My Father Was Andre The Giant
Michael Chin


I never met him.

He’s dead now.

My mother was very small. So small that by the time I was seven, I had grown taller and heavier, and upon realizing this was the case, told her I didn’t have to do what she said anymore. She told me she didn’t have to buy me Christmas presents or cook me spaghetti and meatballs.
I came to discover that not only was my mother small, but I was quite big. At school, a boy named Johnny Reds called me Sasquatch, and though I took small pleasure punching him in the ear, I nonetheless cried when I got home. That’s when Mom told me about my father.
    
She explained that by Andre the Giant’s standards, I wasn’t so big at all. He stood eight feet tall and weighed six hundred pounds. I didn’t approach such dimensions, besides which my hands were actually quite small.

When I was eight, I asked why my father didn’t live with us. Mom told me about wrestling and how Andre had to travel to different cities to help different good guys
. 
When we watched The Princess Bride, I clapped with glee when Andre came on screen. My hands got sweaty when the masked man choked him. I wept when my father caught the princess after she jumped from her window. I imagined I was that princess. I watched that VHS tape again and again and threw a tantrum when Mom returned it to the video store.

When I was ten, Mom revealed that she and Andre had never been married like other people’s moms and dads. When I was thirteen, she explained that it was a one-night stand—an explanation bundled with a birds and bees conversation, followed by a reassurance that though she had not planned to have me, it didn’t mean I was a mistake.

Mom had taken Andre’s order at a diner after his match. He ordered half the menu. She refilled his coffee twenty-four times. When he was done, he tipped her five crisp twenty-dollar bills. Then he waited in the parking lot, cooped up in his rental sedan until she was done with her shift, so he could take her home.

I tried wrestling in high school, assuming I would be a natural. There weren’t many girls wrestling, but even if there had been, my weight placed me squarely between the one-hundred-sixty and one-hundred eighty-two pound weight classes so I’d be stuck with mostly boys regardless. I lost each of my first two matches by pin in under a minute. The third time out, a particularly nasty boy complained to his coach that he shouldn’t have to wrestle a girl, and when he had to anyway, cranked on my arm and neck until I said uncle. I quit after that.

I grew fixated on my mother’s night with Andre. After months of prodding, Mom extended her story past the diner parking lot, back to the studio apartment where she lived at the time. He smelled horrible—like sweat and gas. She told me that Andre liked to be on top, but that he was too big and she was too small, and he was set to both suffocate her and crush her skull beneath the weight of his stomach. So she pinched the soft sides of his belly until she had his attention, scooted out from under him, and slapped his face. Andre smiled and asked her to do it again. She did it again. It turned out he got off on slaps, and so he let her on top of him. The bedsprings squealed, then buckled and she thought for sure they would break. She prayed they would stop at the floor and not fall straight through and demolish the apartment below. 

I told Mom, at last, that I had heard enough.

Neither my mother nor I were invited to Andre’s funeral. I had come to terms with the fact that he probably didn’t remember my mother, and probably never knew I was born. Still, I felt compelled to see him, if just that once. I was in college then. I cut class.

When I got to the church, a man, my height, broad shoulders, puffed out chest, black suit, sunglasses stopped me at the door, and I knew he’d ask me for some sort of credentials or tell me I couldn’t go inside, so I cut off him with a giant sob. I told him I was Andre’s daughter, and unleashed a torrent of tears. The next thing I knew, I was inside.

The church was full of giants. Not just Andre’s family, but a cavalcade of men with long hair and with mohawks. Wrestlers, the lot of them, who walked with limps and had deep groove scars on their foreheads. Who drank from flasks that they had stashed under pews. Who took off their blazers to reveal muscle shirts and tattoos of women name’s and crucifixes and eagles with their wings spread wide. Who wept openly on one another’s shoulders.
The ceremony hadn’t started yet. 
​
Andre rested in a custom-made casket. Enormous, lined in red velvet. His stomach protruded up, over the brim. He didn’t look that much like me. I told him my name was Andrea, and I was his daughter. I told him I loved him very much. I put my little, hot hand on my father’s big, cold one and held on as if he were mine to keep.

About the Author:
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently studies at the MFA program at Oregon State University, where he also teaches writing and is the managing editor for the new journal 45th Parallel. He won the 2014 Jim Knudsen Editor’s Prize for fiction from the University of New Orleans and has previously published work or has work forthcoming in over forty journals including The Normal School, Word Riot, and Bayou Magazine. Find him online at here.

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