so to speak, I put it all together. You know who that woman was?”

“No,” I replied, “Who?”

“Your momma,” Billy grinned.

The kid that could never joke pulled off the longest ever “your momma” joke in the history of jokes. We laughed and he bought the next round. It was like he never moved away at all. Then sometime afterwards, he said he had a plane to catch to somewhere and he headed towards the door. I stopped him to ask what happened to Chip, and he said to ask my mom with another smile and a grin. I told him it was a real head, that Zoltar, and he said fuck if it was. He said good seeing me and I told him that if I was ever at the San Diego Zoo, I’d be sure to give Elizabeth my warm regards.