63 - Tale of the Sideshow - The Manufactured Giant

"Giants," Jason said, cupping a candle in his hands. "Were different back in the day. Before basketball and the NBA, before the Guinness Book of World Records and all that. People tended to be shorter, though not as much as you'd think. Bad food, not enough of it. Today, seven feet tall is a statistical outlier, but not a huge one. Eight, nine feet or more, that's a pituitary condition. Tend to die young. Heart problems. But they also don't tend to join sideshows these days."

He dug out a black cigarette and lit it. The smell of something spicy hung in the still air.

"So what do you do if you want a giant but don't have one? Well, in the old days, we'd fake one up. Makeup, prosthetics, maybe a carefully made stage. But that wasn't how it worked out. And so I'm going to tell you about...

THE MANUFACTURED GIANT

I learned later that it started in China. A mountain, something found in the ice. I don't know the science of it. Cells that were revived? Biochemicals synthesized? Whatever. It came from China, in a series of syringes held in coolers of dry ice.

Billie Chen was 6'11"—a tall young woman, with all the coordination of a newborn giraffe. Chinese-American. Youngest of eleven kids. She was the first picked for basketball, until folks found out she couldn't dribble, couldn't move that body fast enough to be any good at the court. It was a waste of good height. School didn't do much for her, either. Billie had an associate's degree in sports medicine when she was caught dealing. Nothing serious, just pills, but the school asked her to leave and she left.

The Boss found her doing webstreams, working what looked like an absurdly small dildo in and out of her pussy.

I wasn't there for the offer. I was busy getting her trailer together. What I do know is that Robinson didn't go into the sideshow right away. We tried her on the poles, but there was no way to make a stripper out of her. The balance, the grace wasn't there. So she worked security, standing there in a huge t-shirt stretched tight over her breasts, with no bra, and that helped distract the punters.

At night, after the show, I saw it, a couple of times. Billie would lift her shirt, and the needle would go in near the base of the spine.

The change was slow. Billie's clothes got tighter. She had to stoop lower through the doors, into and out of trailers and tents. I asked her once, about six weeks in, if she was sure about this. I didn't know what was in the syringes, but I could see there were other changes than just the increase in height. Her arms looked longer. There was a stiffness in her body. An oddly pronounced jaw.

"I want to be really big," she said. Voice shy. Then, screwing up what courage she had, she added: "Would you—help? I'm having trouble reaching."

So I did. Night after night, after we were done. Clean the sight, slide the needle in. I never asked what was in it. Chinese label. The English said something about "gland extracts." I didn't find out what the Chinese meant until later.

Well, the Boss noticed. She could hardly have missed it. Billie had been gaining an inch or two over weeks, but near the end of summer she hit a growth spurt. Six inches in as many weeks. When she settled down a little, we measured her. 8'1". The sideshow had its giant.

Billie joined us on the winter tour, down in Mexico. Her act was pretty basic. We had a couple of dwarf brothers that joined us down in Mexico, Carlos and Ramon Guzman, and they'd put on a little show. They were wrestlers, well-muscled, and strong for their size, good sense of showmanship. She would "wrestle" with them, and when they'd pinned her she would suck them off, her mouth just engulfing their pricks, or letting them jerk off onto her breasts. Good show, played well to the crowd. The brothers could be mean, though. Call her names in Spanish, which she didn't understand very well. Slap her ass hard, pinch her breasts enough to hurt her.

She didn't stop growing, and as she grew, her proportions got out of whack. Arms much longer now, so that her palms were around her knees. Bigger, more defined jaw. Heavy brow. She was hungry too, and I was always getting fresh produce from the farms, which she appreciated. She had taken to leaning forward knuckles resting on the ground. It made her tits sway, and the punters like that. Billie was having more trouble with her back, then. She was 8'5", but the added weight was **** on her joints. Booze and weed to help with the pain, and I convinced her to stop with the shots, at least for a little while.

The problem came one night when the Guzman brothers decided to **** her. They'd brought out a crate of tequila—an actual crate—and were playing nice, encouraging her to drink, long into the night. I figure she must have drunk most of it. She was nearly four hundred pounds at that point, and the brothers just about managed to get her panties off, and were trying to stick both their dicks inside of her at the same time.

That was when they discovered she was a mean drunk.

I heard this scream like a wounded ape. Then a crash. We hadn't been able to get Billie to sleep in a regular trailer for a while, she was too tall, so we had a tent set up with a long folding table and a roll-on mattress for her. Ramon's skull cracked the main tent-pole in two, and the cloth collapsed. Carlos was yelling, drowning under the collapsed tent, all the weight of Billie Chen on top of him. When we finally dug him out, he was crushed inside. Just smashed, his face frozen in fear and pain.

The Boss took care of the bodies. Billie was crying, and the rest of the sideshow stayed up with her through the night, fed her black coffee and finally got her to sleep a little, curled up in the bed of my truck as we left Mexico the next day. That was the end of the dwarf wrestling act. We worked out another act, with the world's biggest dildo, but—well, that's another story.

Jason blew out the cigarette and stuck the black stub behind his ear. It was Miu, surprisingly, who asked the question everyone was thinking.

"The Chinese on the label. What did it say?"

He looked at her and frowned.

"Gigantopithecus."

So saying, he blew out the candle.