Buffalo-Headed Takes

Scenes from a Life with a Medically Large Head

Prompt: My face on a Buffalo Head nickel

It’s Christmas and I’m four or five years old. My uncle Carl has decided my new nickname is “Charlie Brown.” From the moment the thought occurred to him, he hasn’t been able to stop laughing. Tears are running down his face and he’s wheezing trying to catch his breath.

“Look at his head! Look! He’s just like Charlie Brown! Hold still! Guys am I right? It’s like half of his body! Don’t be upset, Gary! You know it’s true!”

Everyone giggles uncomfortably because it’s so undeniably obvious. Even my dad is fighting back tears. I look like one of the Peanuts characters, where my child-body was sketched into existence as an afterthought to my enormous head.

One of my aunts says it’s okay and that I’m fine just the way that I am, but she still calls me Charlie Brown.

It’s too apt.

It’s summer and I’m twelve years old. I am at Disneyland with my father. We’ve just exited Star Tours and he wants to buy me a hat because he can’t stand to have money. I try to deny him, but the hat is black with a purple bill and has a picture of Luke Skywalker on the front. I can’t say no to a hat like that.

I put it on as we leave the shop.

I don’t know it yet, but this is the last time a baseball hat you can just find in a regular store will ever fit my head.

My dad remarks that the strap is on the last setting.

It hurts my head anyway, and I have to take it off after a few hours. I can feel it pressing on my temples every time I flex my jaw to chew. Eventually, I have to just undo the strap altogether.

In under a year, every other hat I put on will look like a kippah with a bill.

It’s spring and I’m fifteen years old. My father wants me to try out for football. There aren’t any helmets my size at the high school. We go to the community college and they don’t have any either. Finally, my father hears a rumor of an ex-football player with a big head who might have a special made helmet he’s willing to loan. Surely, he says, that will fit.

It doesn’t.

Not even after my dad tries to tap it on with a small sledge hammer while I hold my ears against my head. Not even close. I scream and throw the helmet across the room and tell my dad I don’t even want to play football.

It’s summer and I’m nineteen years old, working at the sawmill. I’ve just walked back into the lunchroom after using the bathroom. A millwright named Wayne is wearing my hard hat. It’s fallen down around his eyes and he’s comically walking into the walls, making a big show of not being able to see.

He holds out the hat for inspection by the rest of the millwrights. My hard hat is set to the very last setting. No one at the mill has ever done that before, not even some mythical guy who retired ten years ago with an extraordinarily large head. It is agreed no one has seen a melon like this in many years.

I take my hard hat back and put it on. Several men remark that I look like a circus bear. I laugh, too, because I do look like a circus bear.

I’m twenty-three, helping my younger brother clear some fallen trees. There’s just been a big storm and the yard is filled with soon-to-be firewood. Our job is to turn it into firewood.

“TaTonka,” my brother breathes.

“Goddamnit, Bryan,” I say.

It has been a few weeks since I had a haircut. I’ve done my best to comb but my hair is thick and wild.

A few days ago, when my dad was watching Dances with Wolves he saw a buffalo and said it looked like his mom if he squinted. He concluded it was in the shape of the head, something in a buffalo’s eye-ridge similar in appearance to Croatian physiognomy. I unfortunately happened to be standing in the room at the same time, at just the right angle, when Mary McDowell taught Kevin Costner the Lakota word for buffalo.

“TaTonka!” my dad shouted.

My brother had heard.

“TaTonka!” He repeats, as we clean the yard.

At least Charlie Brown was a human being.

I’m thirty-three, in bed with my wife scrolling through photos of our trip to Las Vegas.

She looks at the phone screen with me, then reaches over and zooms on a picture of us huddled over the same plate at Caesar’s palace. It looks like a cute red-headed tourist is taking a picture with a buffalo at a wildlife encounter. And that the tourist and the buffalo are eating at a buffet together.

“If you could melt my head and pour it into your head… how many of my heads do you think it would take to fill up your head?” she asks.

“Wouldn’t doing it just once use up your entire head?”

“You know what I mean,” she says.

I take a moment to guess the relative volumes of our heads.

“I don’t know?” I say. “Six? Six and a half?”

“Do you understand now why I won’t let you use my pillows?”

I do.

I resent it, but I do.

I’m thirty-five and my wife and I are walking through REI.

“Oh my God!” she cries, “that hat is enormous!”

There’s a black wide-brimmed hat on one of the shelves.

It looks like it wasn’t even made for a human being. Like it was a movie prop and some child’s imaginary best friend is supposed to wear that hat.

“Try it on!” she insists.

For the first time in over twenty years a hat fits me.

Mostly.

I look at myself in the mirror and I think I’m the spitting image of Tom Bombadil.

My wife very quickly realizes she hates the way it looks on me, but I refuse to get rid of it. It’s not every day you find a magic hat that only fits you.

I’m thirty-five and my aunt informs me via text that they’re having a family head measuring contest. She wants a pic of me so I can enter in absentia. Everyone agrees the victory would be hollow if I don’t enter.

My wife gets a tailor’s tape she uses for measuring clothing. She wraps it around my head above the brow-line.

It turns out my head is twenty-five and a half inches in circumference. A full inch larger than the next largest head in my family. Slavic and Irish bloodlines were never meant to mix, I think. It’s too powerful.

She offers to measure across my brow line, but I tell her I don’t even want to know.

I’m thirty-nine and being fitted for a CPAP machine due to sleep apnea. I snore badly and my sinuses never drain. On top of having the largest head at the mill, I also had to use the extra small ear plugs. I’m starting to take this seriously because I don’t want to get a heart attack or early dementia. My memory is already growing fuzzy, a laughable imitation of the razor of recall I once held in my youth. I can’t do that to my kids.

“I’m sorry, sir. This is the largest headgear we have.” The nurse says with a sigh. She’s been at this for an hour trying to get something that works.

“It’s my fault for not calling… a head,” I say.

She doesn’t get the joke.

“Seriously though, I should have taken this into account. This always happens. Whatever the product maximum is, that’s what I’ll need.”

We, as ever when it comes to my head, make do by improvising a way to hold the headgear in place with materials in the office.

“It’s okay,” I say, “I do operations so I know how hard it is to account for extreme outliers like this. It’s not anybody’s fault”

If my head was an IQ it would be Terence Tao.

It’s an imaginary future and three American bald eagles, representing the three branches of government, place a crown upon my head. The crown is made of fifty stars, each sharp as a razor, and if my head is too small the crown will crash down past my ears, cut open my neck, and kill me. Too large and I will be scalped. It was made this way long ago, by uh… Benjamin Franklin, to ward off pretenders.

At last, the crown settles on my head, held easily in place by my Irish head and Slavic brow line. There can be no doubt, now. The prophecy has been fulfilled. The crowd gasps, each person stunned for a moment before remembering to take a knee.

This is wrong.

“Rise, my people!” I shout, “By order of the King of America, I command you to kneel before no king! I order you to be a free people unto the end of eternity! Let each speak as their conscience demands without fear!”

The ghosts of the Founding Fathers appear and nod, like Star Wards Force projections, approvingly.

Later, everyone agrees this was some really great king shit to say.

It’s some other future, in my imagination, where an alien spaceship has crashed. Inside is a mystery. Approaching the ship causes an aperture to open in a roughly humanoid form but no one can get through. No one can see anything on the other side of the aperture but a soft white light. The opening has no ears and it seems to want some person with a disproportionately large head. It closes as soon as someone tries to twist and cheat the test.

I have no front-profile ear syndrome, a disease that I made up to describe what happened when one of my friends in college discovered when looking at pictures of me taken only from the front that I have no ears. They are hidden by my Slavic brows and my hair. The army has searched the entire internet to find me. I’m humanity’s last best hope. The one person in the world capable of entering the craft. They come to my house in a helicopter to bring me to the crash site.

My wife is crying, holding our children, asking when I’ll be back.

Nobody knows.

At the crash site, the ship immediately takes the shape of my body and I enter. Everyone outside is overawed by this moment, and I feel a sense of destiny as I explore the ship.

The aliens tell me some shit about how humanity is advancing and blah blah blah. Love is the answer. Giant head means we’re ready to move on to the next level. They have to take me somewhere to teach me how to responsibly have a giant head. They don’t give me time to say no and time dilation steals my life from me.

At the end of the movie, because I guess this was a movie, I do a voice over reading of a letter I wrote my family in case something like this happened. It’s very beautiful. Everyone cries.

I win the Oscar for best original screenplay. At the award ceremony I give a speech about the plight of Extremely Large Headed Americans (ELHA or “The Ha!”) and plug that one website that sells speciality hats that only people with really big heads know about. Oliver Platt gives me a standing ovation and weeps openly. I look at him, also crying, and tap the side of my temple knowingly.

At the after parties, I promise everyone that I won’t get a big head about any of this but I’m already plotting a redemption film after this all destroys my entire life —because I will definitely, never ever, even in my imagination, be the kind of person who could go to a party— called “It Went to my Head.”

It’s my everyday life and I tell people that having a big head doesn’t make you smarter, but they wouldn’t understand it because their head is too small to hold a thought that big. I share a knowing grin with the eye doctors when they have to adjust the machine that clamps onto my face. I chuckle that yes, I have seen that scene in So I Married an Axe Murderer. I politely cut a slice up the back of hats for groups I support so I can pretend it fits and take a nice photo.

I tell my wife a series of fantasies I had as a young man where Hollywood Hulk Hogan would try to headbutt me in the ring only to knock himself out. And I share the other daydreams where I was in an action television series where I traveled America and somehow solved everyone’s problems by having a giant head. There I’d be, headbutting unruly bikers and gang members into submission, and for a few episodes we would crossover with MacGyver and Quantum Leap. She only rolls her eyes and shakes her head and reminds me not to use the couch pillows.

And sometimes when my son is feeling like he needs a hug, but not wanting a hug, he likes to smoosh his forehead into mine as hard as he can and I laugh.

I guess, you have to learn how to enjoy who you are.