Zach Miko

Zach and the Beanstalk

The first time I realized someone was afraid of me was at a 7th grade dance. Some of the popular kids had started dating one another, and there were rumors of blow jobs and hand stuff, but for the most part, none of us had ever touched a member of the opposite sex. The style of dance popular among seventh graders in 2001 was called grinding. The boys would stand behind the girls and literally grind their crotches into the girls’ butts, the girls pushing back with their own gyrations. Dry hump sex dancing was all that any of the kids, bursting with pubescence and dial up internet smut, could talk about, even though 9/11 had happened only three weeks prior. The administration had decided to move the dance up in the school calendar in order to distract us from the nonstop images of grey-caked pedestrians and flag-draped politicians promising to never forget, and it worked. 

I didn’t plan on going. I hated dancing, and I would sooner eat skunk than ask a girl if they would be so kind as to let me rub my junk against them. But my mom always insisted I do all the typical kid’s first moments, regardless if I had any interest, so I went.

The dance was held in the gymnasium, balloons hanging half inflated from the basketball hoops. The DJ had two trapper keepers bursting with CDs, and two Walkmans, plugged into the same PA system used for assemblies. It smelled like sweat, hair gel, and cucumber melon body spray. I imagined the dance would be like a 90’s movie: I’d walk in and all the boys would be against one wall, all the girls on the other, each side too scared or embarrassed to ask the other to dance, until two of the “cool” chaperones started busting a move to break the ice. But when I got there, the ice was already broken, and the grinding was well underway. I wanted to leave, but my parents weren’t coming back to pick me up for another two hours, so instead I found a piece of wall, and got to leaning. I wore the hoodie I got from the Harley Davidson factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was the same hoodie I wore almost every day, convinced that a Men’s XXL was the only thing to hide my bulk. I pulled my hood up, trying to block out the sound and light, like blinders on a horse.

From inside my hoodie, I heard voices, curses, frequent and awkward, as if the speakers were still getting used to swearing. 

“He’s fucking staring at me. For five fuckin’ songs that fucking bitch ass freak is just staring!”

My eyes focused and I saw a girl pointing at me, standing behind the boy she had been dancing with. The boy was hitting his other friends on the arms to get their attention and gesturing wildly in my direction.

Big kids grow up with a different experience than “normal” sized children. Our average-sized peers are clearly children and are treated as such. For big kids, our childhood is forgotten as our bodies’ growth outstrips our minds. Our bellies and breasts remind adults of their own, and when our height and weight surpass some of our teachers, our peers become wary. They look at us, suspicious. Is this six foot, two hundred and twenty pound twelve-year-old really another child, or is this a Never Been Kissed/ Billy Madison type situation?

“Leave me alone! Fucking creep!” she yelled over the bass rattling the coils in the ancient PA. 

More boys started to gather around the couple before running off into the crowd.

FUCK. I moved away quickly towards the other side of the gym. I hadn’t been staring at anyone. I had been lost in thought, working out my best strategy on how to beat the gym boss giving me trouble in Pokémon and counting down the minutes until I would be back at home with my Gameboy. 

“Hey!” 

Someone grabbed my shoulder, not one of my classmates. A man’s hand. I turned towards the hand and was shoved against the wall. My social studies teacher grabbed me with his other hand too, pressing me into the institutional white cinder blocks. I heard people taunt and cheer, the adolescent crowd frenetic with the promise of violence. I threw my hands up and ripped my hood off. 

“I’m sorry!” I yelled, “Please, I’m sorry. I’m sorry!”

“Zach?” Mr. Berman said. I sagged with relief.  I had thought I was about to get punched in the face. My teacher thought it was hilarious. Apparently, some of the kids thought I was a man, a kidnapper, a pervert, someone there to prey on them. Mr. Berman, biggest of the teachers, the baseball coach, who still stood an inch shorter than me, had been sent to sort me out.

Now, Mr. Berman clapped me on the meat of my arm.

“Man, that could have been bad, huh?” he said, inviting me to share in the joke of near-assault on a minor, apparently unfazed by the irony that I was the minor in question. 

As I got older, taller, bigger, things like that happened more and more. I did everything I could to stay out of the way, fly under the radar, but it felt like heads turned every time I entered a room. I remember the first time a stranger told me how they would take me in a fight. I was fourteen, buying a Peanut Buster Parfait from the Dairy Queen, when a man behind of me in line, shorter than me of course, wearing a high visibility vest and sagging JNCO jeans, tapped me on the arm with a pack of cigarettes, and started explaining the best ways hurt me.

“The knees. You may think you are big and tough, but one shot to the knees and you’ll crumble like a sack of bricks.” 

I said, “oh yeah, that wouldn’t be good,” then proceeded to pay for my ice cream.

My size was viewed as a challenge by some men. My presence made other people cautious. I didn’t blame them. It became a fact of my existence, an obstacle to overcome. I was a giant, a monster, and the villagers with their torches and pitchforks were easily startled. The instinct is in most people’s subconscious, whether they realize it or not. In Sunday school you learn about David and Goliath and Nephilim. In Monday school, you read Jack and The Beanstalk, The Brave Little Tailor, King Arthur, Norse and Greek Mythology. Almost every story ends with the giant beheaded. 

 When my back was pressed to the wall, I saw the clench of Mr. Berman’s fist, the tightness of his jaw, the righteousness and certainty of the hero ready to slay the monster, the crowd behind him cheering on their valiant knight. I had few friends and was terrified of the opposite sex, but I had believed, at the very least, that I was still just a kid. But instead, I had been Fee Fi Fo Fumming my way through a world full of Englishmen, who were all suspicious of how I made my bread.

In recent years, there has been a rise in hypermasculine influencers, like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson, who complain to their millions of followers that men have become soft. With a mix of masculine pride and good old fashioned misogyny, these influencers encourage men to embrace their darker sides, revel in their capability to inflict fear and violence. In order to succeed as a man, they say, you have to become a monster. But as any real monster will tell you, it’s a lonely existence.

Most big guys I know are the kindest, gentlest, funniest people you will ever meet. We have the Jolly Green Giant to thank for that. Or rather, we have Leo Burnett, a young copywriter for the Minnesota Valley Canning Company. Green Giant Great Big Tender Peas, later shortened to Green Giant Peas, became the top sellers. The original mascot was your standard Britannic, scowling, fur-wearing, club-swinging, cattle-devouring Giant. In 1935, Leo traded the bearskins for a leafy green suit, gave the giant a smile, and put the word “jolly” in front of his name, and as a result, made Jolly an option for all natural-born giants.

I was Jolly. In high school, I started wearing big nylon shirts with flames and dragons, tie dye and goofy sayings. I wore bowling shoes, grew out my hair, and started carrying around a guitar case everywhere I went. I made myself as small as I possibly could. Started taking over-the-counter diet pills and laxatives. Skipped meals and threw up the ones I did eat. But I still towered over my classmates, so I took Jolly even farther, to Goofy. Like the Disney dog, I hyucked and giggled, and bumbled around, figuring if I could just make people laugh, they wouldn’t be afraid of me. I didn’t care if they were laughing at me or with me. They didn’t even have to like me. I would do anything, be anyone, just to get the other kids to tolerate my presence. 

My sophomore year, I joined the drama club. I was already playing a character every day, and I saw drama as my chance to try on a few others. I also needed friends. The group I had fallen in with treated me more like a dancing bear than a person, a creature whose teeth had been removed, so there was no fear of me turning on them. Theater has a well-earned reputation of being open and inclusive, a place where all the weirdos and misfits can find a home. I auditioned for West Side Story, and was cast on spot as Diesel, the biggest and toughest of the Jets. In the stage version, he is the one originally supposed to fight Bernardo before Tony and Riff jump in. I fell in love. My size was an asset to me for the first time in my life. Directors are always looking for a big scary guy to pick on the protagonist. I played Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, The Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors. I played The Black Knight, Frankenstein, Angry Hillbillies, and I loved every moment. I was so good at being a monster. It felt natural to me. 

In college, I decided to major in theater. I wanted to keep living in the world where being the monster got me applause. I always did a silly little dance at curtain call to separate myself from the monster I was on stage. I thought my performance would keep me safe.

The American Academy of Dramatic Art is the oldest acting conservatory in the English-speaking world. As of this writing, its alumni boast 112 Oscar Nominees, 356 Emmys and 100 Tony nominations. Six stories of brick and dreams standing in the shadow of the Empire State Building. I could not believe this was my new home, my new safe space, where I could be anyone but myself. 

But drama school is the opposite of safety. The purpose of an acting conservatory is to break you. To strip you of all safeguards, boundaries, and barriers so, in theory, you are free to become anything. There are a myriad of acting exercises where the only point is to reduce the student to tears. 

“How can you play someone who’s broken, if you, yourself have never broken?” one teacher said.

“You are a horse, a wild beast, I am the cowboy, and I will break you,” said another.

Most of us tried to just fake an emotional breakdown to make the teachers stop, but they got to each of us at least once.

I was in my speech class, in a sweaty fourth floor room. Every room at AADA was sweaty, one of the cons of going to school in a two-hundred-year-old building. The only air conditioning was big noisy window units older than anyone in the student body. My speech teacher, Marta, always turned it off so she could hear our breathing. The day’s exercise was about how different body positions changed our breathing, our emotions, and our voices. Marta had worked as the speech coach for The Elephant Man on Broadway, and she was telling us about how subtle changes in posture and the location of his breath elicited such a powerful performance from Billy Crudup. She took us through some of the same postures she worked on with him.

“How does this make you feel?” she asked, placing her hands on my back, guiding my shoulders into rounding forward.

“Sleepy?” I said. Classmates giggled.

“Very funny, but you see how it can make you feel weak? Drawing in on yourself? Protective?” 

I said I did, trying to decide what I craved more in the moment, the approval of my teacher or the laughter of my classmates. 

“How about now?” She pressed her hand into my waist, her hand sinking into my flesh an inch or two before finding the purchase of muscle and bone. Her other hand gently gripped the back of my neck, my spine bent into an S, my knees bending as she drew me down.

“I feel like you should have bought me dinner first or something.” Classmates laughed loudly. Marta released me.

“If you’re not taking this seriously, I’m moving on.”

I apologized, grinning, still high on the cackles of the other students. I did want to learn, I wanted to pretend better. Marta and the rest of the faculty were legends of stage and screen, and Marta was the go-to speech coach for all of Broadway. 

“I’m serious. No more games. This is our work.”

I took my position once more and waited to feel her hands on my body. When her hand suddenly pressed into my stomach, I honked. That’s the only word I can think of to describe the sound I made. Pure surprise, coupled with shame. At the time, I was at the tail-end of my eating disorder and the idea of anyone touching my stomach was revolting to me.

The class broke out cackling at what sounded like a clown fellating a goose and Marta shoved me forward.

“I’m sorry!” I yelled.

“That’s enough! Get your stuff and get out!”

I felt the flush creeping up my face, my ears burning red. I walked towards the corner where my bag and coat were piled on the floor and began to pick everything up. The room was dead silent now, the laughter extinguished by the other students’ fear of getting themselves in trouble too. As I reached down to pick up my coat, Marta’s hand gripped my right shoulder and pushed hard. I stumbled over my bag, and slumped against the wall, but her hand didn’t let go, instead she added her second one. The cold bricks chilled my back.

“Zach!” Marta pressed harder. “Is this a fucking joke to you?” Acting teachers are allowed to swear. 

“No!” 

She started shaking me.

“Then why are you making it a fucking joke?”

“I don’t know!” She was less than half my size so pushing back was not an option. They put down the dancing bears who fought back. She pushed harder, pulling back and then shoving forward, my back hitting square against the wall with every rattle. It would have knocked the wind out of me if she were bigger. I saw the eyes of my classmates behind her, glittering with the glee of bloodsport, the coliseum crowd cheering as the gladiator slaughtered another lion.

“Why is it so important that you make them laugh?!” She pushed me one last time. My hand came up and I grabbed the wrist of the hand pinning my right shoulder. My arms tensed with rage and shame, but my grip remained loose. I flung her hand aside. 

“So they’re not afraid of me!” 

The shoving stopped. Her hands hung in the air. My knees were done holding me up, and I sank down, kneeling on the gray speckled linoleum. The lump in my throat was forcing its way higher. I stared into my hands. I began to cry. 

I wish it had been the stoic single tear you see in movies. Marta had won. She was the first of the faculty to break me. I sobbed, my wracks turning into wails. I howled and put my head to the floor. My hands curled to fists and began pounding. I brought my knuckles into the floor harder and harder, my screams louder and louder. I wanted to bleed, I wanted to break my hands. I wanted to scare them. I wanted to scare everyone. I wanted them to know how hard it was to keep the monster at bay. How lucky it was that I was bound. How lucky they all were that I cared. That I wanted to be liked, to be loved. 

I felt a hand on my back again. I reared backwards, my eyes wild and feral, ready to defend, to attack. Marta reached down and cupped my face in her hand. She brought my eyes to look into hers and smiled. I got one clear look before the tears caused everything to blur and the light to streak. She knelt down and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Good,” she whispered into my neck. “This is very good work.”

I felt more hands on my back, shoulders against mine, the weight of bodies and heads nuzzling into me. My sobs grew quieter until eventually I stilled, breathing in rhythm with the other bodies pressed into me. I felt myself lifted to my feet by a dozen hands.

“Very good work,” Marta said, this time loud enough for all to hear. “This is what we are trying to do.”

She went on to describe to the class how my emotions and voice changed with each position and posture, and just like that, my breakdown was just another exercise. Nowhere but acting school is someone’s complete disintegration just another successful lesson. My classmates weren’t afraid. I wasn’t exiled. When the class ended, my friends hugged me and other students clapped me on the back and praised my work. 

I left school that day with my skin still vibrating. I walked alone up Madison Avenue, replaying the moments, my admission. People moved out of my way as I walked, giving me a wide berth like they always did, but that was okay for now. They didn’t know me. Hadn’t seen me.  

While I waited on the platform of the uptown 6 train, a man with greying hair, wearing a tracksuit and necklaces more yellow than gold, looked me up and down and whistled at me, the way they do in cartoons.

“You big huh?” he said. “You know what they say: The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“Maybe,” I laughed, like always, but then I stopped. I didn’t want to play the scene as usual, “Oh gee willikers sir, I bet you could, I’m just a big ole oaf who’d never hurt a fly”. I didn’t like that play anymore.

The smile was still in my eyes as I spoke, but his own faltered as I turned to him. After all, a jolly giant is still a giant.

“You could try.”

Zach Miko is a writer and model in Connecticut. He studied Drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Art in New York City and in 2016 he was the first plus sized male model signed to a major modeling agency. He writes about the fashion and entertainment industry, body image, fatherhood, failure, masculinity, and eating disorder recovery. In 2024 he spoke at the United Nations for World Eating Disorder Day of Action. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stratford CT where they run the Drowsy Whaler, a coffee trailer, on the beach.