Читать книгу Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird - Mark Dolan - Страница 6

I arrived in Las Vegas Nevada, and although a glance at the calendar on my Blackberry would confirm it was 2008, on arrival at the airport, it quickly became apparent that in Vegas it always was, and always will be, 1982.

I’m barely off flight BA766, and having bid farewell to UK civility and proper tea – and having tricked myself through passport control by trying to make the nature of this particular documentary sound as dull as possible so as not to stir the notoriously scabrous US customs officials – I’m greeted by a whole land of slot machines and crap tables. In fact it feels like you’ve come off the plane and walked straight into Trump Tower. There must be people who have fluttered away their fortune before even getting their bags off the carousel.

And the airport sets the tone for the whole town – fusty, chintzy and a little bit dog-eared. This airport, like Vegas itself, was genuinely glamorous and gilded and shiny, but a rather long time ago. I’d say it was around the time Peter Duncan was doing his screen test for Blue Peter, and when Margaret Thatcher was putting together her first cabinet. The airport carpet tells the whole story. It’s an Eighties psychedelic take on the kind of rich pile variety enjoyed by patrons of a typical Wetherspoon pub in the North of England. A heavy, dizzying pattern that feeds into the sense that a visit here will be eye-catching but neither pleasant, nor pretty.

Out of the airport, I experience three seconds of dry, dead Nevada heat hitting my pale, jetlagged skin, before jumping into my hired Toyota SUV, a machine that has been air conditioned to sub-Arctic levels. In fact, they have clearly solved the issue of global warming – and the answer, is for all of us to sell our houses and move into US-built Toyota cars. I’ve never been colder. My visit to the snowdrifts of Inner Mongolia to meet the smallest man in the world, where temperatures sank to below minus 20, felt like a beach holiday compared with my commute into Sin City. In fact my travels have given me a mild phobia of air conditioning. If you are going out for a night on the tiles in Vegas, or Hong Kong, or Dubai (I’m showing off now), may I suggest you dress for a particularly harsh Edinburgh winter.

Driving into this bizarre experiment of a town is indeed a surreal experience. It goes something like this: airport, then arid desert, then rubbish suburban bit (imagine a very hot Ipswich) and finally a version of Blackpool on a combination of crack cocaine, crystal meth and a particularly strong mug of builders’ tea. It’s like nothing you’ve seen in your life. But so is downtown Kabul – that doesn’t make it a good thing.

Vegas is a debauched, energy-guzzling, dollar-shredding party that runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and has been throbbing in the desert for about the last sixty years. It is the dark heart of the American dream, flying in the face of the USA’s predominantly evangelical Christian, puritanical culture. It’s like LA in that it’s a very wrong place, but like so many wrong things in life (liquorice, crushed denim, Russian pop music) it’s strangely comforting to know it’s there.

Vegas is all about scale, and inspiring awe. Just in the same way that churches and mosques and synagogues, and whatever it is Quakers hang around in, are designed to make you feel small and create a sense of a higher power, so here in Vegas you feel dwarfed by the size of everything, and the blinding brightness of it all. Driving the Land Cruiser into this adults-only playground, you are struck by a number of familiar sights – a mini version of the Eiffel Tower, a shrunk-down Venice and of course a pint-sized copy of New York City. The message to Americans outside Vegas is: shred your passport, everything that’s good about the world is right here. What a relief to know you’ll never have to worry your pretty little head about going to Paris ever again.

The huge problem with Vegas for me is that I’m not a gambler. So it’s like being a child in a pub – what’s the point? If you don’t gamble, you bypass the whole purpose of the place, rendering the experience utterly meaningless (once you’ve been to the mall, taken in the Bette Midler Show and bought an Abercrombie polo shirt designed for someone ten years younger than you, and considerably more ‘ripped’). It’s like going to Disneyland but not going on the rides, or going to Florence and keeping your eyes shut.

But then, I wasn’t here for the gambling. I’m here to meet the most enhanced woman in the world. But what does that mean? Well, it’s a polite euphemism for the female that’s had the largest breast implants on Earth. In fact, as I pored over some images of such women on the internet – by way of research you understand – it became quite clear that it was anything but ‘enhanced’. Butchered, inflated, almost exploding would be better terms. We all know that boob jobs are now widely practised across the globe. In the UK alone, the best part of 30,000 women a year build on what God has given them, resulting in varying degrees of Dolly Partonness. In the States it’s 340,000. That’s a lot of breast.

Up till now I’ve been fairly agnostic about the issue of fake boobs. I tend to adopt the crooked nose rule, which is that if you feel the way you look is abnormal, and you just want to fix that, and it will boost your confidence, it’s pretty loathsome for someone to say you can’t. I’m imagining the equivalent to the crooked nose in the chest region would be a feeling of being so small that there’s the absence of a so-called feminine figure. A bit of well-placed silicone might balance things out a bit. In which case, good luck to you.

The women I’ve come to see are not the thick end of the wedge. They are off the wedge. They are on another planet. They are their own species. They occupy a chapter of their own in the big book of human madness. Minka is one such woman. And of course, she lives in Vegas. Elsewhere, with her matching 4-litre-enhanced breasts, she might be an embarrassment, or worse, a freak. Here in the neon-lit desert, she’s a national treasure – she’s Vegas’s answer to Rolf Harris. She, along with a few other ageing, living ‘legends’, plies a trade here as a porn star, glamour model and semiprofessional tennis player. From a glance online, it’s very much in that order. And it’s time to meet her.

I’m staying in one of the Pyramids – the gold-leaf Egyptian paradise that is the Luxor Hotel. It’s a Pyramid on the outside, but rather more Travelodge once you get to your room. After having breakfast at one of the hotel’s 870 branches of Starbucks, I fired up my trusty mini space rocket on wheels and drove to Minka’s home – an upmarket residential district a mile or two from the Strip. Minka clearly likes to be near the shop. It’s a glorious, dry, sunny day. But that’s not a story here. And my attempts at weather small talk in this town are met with death stares. Granted, good weather-related small talk relies on the weather having some kind of narrative. Stuff has to happen. The weather here is like listening to a Westlife album, it’s more, and more, and more, of the same.

I’m always a bit nervous about meeting people for the first time, particularly if they are the first contributor in a new film. Meeting the people who I’ve spent weeks or months trying to get hold of, and deliberating as to whether in the world they occupy they are the right choice, that’s the scary bit. So as I walk up Minka’s driveway, past her gleaming white Mercedes-Benz E Class, paid for no doubt by her army of online fans, I’m tense. There’s a lot riding on that first moment. We have to hit it off. I’m going to spend a number of days with this person. They have to like me. They have to open up the outer and inner workings of their life to a 6 ft 5 in, bespectacled Limey they’ve never met before. Try as I might to make a good impression, it’s all futile – it’s not in my hands. The door knocker is, and I whack it. Then I ring the doorbell. Then I hammer the wood of the door with my knuckle. I always like to take advantage of the myriad solutions by which those inside a house are alerted to the presence of someone on the outside. In the same way I will select the up and down buttons while waiting for a lift, even though I’m only going up. I like the idea the lifts are working for me.

Dogs, many of them, have heard my hammering. They are yapping away. The person the other side of the door chides them and unlocks a seemingly endless series of locks. The door opens fractionally, just enough for what looks like a squirrel in a wig to bomb it through the gap, into the front yard and onto the road. I chase across the road, dodging a postal truck, and aim to get this little canine runt back to its owner. We can’t start this encounter with the death of a beloved pooch – not on my watch. Dog in hand, I hurry back along the driveway and through Minka’s ornate, fauxantique front porch. Minka closes the door behind me. There are dogs everywhere. They are all small, loud and identical. At least six, but who knows…There might have been twenty. It was in a blur of dog. But, not being indelicate, this is the perfect way to meet a woman as notoriously chesty as Minka. Because as she bent over, and tried in vain to gather her screeching flock, her breasts perambulated like two lead-filled beachballs, glued to a tanned broomstick. There is no photograph which does adequate justice to the sheer scale of Minka’s swinging décolletage. And where do you look? Hitherto I have summoned up every ounce of my Irish Roman Catholic guilt to avert my gaze at the sight of a woman’s cleavage. But now it’s impossible. This is the breasts equivalent of a twelve-car pile-up on the M1. You’re not going to not look. Minka’s hunched position and a hopelessly low-cut lycra sports tube conspire to produce a sight which makes the collapse of the Berlin Wall look a tad uneventful. Eventually she stands up. That in itself is a sight to behold.

The dogs safely locked behind a child safety gate, it’s time to properly greet Minka.

‘Hello Minka! Great to meet you!’ Minka seems nonplussed at what I thought was an uncontroversial opening remark. There’s an awkward pause. She then helloes me back. But that’s all I get. This is playing out like an audience with the Queen. Minka is very tanned, and surprisingly slim. In fact she’s tiny. Her delicate East Asian frame, complete with a waist like a serviette ring, plays host to what may be the largest enhanced breasts on God’s Earth. But does Minka want to meet me? Does she want me to be there at all? The opening vibes suggest not. This is very troubling. Minka is passive, almost not with it, and seems to have tuned out of this encounter before it’s even started. Luckily there was someone who clearly did want me there. And as I turned around in the hallway of this rather tall house, he was walking down the grand, curved staircase. In his slippers. It was time to meet Hank…

To add to the surrealism of Minka’s utterly incongruous body was the arrival of a man who would introduce himself as Minka’s ‘manager’. Curiously, unnervingly, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Hollywood screen idol Humphrey Bogart. Everything, down to the dark, slick-back hair, the full eyebrows, the massive man’s head on a tiny man’s body, and the general air of lugubriousness. Also like Bogie, Woody has a set of shoulders that seem to be in an almost permanent state of shrug. And both men even share the same watery, tragic eyes. Though the tears come from different places.

I rush to the bottom of the staircase.

‘Hi, I’m Mark,’ I say enthusiastically.

He extends his hand. ‘I’m Hank,’ he says dryly.

‘Hi Hank.’

‘I mean Woody,’ he says.

This is a confusing start. I’ve fallen at the first hurdle. His name.

‘So Woody is your real name?’

With a hint of aggression he counters: ‘No no no. I just gave you my real name.’ He then laughs nervously, like a mafia boss waiting for the guns to arrive. ‘My stage name is Woody.’

God, this is confusing. So what does he do?

‘I’m Minka’s manager,’ he says. At this point Minka, a vision in lycra, is standing, hands on hips, seeming to enjoy the early focus on her little helper, rather than herself.

‘And this lady is a full-time occupation – right?’ I’m scrambling for the right thing to say, so that this encounter doesn’t fall apart around my ears. At this point Woody – or Hank, or whatever he’s called – is tense, like a cat being held upside down in the air. I’m on his territory and I’m far from reassuring him that this will all be OK for him.

‘More or less she is, yeah,’ he concedes.

‘So this lady here is big business, right?’

A quick glance at those personal twin towers of hers, jammed into her lycra boob tube, which seemed anything but ladylike.

‘She’s a commodity,’ Woody continues, warming to his theme. ‘There’s only one like her in the world.’

It’s like he’s describing the Statue of Liberty. But did large numbers of people jump on a ferry and pay to go inside Minka? We’ll get to that later…

Woody is now firmly settling into his manager’s role. He continues to explain her unique selling point(s). ‘There’s only one like her in the world. Have you ever seen an Asian that looks like that?’

‘No, I don’t suppose I have,’ I say, embarrassed that we are talking about this woman like she is a rare Pekingese.

Woody seems to assume we are all unofficial shareholders in Minka Inc. He’s talking to me in cold, factual terms about this human being that’s looking on, which I find very awkward. I have the early sense that it’s because Woody lives in Woody’s world, a world he thinks we all live in. There’s no sense that this tall, bespectacled Limey standing in his house – and I think it’s his house (he seems to be wearing pyjamas) – might think it’s somewhat strange to refer to someone, anyone, as a ‘commodity’. And this particular commodity was, I suspected, more than just his client.

We wander into the living room. Like the rest of the house, it has its own colour spectrum which ranges from off white, to very off white. It’s that classic Martha Stewart inspired look of suburban American grandeur. Faux-mahogany kitchen units, fibreglass counter posing as marble, carpet heavier and thicker than Brian Blessed’s beard, massive, deep, low easy chairs and a telly the size of a football pitch. It’s the American dream. And it’s identical to every other similarly moneyed house in the country. Curiously, it’s not just in the malls that America rolls out its monolithic, chainstore culture. It’s often been proudly boasted that if you eat a hamburger from McDonalds, it will taste the same in Kentucky as it does in San Francisco. Similarly, a middle-class living room in Connecticut will be a dead ringer for one in Kansas City. I can prove that this is true, in an entirely unscientific manner, but born out of experience. I’ve stood in around twenty living rooms in America, and apart from the pecuniary value of the various items therein, and the layout of the respective houses, they were all essentially the same inside. Even my beloved Auntie Pasty’s house in Napa is decorated in the same way as Minka’s. Which is confusing. Maybe I’m just guilty of the interior decor equivalent of casual racism – because these homes are foreign to me, they all ‘look the same’. I hasten to add that notwithstanding decor parallels, that’s where Auntie Patsy’s and Minka’s similarities abruptly end.

Minka rushes off to an ice cooler and offers me a crisp, chilled apple. In spite of these undoubtedly unhealthy protrusions she calls breasts, she does have a strangely healthy glow. She clearly maintains her body to almost Madonnaesque standards. She is tanned and toned. And frankly just the act of standing up from a chair, given her upper proportions, is a gym exercise all of its own. We get onto her record, and whether she holds one.

‘So Minka…’ I start. How do I put this? ‘Do you have the most enhanced breasts in the world?’ That’s how you put this.

‘No’ she replies, flatly. Her voice is deep and her English, both in terms of pronunciation and grammar, is regularly upstaged by her mother tongue of Korean.

‘You don’t have the most enhanced breasts in the world. OK, where would you say you come in the order of it?’ I ask.

‘Number two.’

‘Who’s number one?’

‘Maxi. But I don’t know what happened – she got infection. But I don’t know what happened. Her boob, one is gone – I cannot find out what happened. When she’s gone, I’m gonna be number one.’

Woody is shaking his head disconsolately. ‘We don’t know that for sure,’ he mutters. Minka, the Pekingese, is off the leash, and he doesn’t like it. I don’t know why Woody is suddenly so circumspect about the facts. I suspect he’s a player in this world of large-breasted females, and therefore not one to spit on his own d-cup. Claims about who’s biggest in this arena would doubtless lead to a nasty catfight among these top-heavy women. A call later to Maxi’s agent informs me that Maxi does indeed seem to be out of the picture at the moment, whether retired or otherwise – and is thus out of this rather perverse race.

‘So Minka,’ I go on, ‘if Maxi’s out of action, does that mean you have the largest enhanced breasts in the world?’

‘Yes,’ she says without fanfare.

‘You’re number one!’ I insist.

‘Yes!’ And now, for the first time, Minka seems to be perking up – her pink lip gloss emulsioning a sincere smile. She’s warming to the attention and focus. Unexpectedly she dances towards me and grabs my arm.

‘Give me your hand,’ she says playfully.

At this moment I’m seized by a paralysis called Englishness. She pulls my hand with her veiny, gym-fit arm, her South Korean biceps gently pulsing. She then pushes my hand under the vast cantilever that is her right bosom. It’s like being asked to have a quick hold of the flat roof at Heathrow Terminal 5. Her breasts are incalculably heavy – the figure of 4000 centilitres of volume per breast doesn’t do it justice. And what’s shocking isn’t just the dense weight. Or how it looks. It’s the tactile aspect. The breast is rock hard, like a block of concrete. The kind of concrete they use to hold bridges up. In windy countries. That get earthquakes.

It’s at this point that any sense of camp, seaside-postcard comedy disappears out of the room. The price Minka pays in every waking and sleeping hour has suddenly dawned on me. Having been initially perturbed and certainly repulsed by Minka’s inflated upper half, it now strikes me as being horrific, like someone living with a terrible disability. Except this is self-inflicted. Or Woody-inflicted…

‘Are they heavy – you think that’s heavy?’ says Minka.

Why’s she asking this insanely silly question? Yes! Does she need confirmation that carrying a rack equivalent to six large Evian bottles strapped to your front is rather labour-some? I suspect it’s her way of garnering some understanding on the part of others about just what she’s going through, and that she can carry this much weight and not be dead by now. I also take it as a sign that Minka is starting to trust me, and that perhaps she feels increasingly comfortable with my approach and my motivation for being there.

As my sympathy for this remarkable woman grows, so does my germinating affection. In spite of her astonishing appearance, she is strikingly normal. And I detect a strength, not just in her lower back.

‘That weighs a ton – how do you carry that around all the time?’ I ask.

Woody pipes up, Alistair Campbell-mode, rapid rebuttal.

‘She works out every day.’

Oh, well that’s OK then…

Having literally come to grips with Minka’s body, it’s clear to me that these huge breasts can only stay put for a finite period of time. But how long precisely?

Woody’s in no doubt: ‘Ten years.’

Minka, like a teenager indulging in backchat, says sulkily, ‘He says ten years.’

I innocently suggest to Woody that’s a long time to carry that kind of weight around.

Minka doesn’t give Woody a chance to respond.

‘That’s right – you are right…’ she says, glaring at Woody. I now feel I’m in the middle of a fight these two are pretending not to have. It’s awkward. Wading into choppier waters I ask Minka the question again, the one Woody has answered for her.

‘What about you, Minka, what’s your timescale?’

‘I don’t know, maybe two or three more years,’ she suggests.

Woody’s state of permanent shrug has notched up to a passive rage.

I feed the monster.

‘Woody, if she said to you I’m going to see the plastic surgeon tomorrow, I’m going to have it all out because I want to have a normal life, what happens?’

‘I’m out of here…’ he says dismissively.

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’m out of here. What would you say? Businesswise – businesswise – it’s gone.’

Minka, still in fifteen-year-old mode, says ‘fine’. Like it’s not fine.

Woody continues the lecture. ‘Because she knows she’s gotta keep ‘em till she’s got enough money to retire, so long as she’s not fat she can remain till maybe she’s seventy years old…’

What??

He goes on, back to his favourite part of the sales pitch. ‘She’s a commodity. Coz there’s no one in the world like her. No one – that’s it.’

So several things have emerged in this subtly explosive chat. First of all, Woody is more than Minka’s ‘manager’. They reside together, and in fact I am to discover later that they are married and even have a son. Woody is defensive about protecting Minka’s image to her fans as sexy, single and available. I have to respect this. Minka might be at the glamour, or even, sleazy end of the entertainment industry, but anyone in a magazine, TV show or movie has to perpetuate a certain persona that plays to their fanbase’s fantasy. It’s the nature of showbusiness. That’s why for all those years, we had to labour under the illusion George Michael was straight. And that Little and Large were funny.

But what’s disturbing is that Minka and Woody do not have a united front, on Minka’s front. This is genuinely troubling. It doesn’t seem that Minka is the driving force in this quest for mammoth breastage. I am concerned that Woody’s perception of his wife as a commodity supersedes any husbandly concerns for her physical well-being or, at the very least, her physical comfort. Otherwise why would he bark that she can carry those edifices around until she’s seventy, when she clearly wants to have them out in a year or two? Surely it’s her call, isn’t it? A man of Woody’s generation might not have included Germaine Greer or Naomi Wolf in his bedtime reading (I had Woody down as a strictly Wilbur Smith man; no offence Wilbur…), but surely the most misogynistic, unreconstructed male wouldn’t question a woman’s sovereignty over her body and what goes into it? Would he?

The problem comes back to Minka being both a commodity and a wife. The ultimate conflict of interest. With her long mane of oriental hair and proud posture, Minka isn’t unlike a prize racehorse and Woody her diminutive jockey, complete with whip. I can see how their marriage, and the life they live, is based on Minka’s breasts. This woman is an emotional and economic prisoner in her own body. How terrifying is that? Imagine being owned by your own body. Now obviously the likes of Kate Moss have to eat a lot of salad to keep the body they are selling, and an athlete certainly doesn’t always feel like getting up at 5 a.m. to go running, to stay at the top of his or her game. But Minka’s sacrifice is one which affects totally, let there be no doubt about this, her quality of life. And almost unquestionably her health.

One clue to this is that getting to be as big as Minka is now illegal in the United States, and the technology with which she inflated her chest is no longer available. Minka is one of a handful of ‘living legends’ in the world of big breasts and Woody is right to suggest that there’s no one like her anywhere else on Earth. That’s because Minka is part of the rarefied ‘silly string’ generation. A tiny group of women who experimented in the early 1990s with a special material which produces fantastically enormous breasts. It’s impossible to be as big as Minka with silicone, as silicone is an extremely dense, heavy material. Gravity would prevail. So various plastic surgeons experimented with a material developed during the Vietnam war to help heal open wounds. This special fabric fuses with skin tissue and expands with water and matter to form an extra skin, for where it had been blown off by an understandably belligerent Vietnamese soldier. This doctor speculated that something which does this for a wound may have the same effect in the cosmetic arena. The results were startling. Women like Minka had the silly string inserted and day by day their breasts grew in size. To the point where it was feared the breasts might eventually explode. Indeed some of the early recipients of this procedure went back to have their breasts drained as they were getting so big.

Mercifully this practice was later outlawed amid concern about the health risks. But a tiny number of now ageing ‘silly string’ ladies – Minka, Maxi Mounds and Caila Cleavage – still trade on their look because essentially it’s impossible to look like that now. So they have a unique selling point, albeit a freakish one. They are the embodiment of a frankly disturbing period in the history of plastic surgery. They reflect a time when plastic surgeons were about as vigorously regulated as your local hairdresser, and when the patients were human guinea pigs, willing participants in an extremely risky experiment that might ultimately claim their lives. And they paid for the privilege. One such victim was Lolo Ferrari. Lolo’s story is a well-known one, and her untimely, mysterious death casts a dark hue over this world of big breasts. And perhaps that is her legacy. Because not only is it almost impossible to be that big in the twenty-first century, but with Lolo’s passing, the comedy of her appearance – often paraded on TV shows like Eurotrash – segued, almost instantly, into the macabre, and tragic.

Woody and Minka met in Minka’s native South Korea when Woody was in the military. Given the age gap between them, and the fact that Woody brought her to the USA, a picture was emerging of a relationship, both in business terms and personally, that was unequal. Apart from the money, I want to get a sense of what motivated Woody in this whole endeavour. Is Minka’s appearance purely business?

‘Woody, do you think that Minka’s look is attractive?’ I ask.

‘I…yes. I like big-breasted women, personally always have,’ he says.

‘So you’re a big boob man,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says.

‘As far as you’re concerned, you’ve lucked out then,’ I suggest.

‘Yeah,’ he says. Then there’s a crunching gear change I don’t see coming. ‘If it wasn’t for her I’d be dead – that’s one thing.’

Eh? I’m not expecting this. What does he mean?

‘I have cancer,’ he says.

‘Do you?’

‘Yeah – I’ve been in remission for nine years,’ he says, rightly proudly.

I shake his hand by way of approbation. And view him as a human being for the first time in our encounter. Over on the small dinner table, one of the Chihuahuas is licking from the bowl of someone’s unfinished breakfast.

‘Yes, I’m a cancer survivor,’ he says.

‘Congratulations,’ I say. ‘So why do you feel she’s helped you survive cancer?’

‘Coz she’s taken care of me.’

‘Right,’ I say. We’ve got pathos here. It’s emotional. Woody’s eyes are filling with even more water than before. The juxtaposition of this pornographer being cared for by his wank-fantasy nurse/wife takes the bizarre nature of this union to a new level. It’s like Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, but with massive tits. I’m already looking forward to the film, starring Jim Broadbent as Woody.

‘Whereas probably no one in my condition one year ago would have took care of me like that…’

Minka’s full lips turn upwards. Oh my God, she loves him. I’m confused. And so I should be. That’s love.

We go upstairs on the softest, mushiest carpet I’ve ever stepped on. The Americans do mushy like no one else. The carpets are mushy, the suspension on their cars is mushy and 98 per cent of the food is too. Americans like things to be soft and squashy. I think it fits in with the first of the two American obsessions: comfort and convenience.

We make our way conveniently up the staircase to ‘the office’, inside which is a large computer, an ironing board and a green parrot. The parrot is called Buddy and he is Woody’s. Why do certain members of families appropriate certain animals? Surely if an animal lives under one roof, it belongs to all the inhabitants. Rusty was our gorgeous German Shepherd when I was growing up. He belonged to me, my brother, my two sisters, and my parents. In fact he belonged to hundreds of people, as I grew up above a pub in Camden in London, and anyone who purchased a pint of Ruddles County, or Carlsberg, essentially bought a share of Rusty as he meandered around the pub hoovering up discarded Golden Wonder Prawn Cocktail crisps. But he was no fat pet. More on them later…

To prove his ownership of the soul of this parrot, Woody essentially proceeds to French kiss the creature. This is a difficult thing to watch. Which is saying something in a room which contains over a thousand hard-core pornographic DVDs. None of which, mercifully, feature Buddy. Minka does though. We look at one DVD cover – it’s Minka with naked breast exposed, being licked by another, fair-haired lady.

‘Is that a friend?’ I ask. ‘Who is that lady?’

‘That’s Maxi Mounds,’ says Woody. This is the legendary Maxi Mounds, the most enhanced woman in the world, on paper at least. But as a quick call to her agent confirmed, she is currently retired. It’s hard to picture a woman that looks like that being ‘retired’. I can’t picture her playing for pennies at a local bridge club, or wandering the aisles of B&Q, looking for solar-powered garden lamps. Maybe she just knits.

‘Woody, I’ve just noticed one of the films there is The Milking of Minka,’ I say. I suspect it’s thin on plot. ‘And then there is another one called The Orient Express, what’s the storyline in that one?’

‘It’s the Orient Sexpress,’ corrects Woody.

I wasn’t playing dumb. That’s how green I am about these things – I actually missed the very demonstrative pun. I go on reading the blurb about it. ‘Starring Minka, Mr Hanks…Is that Tom Hanks?’ Now I am playing dumb.

‘That was me,’ says Woody.

‘Oh, you were in one of those movies?’

‘I have done a lot of the movies with her.’

This is a surprise – I didn’t have Woody down as front of house. So it turns out, like Bogart, his doppelganger, he has a career on celluloid too. Though I suspect The Orient Sexpress isn’t quite the cinematic masterpiece that Casablanca is.

‘So you have starred in these adult movies, most of the movies?’ I ask.

‘Yes, because there is things she will do with me in a video that she won’t do with other guys.’

‘OK,’ I say.

He goes on. ‘She will do me orally without a condom, but she hasn’t done that lately and she has got to go back, she has got to go back to doing the nasty stuff for it to sell.’

I go on to ask him what the nasty stuff is. He gives me an example.

‘Well, do you know the expression cream pie?’ he asks.

‘No I don’t.’ I don’t.

‘It’s when a guy comes into the woman and you have a close-up of the vagina as the semen comes out,’ he says nonchalantly.

The expression ‘I wish I hadn’t asked’ can’t be more appropriate at this juncture. And I have had those moments in the past. I’ve asked plenty of women who were overweight when the baby was due. And, enquiring as to how long they were staying with us, I asked a gravely ill friend, ‘When do we lose you?’ Thankfully they actually survived, and spared my blushes…

But asking Woody to elaborate on the context of the ‘nasty stuff’ is my gravest error. Aside from the misfortune of being presented with this image in my mind, I am amazed at Woody’s sheer boredom at describing these things. It’s like when the heroes of the trenches during the First World War became very sanguine, nay flippant, about death and images of death, so Woody is a veteran of the sex industry and thus has a certain attitude to the human body and its reproductive processes, which is reflected in the language he uses. But how can you possibly talk about your wife in these terms? It struck me at the time as cold and brutal, and even now, looking back on it, fills me with a sadness.

But the flipside of it is they are married and she did nurse him through cancer and I think they genuinely care for each other. Love comes in all shapes and sizes and though I felt sorry for one of the parties involved, ultimately their relationship functions. It works and each partner has a set of duties and expectations on them which are wholly unconventional and unedifying, but that is the relationship. It’s ironic to think that this dysfunctional union has escaped the statistic of one in three marriages failing. Woody and Minka, for all of the horror of their domestic arrangements, are still together after all these years. And they clearly need each other.

‘Minka, how do you feel about this, this business of having to do the nasty stuff?’ I ask. She is leaning on the ironing board, which is creaking at the combined weight of her, and her breasts.

‘Hmm, I have to do it, I have to do it. They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.

I feel that she’s rehearsing the party line. But she believes it too. That said, there is no enthusiasm in her answer. It strikes me as a doleful acceptance of the status quo. They do live in a big house. They have cars, jewellery, and huge medical bills (welcome to America). Minka has certain material expectations which trap her in a job she would rather not be doing. But while plenty of people compromise professionally to keep themselves in iPods, foreign holidays and posh sausages, few have to make their bodies available to the latest well-hung movie star. And even fewer have to pay the 24/7 price of carrying these monsters around, even when asleep. Minka’s never off duty from her own body.

‘But is money really worth it for what, you know, for what you go through?’ I ask Minka, pushing this point.

‘Money, money, power. Money control whole, all over the world. Right?’ she says.

Woody fires up, almost evangelically. ‘You can’t live without money,’ he announces. ‘The bottom line, this is a business; any business the bottom line is money and you got to do what you got to do to make the money.’

Minka then interjects, supporting Woody. They’ve cornered me. It’s good cop, bad cop. Big-boobed cop.

‘They want to see something different, you know. I have to do it. It’s money yeah. Income,’ she says.

She seems convinced. And it’s time to experience one of the fruits of Minka’s labours now. It’s time for Minka’s tennis game at her local club. We are on our way in the car. A white Mercedes with cream leather seats. The seats are firm, not mushy. The Germans don’t do mushy. Woody has the hangdog expression of a professional chauffeur as he ferries his VIP with the USPs to her next engagement.

There is a brief, amusing argument about how Minka is flaky when it comes to her financial paperwork. Woody is still sore from a lost three-week period in which Minka didn’t put her petrol receipts through the books. Something you’d think would be hard to get cross about, but Woody’s rage grows as he recalls this fiscal misdemeanour. There’s a serious hue to this discussion though, as at the heart of it Woody is anxious that she couldn’t manage on her own without him. A scenario less abstract for him than most, since his brush with the big C. Minka reverts to her inner pouting teenager during this discussion. The look on her face says ‘woteva’. She claims none of this is true, though notably she offers no evidence in her defence. I tend to side with Woody on this one. He’s clearly business-minded to the core and, like all American citizens, has an acute, vitriolic hatred of paying tax. They continue to and fro with this argument, which has a rehearsed familiarity to it – it feels like one of their argumentative ‘greatest hits’. Like a well-meaning child sitting in the back, I change the subject to try to stop ‘mummy and daddy’ bickering. In much the way I used to try to stop my parents having their occasional ruck. Except I’m not related to these people, and I’m a thirty-five-year-old man.

‘So how often do you play tennis?’ Trying to sound cheery, to break the tension.

‘Every morning,’ says Woody grumpily. ‘Her world revolves around tennis.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Her entire lifestyle revolves around tennis,’ he repeats.

‘Minka…?’

She doesn’t have time to speak.

Woody continues his moan. ‘It’s interfered with our business.’

‘Has it really?’

‘Definitely.’

‘Sometimes tennis comes first,’ I suggest.

‘Yeah yeah, and that’s when we get to really going at it,’ he says.

‘That’s when you get really fighting?’

‘Yeah, I get very, very argumentative when the tennis comes, when she puts the tennis before the business.’

‘Do you think the tennis is an escape from the breast business?’

‘Yeah yeah it’s an escape for her,’ he concedes.

He says this with a reluctance, rather than any sense of being pleased for her. Like an uncaring farmer allowing his livestock fresh straw not because that would be nice for them but because they’ll die if they don’t get it. And that would be inconvenient. We get out of the climate-controlled Benz and step into the climate-uncontrolled Vegas heat. It’s lunchtime, the point of the day at which the Nevada sun is at its most unforgiving. The tarmac on the road looks as hot as the day it was laid. Minka is resplendent in an all-white tennis outfit, with that shade of white only a very bleachy washing powder can manage – the kind a generation of babies in the Seventies were subjected to, creating a mini eczema epidemic at that time – ah happy days. In fact her outfit is so bright, pressed and consistently white, she could have been the darling of the Lawn Tennis Association. Though her chest would have the older members of the club spluttering into their English Breakfast tea.

She has invited me for a game. Now at this point, I am reminded that there are almost no things I am good enough at to compete in an actual game. When ‘playing tennis’, something I have probably done about eight times in my life, I normally request to my colleague that we play ‘Dolan rules’, which involves hitting the ball to each other very slowly, the aim being to keep the ball in play. Any obeying of the boundaries of the court would be against Dolan rules. So there’s no ‘in’ or ‘out’. The ball is literally inside the court or over the fence, and not in the court. Those are the rules. Serving is a no-no too. Especially with Minka – I would need to be in the car park to return one of her serves. It turns out, in my unqualified opinion, she’s extraordinarily good at tennis. She’s fast, powerful and accurate. She ignores my gentlemen’s agreement about the rules, and plays proper tennis at me. I say ‘fucking hell’ a lot.

But as with all matters Minka, it always comes back to the breasts – they are the two elephants in the room, as it were. And out there on court, the last thing you will notice is her backhand or volleying. Her untamed bosoms dart around the court quicker that she does. It’s actually painful to watch. It looks totally uncomfortable. It’s ironic that the one pastime about which she is truly passionate is the one which graphically illustrates the price she has paid – and pays – for her day job. If it wasn’t sad it would be amusing. But after having spent time with Minka, having eaten her chilled, crunchy apples, having played with her dogs and having asked her how much she paid for her fridge, I’ve grown very fond of her. She has a dry sense of humour – often asking me in hushed tones, ‘You like blow jobs, Mark?’ not because she’s being lewd, but she has discovered that kind of chatter makes me uncomfortable. She is intelligent, knowing, wise and funny. But at an earlier age, she met a man from another, more economically robust continent, with big ideas about their future together. A man with a big-breasts fascination, with connections in the pornographic world. So this woman morphed into his wet dream, both in the bedroom, and on the balance sheet. It’s now what they both do – and it’s hard to change that, especially when one of the parties is doggedly committed to that path, and when the other has a body which says there’s no turning back.

I had one last go at cornering Woody as to his role in this path Minka has taken.

‘I think the problem is, Woody, that people will think you particularly like big breasts. You have met this young woman in South Korea, you took her to America and they will see that you are very much the driving force in all these really big choices. What do you think of that?’ I ask.

‘She hasn’t done anything that she didn’t choose to do, OK?’ he counters.

‘But is she and also this lifestyle an embodiment of your personal fantasy?’

‘No.’

‘Even though you like the big boobies?’

‘She had big boobs before, they are just bigger now that’s all.’

‘Quite a bit bigger,’ I say, and it’s an understatement.

‘Which is fine. But she was plenty big before.’

Hmm. I’m not convinced.

This is as far as I feel I’m going to get with Woody. The best I can say about him is that he isn’t breaking any laws. But I do feel their relationship is unequal, and unbalanced, like Minka’s very body. I just hope at some point she does retire, because although material comfort is alluring to almost all of us, I feel that for Minka it’s reached the point at which the material stuff is the tail that wags the dog of their life. Before I leave to pack my bags in my tiny room in one of the Pyramids, I put this to her. Wouldn’t she give up the endless strain on her upper body and having to sit by the pool, naked, in her fifties, sixties and even seventies, being photographed for her website by her husband who’s telling her, ‘Close up. Smile. OK. Turn your butt around…’ Wouldn’t she rather be playing tennis?

‘When I am playing tennis I am not in the business. Sometime I wanna get out from, you know, I am telling you true, do I love it tennis? I love it. Just bottom line is money.’ She says, wiping a bead or two of sweat from her brow.

‘But wouldn’t you rather live in a small house and drive an old car and then only play tennis?’

‘No, no,’ she says.

I have my answer, but it’s not the one, for her sake, I really want to hear.

Taking one last glance at Minka’s iconic décolletage, my eyes are once again assaulted by the stretched, veiny horror of Minka’s chest. Brutal, barbaric, inhuman; none of these words overstates the case. The idea that anyone would consider going even a millimetre bigger than this is unthinkable. But these journeys are all about the unthinkable. Meet Sheyla, a young Brazilian television celebrity, who’s about to have an operation that will give her an extra litre and a half of size per breast on top of what Minka has. That’s five and a half litres per breast. And she’s almost as petite as Minka. What’s she thinking? Can I stop her? The flight’s booked; I’m on my way…