In the stagnant country of his little bedroom, on the island of his gigantic bed, with two curtains sewn together to clothe his body, Paul Mason decided that he didn't want to die. Three years had seeped in and out of the room, with his head at the same angles, the mass of him pooling outward, the banal sensation of the air-conditioning breathing onto his urine sores. By then Mason had been dubbed the world's fattest man, perhaps the most ridiculed person in the United Kingdom, trapped on a 10-foot mattress, everything he'd ever collected on shelves within arm's reach. He was also weary of his appetites; he no longer wanted to consume his daily intake of nearly 20,000 calories. He was exhausted of wondering what it might be like outside his house.
He wanted out of his skin, and skin was all that he'd become. He had given up on losing weight naturally. His breakfast was the meal of ten people—a pack of bacon and a pack of sausages and countless eggs, and his snacks were 40 bags of potato chips and 20 chocolate bars a day. An intercom system on his front door allowed restaurants to deliver food to his bedside, entering his little flat through the doors and hallways specially widened by England's National Health Service. He wore a little white towel draped over his privates. At his heaviest he'd weighed 20 pounds shy of 1,000.
He knew that bariatric surgery had a good chance of killing him, just as it could save him. The procedure, he understood, would shrink his stomach from the size of a melon to the size of an egg, bypass much of his small intestine, and give him a 50 percent chance at a new life. The other 50 percent meant a possible heart attack or blood clot, a burst vessel, catastrophic organ failure—a complication that would snuff him out before he even awoke from the operation. But without the surgery he was dead anyway.
And so on a freezing day in the winter of 2010, five paramedics in yellow suits wheeled Mason out of his home on the bed where he lived. Using a motorized winch, they hoisted his extra-wide reinforced stretcher into the back of the supersized ambulance that the Suffolk branch of the NHS had scoured all of Great Britain to find. (A helicopter, which had been considered, didn't have a door wide enough.)
The ambulance drove south, followed by photographers trying to snap pictures of the human being the tabloids had dubbed "Man Mountain." He watched the traffic out the back windows. How bizarre, he thought—he hadn't remembered that cars could go so fast.
The logistics of getting him into surgery were unprecedented. Engineers had realized before he arrived that the operating room probably wouldn't be sturdy enough to hold him. After consulting blueprints, they ultimately installed metal supports beneath the floor. Then doctors had to make a scary guess about how much anesthetic to pump into their patient. He needed much more than a normal person; the customary amount would merely dissolve in his body. But too much could mean death.
He was all too familiar with that precarious balance. In 2008, he had tried to commit suicide by taking enough codeine to kill two people, but he'd woken up the next morning with only a headache—his body had absorbed it all. Now he'd had a change of heart.His surgeon, Shaw Somers, was something of a celebrity in Britain. He had appeared on a TV show called Fat Doctor, and had operated on thousands of obese patients. When he first visited Mason to assess whether he could withstand the surgery, Somers stood over his bed. With his bare hands, he pushed around on the mound of Mason's torso, lifting the folds that caregivers had spent hours rubbing with medicinal cream, revealing buried, luminescent skin. When he was done, Somers asked Mason if he would be willing to die in order to lose weight. Mason began to bellow and sob. Yes, he told Somers. He was willing.
On the day of his surgery—after first spending two weeks on a milk diet in order to lose as much weight as possible beforehand—Mason lay on a new surgical bed, the largest available, though his skin still dangled off the side. Somers and his team set about performing a keyhole gastric bypass, which required sticking five ports into small incisions patterned out on Mason's abdomen. Blood trickled down his stomach from each hole where the ports went. Somers manipulated his surgical instruments through the ports, using shears and stitching instruments to cut around Mason's stomach fat. Mason was asleep, a breathing mask covering his face. Though most of his internal organs were blanketed in a thick yellow layer of fat, his heart looked amazingly healthy.
The surgery took two hours. Somers wore a surgical cap patterned with an apropos design: rolling dice.
He wasn't always so heavy; he wasn't always so big. But Mason was taller than everyone else in school. He remembers being nearly six feet tall when he was nine years old, tall and awkward and shy. When he walked to class the other boys would climb on his back and try and tackle him to the ground.
He found little comfort at home. He was terrified of his father, a martinet who spent years in the army and military police. Mason always finished the dinner his mum prepared—his father wouldn't let him up from the table if he didn't clean his plate.
Mason, his parents, his two sisters, and an aunt lived in a middle-class house in the town of Ipswich, about 75 miles northeast of London. There weren't enough beds in the house, so he shared one with his aunt. He says she would come home drunk and climb in the bed with her breath on his neck and touch him, and that lasted for three years, which is something he didn't tell anyone until he sought counseling in 2008 when he weighed well over 900 pounds.
There were some things, at least, that made him happy. Like riding his bicycle around Ipswich. He had a paper route in the mornings and attached long handlebars to his bike from which he would hang his satchel of papers. He played percussion in the Salvation Army Church band. He sat in his bedroom, drawing hot rod cars in pencil on construction paper that he would cut out and tape to his chair.
His two best childhood mates were Pum and Joan. They lived in an apple tree, and no one else could see them. Mason looked out at the tree from the big sash windows in his room that opened up toward the garden, so he could always keep an eye on his imaginary friends. "Pum and Joan were two girls," he told me when I began getting to know him last year. "Just two honest schoolgirls. Normal girls, who listened to me when I was sulking most of the time." He climbed the tree and sat up behind the branches with them for hours.
His father, Roy, was overweight and contracted diabetes at age 29. "I remember one Sunday mum cooking salad," Mason said. "Mum had prepared a salad for all of us with some cold meat. We weren't allowed to sit at the table until dad sat down. He sat down and looked at the plate, and said, 'What's this rabbit food?' She said, 'I thought we'd have a change.' He slammed his plate across the table and said, 'I want my roast. Now go in the kitchen and cook it.' She just started crying. He would force us to eat the same size plates as he did. He was quite barbaric."
Roy, when Mason was 15, made him go to the video rental store and ask the attendant for some of the movies in the back, in particular a VHS tape called Pussy Talk, which he made his son sit and watch with him while he laughed.
Mason graduated high school and worked at a warehouse unloading semi trucks with boxes of everything from peanuts to fertilizer. He worked briefly as a mechanic. He got a job at the Royal Mail when he was 18, delivering post around Ipswich. In 1982, when he was 21, he met a woman at a pub and fell in love for the first time. She was 39 and had three kids. They lived together for two years, he says, and when he thought they might get married, she told him over dinner that she didn't want to see him anymore, and left. He was in love, and then he was alone.
That's when he began to indulge in the comforts of food, which briefly lifted his spirits every time he tasted it. "It hit the back of your throat, and you've got that endorphin that's released in your brain and that makes you feel good. I began to be just like a drunk. I didn't realize what I was doing to myself."
In 1986, he weighed himself at work. He and some of the other guys used to get on the mail scale, for a laugh—he was 350 pounds. His waist, in a few years, had gone from 34 inches to 56, almost as though he hadn't been paying attention.
"It didn't mean nothing to me," Mason said. He just started buying bigger clothes.
The next year his father succumbed to diabetes, and Mason moved in with his mum—she was in a wheelchair with chronic arthritis. He began to eat even worse, ordering takeout three or four times a day. At work he became too big to deliver mail. Too big to ride his bike.
He moved to an inside job. There he was caught stealing money out of envelopes to pay for his burgeoning food intake. He was sent to Norwich prison for a year.
In prison he got friendly with the convicts who toiled in the kitchen.
"When we worked in the garden outside, they would give us tobacco as payment, and you would barter that, or exchange that for food, meat, cheese, what they would throw away in the kitchens," Mason told me. "And there's always seconds you could go up for, when you go for meals. And there's the canteen once a week—people send you money, you can go and buy things like candy."
When he was released from prison, he went back living with his mum. Her house was paid off, but he was so dedicated to eating that he eventually asked her to remortgage her home to feed his addiction. She never said a word to him about his weight. They ended up getting evicted. When the British tabloid The Sun wrote an article about him years later, it dubbed him The Man Who Ate His House.
The government moved Mason and his mum to a housing complex in 2000. In 2001, when he was 600 pounds, Mason developed a hernia and needed to go to the hospital. The Ipswich fire department had to smash through his bedroom with sledgehammers and move his bed out with a forklift. He stayed in that hospital for two years, and then was moved to an old folks' home, where he was not allowed to leave his room because of the liability he posed to the place if he fell.
Health care workers would sneak him food. He used to listen to the tenants play Bingo, and would shout out "Bingo!" to play along with them from his bed. When Mason was moved from the retirement home into a house that had been specially built for him, he was nearing 800 pounds and costing the NHS $100,000 a year for his rotating caregivers, for his food, for his four baths a day, for the medicinal creams, for the diapers.
"I had a waistline of eight feet," he said. "I was permanently lying down. I was six foot four, so my stomach was wider than I was high. I was in a bubble. I let all my dignity go; I just didn't care. I was focused on food. That one thing."
He was a pariah, used in the newspapers as an example of how people's tax dollars were being wasted in the UK. His own sisters were disgusted by what he'd become, he says, and stopped talking to him. And when his mother died, Mason was not just morbidly obese but also all by himself.
When Mason listed his reasons, his triggers, his causes, he did so matter-of-factly, in the tone of someone who was used to having explanations—for everyone who wanted to know how he had become so big. He had addressed the questions ad nauseam on talk shows, and would probably have to address the questions forever: How had he lost control of his body? How had he lost all the weight? And how does the same person possess the will to do both? And yet none of the answers he gave, he says, ever seemed to suffice. It was hard to get inside the head of someone who had lived inside his own head for so long, who stared at the ceiling for years on end in his superwide bed, alone with his thoughts—someone who didn't ever want to be in his head again.
By the time he agreed to the surgery, Mason had no one at all in his life. His caretakers were basically invisible, faces above him cycling in and out of his room every day, their words blurring together, maybe trading a joke, their hands cleaning his body for which he had no shame. He didn't care that they saw his genitals or explored the recesses. He often pretended his caretakers weren't even there.
He spent his entire disposable income on food. At one point he gained more than 150 pounds in six months. At his biggest, he weighed 980 pounds. He never even got a real night's sleep—his life was a series of catnaps from which he would awake to eat, 24 hours a day, the bacon, the candy bars, the fish and chips and kebobs. His body needed so much food to maintain itself that the caregivers who fed him felt conflicted just by doing what it took to help him subsist.
"Paul needed a lot of attention," said one of his caregivers, Maria Tyler, who was at Mason's bedside for years. "He was suffering from depression, and he was lonely. He had urine infections, nearly every day. Just turning him on his side put pressure on his heart and lungs and opened up any sore that was healing. Eventually he started wanting the surgery; he was trying as hard as he could to tell people he wanted to get his weight down."
After turning him down several times for gastric bypass, the government eventually decided that paying for it might ultimately be cheaper than covering his existing expenses. And that's when Mason met Dr. Somers.
"I was really struck by this fairly young man and his absolute helplessness because of his weight," Somers told me, on the phone from England. "His despair and psychological trauma—he didn't see any way out. The only thing that gave him comfort in life was food. It was a drug of abuse, freely available, heavily marketed. I think that's almost universal to people who get to that size. He's still the biggest person I've seen."
The first time Mason stood up after his surgery, he hadn't risen for so long—years, in fact—that the cartilage had dissolved in his knees, and his legs buckled. He had forgotten what it was like to just be in that position, how to deal with it, just as he'd forgotten what true companionship was, and how fast cars could go. The perspective overwhelmed him, the feeling of the walls coming in on him frightened him, distorted the sensation of being upright, making him cry out that he needed to sit back down. But he hadn't sat—he'd done his best, knees shaking, to try to stand there for as long as he could.
One day last summer, six years after Mason's gastric-bypass surgery, I went to see him. He was famous for his weight loss, thanks to two British documentaries that had aired on TLC, titled "The World's Fattest Man: Eating to Death" and "The World's Fattest Man: A Love Story." I wanted to know what his life was like now—nearly 700 pounds later.
He was renting one room on the bottom floor of a renovated retirement home with dingy carpet, on a street named Pleasant Street, an hour west of Boston in a Massachusetts town called Athol. I parked my rental car, and as I approached the building the front door opened and Mason, around 280 pounds and holding a cane, extended his hand.
He was 55, with a shaved head, new pale stubble just starting to show. He wore small black glasses that contrasted with his skin, which was blanched. He had on a Star Wars T-shirt, size XXXL. On his lower half he wore athletic shorts and a fanny pack that contained his cell phone charger, his glucose monitor, and a Ziploc bag of change. His cheekbones on the thin face stood in stark relief to the rest of him, all of him below the neck, which hung downward—the skin sagging from his arms and calves, the vestiges of his former life.
He had moved to the U.S. in 2014 to live with a woman he met on the Internet—his first relationship in 30 years. Perhaps predictably, it didn't last. And so now he lived by himself in one room with a Union Jack taped on the outside of his door. Inside was a single bed covered in clothes, a backpack, and a computer keyboard.
We listened to music as I sat among the detritus of everything he owned, stacked everywhere: his gigantic old crutches, clothes, his coffee pot, the TV he'd purchased at a discount because it was a display model without a remote. There was a bathroom on the side of the room, and he had a special plastic ring heightening the seat of the commode, so he wouldn't have to bend down too far to take a seat.
In the center of his bedroom was a broken recliner. Sometimes, when he couldn't sleep, he would stay up all night sitting in it, singing along to Adele, so loudly that the neighbor on the other side of the wall would bang on it and ask for him to stop.
He had a proper dietary routine now, he said. In his new life he was up at 5:30 a.m., made oatmeal for breakfast, ate a banana as a snack, had a salad or PB&J for lunch, and some pasta for dinner. But the weight had taken a toll on his body. He had arthritis in both knees. He rubbed Bengay on them to varying effect, and grunted whenever he lowered himself into a chair. He was anemic. He took warfarin for blood clots and furosemide for the fluid in his legs. He took anti-depressants. He took sleeping tablets. He already wore dentures—because he used to be too big to go to the dentist, he had yanked out his old teeth with pliers when he was bedridden. To numb the pain, he filled syringes he bought off eBay with morphine the doctors had prescribed him for joint pain, and injected it directly into his gums.
No longer bedridden, he had stories about what it was like to do things that anyone else would take for granted, what it was like to be born again onto a different country. For instance, now he could walk. He sometimes walked to a local well, and filled giant plastic jugs with fresh water that he brought back to his room. Other times he walked on a treadmill wearing a T-shirt that said "700 AND COUNTING." He lost himself in the woods of Massachusetts taking long walks, until his legs hurt—he merely wanted to use them.
He was fond of standing by the water of the local Quabbin Reservoir. Whereas some people might post a picture on social media simply to share the experience, Mason's posts took on a deeper resonance with captions like, "I'm so lucky to be enjoying these lovely places." It wasn't so special that he was there; it was that he could be there. That he had made it there.
His new life was full of wonder, and yet defined by all his old burdens. He still needed huge amounts of medical care. He didn't have a car. He didn't have a driver's license. He didn't have a social security number. He didn't have a job. He said that he received $197 a week in pension from the U.K., which is how he afforded his $125 a week rent and the money he spent on groceries from Walmart, where he zipped around on a scooter. When I asked him what he did with himself, how he spent his days, he said "Walmart." When I asked him how he got around, he said he waited on the bus sometimes, out there on the concrete stoop near the road, and other times he asked either neighbors or worshippers at his local Salvation Army church to take him where he needed to go. When I asked if he had friends, he demurred and then said, "Yeah, a couple."
In terms of hobbies, he liked taking pictures on his phone. He had a thing for flowers, pretty much any kind of flowers, and he liked to walk, when he felt up to it, from the house down the road looking for them in and around the woods. He had a table in the corner of his room where he kept paints and crayons and drawing pencils and he had books of blank designs that he would sit and letter and color and paint, which took up a lot of time. He went to church most every Sunday; the church van picked him up and brought him home.
He seemed excited that I could drive, so I asked him where he wanted to go, and he suggested a sports bar called Herrick's Tavern.
When we arrived he rested his cane against the windowsill and slid into the corner table. I ordered some mozzarella sticks for us to split, then winced at the insensitivity of the order. He only ate two of them. While we were sitting there, he finished half a salad and half a mushroom Swiss burger while leaving the top bun untouched ("I can't eat a whole burger anymore," he said), and told me the bariatric surgery that could've killed him did exactly what it was supposed to—it had shrunk his stomach to the point where it could no longer hold much food, forcing him to change his diet and, in turn, his life.
Of course, he still had proof of it all, the constant reminder of his skin pooling onto the wooden table. "These are my bat wings—my jumbo wings, my whale wings," he said, holding up his arms, and snickering.
From there we commenced three days of errands that I could tell were legitimate needs but also excuses for Mason to do what he wanted to do most, which was simply to be out of his apartment and in the world.
One day we passed a strip mall with a pizza parlor and a Dunkin' Donuts, and he waved for me to pull in. Paul ordered a breakfast croissant and one Boston cream, which he took one bite of and smiled. He made a satisfactory Mmmmm and put the rest in the little paper bag for later, a restraint he once felt incapable of.
He sat across from me at the table, his black socks pulled mid-knee above his black sneakers, drinking coffee with two sugars out of a Styrofoam cup, when I asked him about what life was like now, if this was really it. If this was how he thought freedom would be, losing all that weight, sitting right here with a stranger eating donuts in America.
"It's not simple to change your life," he told me, drinking his coffee. "There have been knockbacks along the way. I think a lot of people gave up on me: my sisters because I mortgaged mum's house for my food addiction. It was such a horrible life, really. Back then, I didn't want to ask for help. Now I look back on it, I don't know if I can relate to the person lying in the bed. To me, now, I'm a different person."
I drove him around as he sat in the car, his calves pressed against the automatic shift, him thinking about his life in great measured pauses while taking in the back roads of middle Massachusetts, talking about himself while I took him places he otherwise wouldn't be able to go.
We went to UMass hospital, an hour away in Worcester, where he could pick up his medications. He also asked go to a place called Connor's Pond, and I took him there, following behind him slowly after he got out of the car. "Perfect," he said, as he considered the quiet whoosh of the water over a concrete dam. He walked among the trees to the water's edge, leaning on his cane, pausing for long stretches to stare into the trees, his athletic shoes crunching in the gravel, snapping a picture of the water with his phone, the skin of his arms hanging in the sunlight.
He also needed to go to a doctor's appointment at a clinic, where he was scheduled to have the iron levels in his blood checked before his next skin-reduction surgery, which would take place in New York. A plastic surgeon there named Jennifer Capla had agreed to remove the excess skin on his arms, his second skin-reduction surgery pro bono.
"I think he knows that he is very fortunate to have people who are willing to give him his life back," Capla told me when I called her after my visit with Mason. "I do think there is a tendency for people who have managed to get themselves in this circumstance to feel sorry for themselves. I have to remind him, Paul. Think about where you are today. From where you were. You don't eat yourself into that type of oblivion without feeling sorry for yourself. You have been given so much—you need to appreciate it."
And yet appreciation came difficult to a man accustomed to being taken care of, a man who had spent years unable to do things for himself and then realized that others would do it all for him. Last year, Capla performed a complimentary nine-hour surgery to remove a mass of skin that hung around Mason's waist. She remembered that after the surgery he was in the hospital, for free, and had complained about the food. "People don't want to hear that part of the story," Capla said. "People want the wonderful story where he does something with his life. We're hoping he does."
He told me that he'd met somebody, but he didn't say much else. At the end of July, when I called him again, Mason sounded more cheerful than I'd ever heard him, and soon he was handing the phone to a woman named Leslie, who had been in the room with him, playing cards. When she first met him, she told me, she knew who he was. He had been at Athol Hospital for his arthritis, needing a ride home. She was there for a crisis evaluation about a shunt in her brain. She recognized him as the former world's fattest man, as he had been billed in those two documentaries she had seen on cable. They were both sitting in the waiting room.
She built up the nerve to ask him if he was who she thought he was. He said yes, and they began to talk about his weight—about what he felt like now, about what his life was like, and then he asked about her, and that's when she told him all she'd been through. She was 36 and had been in and out of the hospital, just like he had, with a rare brain disorder. She had spent much of her life alone, too sick to leave the house.
They told their stories in the waiting room, two lost souls, sharing and confessing. A couple days later, they ran into each other at Walmart. "Nuh-UH!" she had exclaimed, as he rode past her in a portable scooter, looking for a cellphone. "This is too coincidental," she said. She told him she wanted to get to know him better, and gave him her number.
Mason, when I talked to him, was clearly smitten—"We went to the movie the other day. It was great, it was brilliant, that was my first 3-D movie," he said. "It really was good. We went to the Cinemark in Hadley. We shared some popcorn. And diet soda. And we went for a meal afterward."She had an apartment, he told me, and she had invited him to hang out.
She visited his room, too, in the boarding house in Athol. They had dinner there, on paper plates—he cooked pasta—and she stayed much later than she intended. Watching his discount TV, they spent three hours in his room singing show tunes and Queen, Mason doing his best Freddie Mercury in a warbly British accent, her bent over laughing. "He just makes me smile," she told me. "I always leave, when I'm with him, happier."
She told me she appreciated that she didn't have to pretend to be well when she was around him. "I allow myself to feel sick when I feel sick. I was throwing up, and he helped me. You know, insistent that he do my dishes. A really good friend. I'm not used to that. I haven't allowed myself to be open to that. I think he mopped the floor at one point."
They talked about the possibility of moving in together; the apartment they were looking into was a two-bedroom.
When I asked him what it was like to have this relationship, he took awhile to respond and then said, "I can't put it into words." When I talked to Leslie, whose name has been changed for this article, she asked me if I understood what it was like to be alone; not just to be lonely but a deeper aloneness, a life only with yourself. It was the worst thing in the world.
Mason had forgotten so much when he was trapped in his bed and in his body; he had forgotten the smell of the air, and often yearned even to be able to stand in a parking lot in Ipswich. Even here in the U.S., where he had become an inspiration to people who wanted to lose weight and who wrote to him on Facebook—he'd motivated his own church pastor in Athol to lose more than 300 pounds—he'd spent years essentially solitary, alone in his little room with a bread-maker and his pencils and the vegetables that were a part of his healthy diet, alone sitting on the stoop waiting for the 4 o'clock bus, alone with his sagging skin.
In August, Mason had his second skin-reduction surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, pro bono at the hands of Capla and three other doctors, another risky procedure to remove the excess skin from his arms and some from his hip, twenty pounds' worth total, the doctors carefully cutting through his enlarged blood vessels in order to get rid of his self-described bat wings. While he was recuperating in a hotel room paid for by an anonymous benefactor, Leslie was not there, she told me, but she was worried about him, thinking about him, waiting for him to return to that tiny town in Massachusetts.
In December, Mason emailed me to say that he had recovered from surgery. The dangling skin of his arms was gone, but he was having trouble walking again; the arthritis in his knees was so vigilant that he would ultimately require another surgery, in another hospital, another milepost in this endless journey of self-reclamation, to replace his knees. He was writing me, he said, from his room in the boarding house, which he had moved back into. He was alone again. "My relationship with Leslie is finished," he said, and wouldn't say anything else. Leslie wouldn't return my texts, either.
I felt a deep sadness reading that email. I remembered what Leslie had said to me, only a month earlier, when she was one of the only friends in the world I could find willing to talk about Paul. She had said that when she thought of him, she didn't think of the man, years ago, on a bed and ready to die. She thought of him as the man she'd met in the hospital waiting room, the man on the scooter at Walmart, the man in the Facebook pictures standing in a bed of flowers, the man singing Billy Joel at 2 a.m. on a tiny bed in a one-room apartment, the man who had been alone forever—and then discovered that he didn't have to be alone anymore.
Justin Heckert previously wrote about a son injected with HIV by his father for GQ.
