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“Some years earlier, in the mid-1950s, Grainier had paid ten cents to view the World’s Fattest Man, who rested on a divan in a trailer that took him from town to town.  To get the World’s Fattest Man onto the divan they’d had to take the trailer’s roof off and lower him down with a crane.  He weighed in at just over a thousand pounds.  There he sat, immense and dripping sweat, with a mustache and goatee and one gold earring like a pirate’s, wearing shiny gold short pants and nothing else, his flesh rolling out on either side of him from one end of the divan to the other and spilling over and dangling toward the floor like an arrested waterfall, while out of this big pile of himself poked his head and arms and legs.  People waited in line to stand at the open doorway and look in.  He told each one to buy a picture of him from a stack by the window there for a dime.”


                                                                           -- Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

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