Wesley Warren Jr., last year
Fame must be a little like meth.
People will do anything for another hit. Or not do anything, as the case may be.
Take, for example, the poor soul in Las Vegas who now is so hooked on his notoriety that he's turned down the offer of a free million-dollar surgery to right-size the source of that notoriety -- his person-sized testicles.
The man has to go through life wearing enormous hoodies as if they were pants, because that's the only thing into which he can stuff his junk. He also has to go through life peeing on himself because . . . well, he can't find it buried deep within all that.
Then there's all the stuff you can't do when you have a 100-pound scrotum.
So, whatever the risks -- and there are a couple -- you'd think accepting the offer of free surgery to fix what ails you would be a no-brainer. Unless accepting the offer from the Dr. Oz show meant it got exclusive rights to your story.
And what if getting rid of 99 percent of your enormous testicles -- getting to the point where people never mind your bollocks -- meant that people would never mind you, either?
Tosh.0
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Wesley Warren Jr., this month on Tosh.O . . . in the video
I can show. (Skip to 4:45 in the video.) In the other clip,
Warren drops hoodie and shows "it."
The late President Lyndon Johnson used to relish doing in-person interviews with reporters while moving his bowels. Wesley Warren Jr., he of the 100-pound scrotum, loved being interviewed last week while sprawled bare-assed across his bed.I WONDER whether he charts its growth with pencil marks on the doorjamb, just like the proud parent of a similarly sized child.
Yet Warren, unlike Johnson, swears he was "just being comfortable," that he wasn't deriving a twisted sense of power from watching a journalist try to act like nothing is strange as he is deliberately cast into an awkward situation.
"Write that I have clean butt cheeks," Warren said, laughing in a follow-up phone interview.
Uninspected butt cheeks aside, Warren laughed often as we talked in his small Las Vegas apartment, and he said his scrotum, partially encased in a towel, "grew another three inches."
But celebrity -- even the strangest manifestation of it -- is a narcotic, and you got to get that next fix. Ordinary junkies and meth heads do mundane things in the name of getting high, like stealing from family or selling their bodies to strangers.
Fame addicts do other things. Ultimately, they develop a Stockholm syndrome kind of relationship with the genesis of their notoriety, the thing that's holding them hostage.
No debasement is too much, no testicle joke too demeaning if it prolongs the buzz. Even if the world is laughing at you instead of crying with you, the world still is acknowledging that you exist.
Oh, joy.
A "Tosh.0" video also showed a skateboarder appearing to get knocked down when he ran into Warren's scrotum.TOO LATE. Warren died when he answered that first phone call from a Hollywood TV producer.
"It was fun going to Los Angeles in the big van they sent for me," Warren said, grinning.
The Wesley Warren of today does not act like the somber Wesley Warren I interviewed last fall.
Rather than on the edge of tears, he's seemingly enjoying his celebrity. He reminds you he'll soon appear on The Learning Channel and that Fire Cracker Films of Great Britain signed him to a contract for a documentary.
An indication that Warren's interest in celebrity could interfere with repairing his condition seemed to arise soon after my first story appeared. Producers from "The Dr. Oz Show" called to say Dr. Mehmet Oz had read the piece and would find the best surgeons possible to help Warren at no cost to him.
Yet Warren balked. While fearful he might die on the operating table during the highly complicated surgery, he also said he did not like the fact that Dr. Oz wanted to confine all interviews to his show.
"Howard Stern (the radio shock jock) wants me on his show," he said.
But Warren grows angry if anyone suggests he wants the spotlight more than the corrective knife.
"Who would want to live like this?" he said. "I just don't want to die during the operation."
The Man With the Mammoth Balls, who's filling the late Wesley Warren Jr.'s upside down XXXL hoodie, is going to ride his bollocks as far as they'll carry him. Maybe even to The Howard Stern Show.
Again.
In today's America, it's always better to be The Man With the Mammoth Balls than to be nobody at all.