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
