Funny Fat Guy Origin Story

 
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In ninth grade it’s discovered that I can do a good
impression of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers 2

& so my life in comedy begins. I keep them laughing, 
keep their weapons clean. Smarter, faster, funnier—

I learn because they want to kill me. Or perhaps 
I’m being melodramatic—my Borsht Belt blood.

No one wants to kill me, only to watch me wish 
I would die. If I were to call myself a comedian

it would be a dishonesty. I’m not a comedian. I’m an 
executioner. I know how to keep the guillotine whet. 

In tenth grade I put on the diaper & dance, in twelfth
grade, different school, I put on the diaper & dance, 

& years later, an audition room, I take off my shirt & dance, 
& they say, thank you. There are those of us for whom 

this has become a living. There are those whose lives 
this living has ended. In the classroom, I absorbed

a pencil into the folds of my belly & launched it out,
again & again, transforming my enemies into patrons.

If I am not this, what will they pay me for? What could
they love? My life depends upon the courting of death,

do not let me pretend I don’t love it, the need, the need,
caressed by laughter, the boundary between oblivions—

& what is a boundary to an endless body? They grabbed
my tits, hard, I joked there would be blood in my milk,

I stood in the center of a group of them in some parking 
lot & joked & joked, they cackled, & I could not look

into their eyes—when I say them, I mean my audience—
my great love, who lets me decide when it’s over, lets me

sit in the diner alone at two in the morning & order 
another stack of pancakes. The perfect size to be seen 

by a crowd, too big to be seen by one. Fat Bastard says 
I eat because I’m unhappy & I’m unhappy because I eat—

it’s a vicious cycle. Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s someone I’ve got to 
get in touch with & forgive—myself,
& then he farts & I fell 

to the floor of the theater—because I was laughing 
or because I was attempting to duck the future? What

is grace without grotesquerie? He was everything I vowed 
to become. A man in a fat suit. An entertainment. He ate 

fried chicken in bed, naked, with a woman, strands of grease 
strung between the terrible pleats. & yes, I cracked up, & yes,

no one saw my body unless it was onstage. Who was I to set 
myself against the book of clowns? I knew what I was, I knew 

what I was there to do, & did it with relish & poise. 
It was a job, I reassured myself, polishing the blade, 

turning to the crowd, pulling the hood down 
over my eyes as the fat boy waddled up the ramp.


Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, teacher, and amateur gardener. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, The Journal, MUZZLE, and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (not a cult press, 2017). He lives in Los Angeles, where he once sat next to Carly Rae Jepsen in a restaurant. Follow him @germyradin.

 
poetry, 2020SLMJeremy Radin