W. Todd Kaneko

1. A man can stand with both feet touching the ground until his legs no longer reach that far, until the ground disappears. 2. Giant Baba stands six feet ten inches tall, taller in Japan. It doesn’t matter how tall you are. 3. A man can hold a woman, can’t stand to lose her to the heart’s wreckage. His body will fall apart one day—a rock crab’s chassis stripped clean by seagulls, a dandelion gone to seed. 4. Giant Baba stands over seven feet tall. When he lifts you over his head, you will be eight and a half feet above the ground. 5. A man can stand for anything when seen from below—fatherhood, majesty, satisfaction after conquest. In the end all men are seen from above—patch of lawn, chunk of stone. 6. Giant Baba towers above your house, dangles you by the ankle. Your life looks so small from the sky. 7. A man and a woman can wrestle together in the same bed. A man and a woman and a marriage can brawl all night. 8. Giant Baba looms dark against the stars, back blotting out the Milky Way, arms cradling you and your family history. Listen to his mammoth heartbeat, war drum, earthquake. Just listen. 9. A man can stand naked in a foreign country, can search for meaning in strange tongues. He tries to find himself in stories about famous battles, about giants. It doesn’t matter where he stands. 10. Giant Baba’s body is made of girders and mastodon bones. When you stand outside to look at your house from new angles, when you think of how your father died, the giant will be there to catch you.

13. After the dinosaurs fell asleep, after those terrible lizards began their slow decay into mythology, Andre the Giant was there to cradle their bodies in his soft hands and weep. 24. Andre the Giant wrestled the Earth into a globe, carved his name into the ocean floor with his pinky to remind the whales who taught them to sing. 32. Andre the Giant was a village. Then he became a dragon. Then he became an army. Then he became a king. Now, he is the wind. 40. A man can’t bodyslam Andre the Giant unless he’s worthy of slaying a monster, unless the giant decides it’s time to lie down. 58. Andre the Giant stole fire from Heaven, hid it in his mouth, fed it to monkeys one lick at a time until they learned to pronounce his name. 67. Before there were boys with magic beanstalks, with slingshots or singing swords, Andre the Giant brawled with sooty angels, volcanoes spouting from where he buried their hearts 75. Andre the Giant scaled the Empire State Building with Marilyn Monroe in one hand, Cleopatra in the other. They marveled at how small we are. 81. Andre the Giant once cracked the sky’s ribs. Then he was thunder churning like trout. Then he was an avalanche of fists and knees. Then he was a fire burning through the forest. Then he was a tidal wave seething offshore. Now, he will not be a metaphor. 93. When Andre the Giant pitched a man over the top rope and out into the crowd, he aimed at the moon. 100. A man never tells a lie, always treats a promise like his mother’s name. Andre the Giant once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, hit a buffalo in the eye and killed it as it grazed. 116. Andre the Giant drank three bottles of whiskey and grappled with the Devil in a bingo hall in Memphis. Then he invented the blues. 125. On television, Andre the Giant grinned with a mouthful of shark’s teeth. He devoured mortal men ten-at-a-time, laughed and spit their bones into our living rooms. 137. Andre the Giant was a Frenchman. Then he became an ogre. Then he became a movie star. Now, he is the constellations. All of them.

Tonight, I am in search of clues on how to be a man, not a man like my father, who traded his motorcycle for a job in the plane yards after my mother left. Before my father tried telling me wrestling was fake, we watched men scrap with brass knuckles and bull ropes. Back then, a dude could get his jaw broke calling the wrong guy a fake. Lou Thesz was a bona fide grappler, stretching men with that toehold facelock, snapping men’s elbows to protect his championship belt. My grandfather saw him lose the title to Bronko Nagurski, celebrated footballer who stomped men into the turf on his way to the end zone. Before my father died, he insisted my grandfather never saw that match, that men always invent things when they have something genuine to say. Today, everyone knows that fight was fixed. Tonight, I am thinking about all those shapes Lou Thesz could twist out of a man’s skeleton, and how some nights that just isn’t enough.

It's hard to be humble when you're 235 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with a body women love and men fear. —Sputnik Monroe When my father died, he left me a trove of video tapes, a warped memorial for those men he watched with my mother before she left for parts unknown, for those fights he relived once he was laid off from the plane yards. We watched men like Sputnik Monroe bleed the hard way, shook our fists as he broke rules against guys who were easier to cheer. He was a bad Elvis, greased-back hair with a shock of white, Sputnik Monroe mixed it up everywhere, a rodeo fistfight, a henhouse tornado. My mother picked a fight in an Idaho truck stop once, stabbed a man’s chest with her middle finger, then stepped to one side so my father could fight him in the parking lot. Afterwards, my mother was silent all the way back to Seattle, her disgust with him—the way he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, guided her to the car, and sped back to the freeway—hanging between them from that point forward. Sputnik Monroe clobbered men wherever he went, sneered at those fists raised against him in Memphis. Some nights, as my wife sleeps upstairs, I watch my father’s video tapes and imagine what I would have done that day if I knew that my marriage depended on what I did with my hands.