‘Sometimes tennis comes first,’ I suggest.
‘Yeah yeah, and that’s when we get to really going at it,’ he says.
‘That’s when you get really fighting?’
‘Yeah, I get very, very argumentative when the tennis comes, when she puts the tennis before the business.’
‘Do you think the tennis is an escape from the breast business?’
‘Yeah yeah it’s an escape for her,’ he concedes.
He says this with a reluctance, rather than any sense of being pleased for her. Like an uncaring farmer allowing his livestock fresh straw not because that would be nice for them but because they’ll die if they don’t get it. And that would be inconvenient. We get out of the climate-controlled Benz and step into the climate-uncontrolled Vegas heat. It’s lunchtime, the point of the day at which the Nevada sun is at its most unforgiving. The tarmac on the road looks as hot as the day it was laid. Minka is resplendent in an all-white tennis outfit, with that shade of white only a very bleachy washing powder can manage – the kind a generation of babies in the Seventies were subjected to, creating a mini eczema epidemic at that time – ah happy days. In fact her outfit is so bright, pressed and consistently white, she could have been the darling of the Lawn Tennis Association. Though her chest would have the older members of the club spluttering into their English Breakfast tea.
She has invited me for a game. Now at this point, I am reminded that there are almost no things I am good enough at to compete in an actual game. When ‘playing tennis’, something I have probably done about eight times in my life, I normally request to my colleague that we play ‘Dolan rules’, which involves hitting the ball to each other very slowly, the aim being to keep the ball in play. Any obeying of the boundaries of the court would be against Dolan rules. So there’s no ‘in’ or ‘out’. The ball is literally inside the court or over the fence, and not in the court. Those are the rules. Serving is a no-no too. Especially with Minka – I would need to be in the car park to return one of her serves. It turns out, in my unqualified opinion, she’s extraordinarily good at tennis. She’s fast, powerful and accurate. She ignores my gentlemen’s agreement about the rules, and plays proper tennis at me. I say ‘fucking hell’ a lot.
But as with all matters Minka, it always comes back to the breasts – they are the two elephants in the room, as it were. And out there on court, the last thing you will notice is her backhand or volleying. Her untamed bosoms dart around the court quicker that she does. It’s actually painful to watch. It looks totally uncomfortable. It’s ironic that the one pastime about which she is truly passionate is the one which graphically illustrates the price she has paid – and pays – for her day job. If it wasn’t sad it would be amusing. But after having spent time with Minka, having eaten her chilled, crunchy apples, having played with her dogs and having asked her how much she paid for her fridge, I’ve grown very fond of her. She has a dry sense of humour – often asking me in hushed tones, ‘You like blow jobs, Mark?’ not because she’s being lewd, but she has discovered that kind of chatter makes me uncomfortable. She is intelligent, knowing, wise and funny. But at an earlier age, she met a man from another, more economically robust continent, with big ideas about their future together. A man with a big-breasts fascination, with connections in the pornographic world. So this woman morphed into his wet dream, both in the bedroom, and on the balance sheet. It’s now what they both do – and it’s hard to change that, especially when one of the parties is doggedly committed to that path, and when the other has a body which says there’s no turning back.
I had one last go at cornering Woody as to his role in this path Minka has taken.
‘I think the problem is, Woody, that people will think you particularly like big breasts. You have met this young woman in South Korea, you took her to America and they will see that you are very much the driving force in all these really big choices. What do you think of that?’ I ask.
‘She hasn’t done anything that she didn’t choose to do, OK?’ he counters.
‘But is she and also this lifestyle an embodiment of your personal fantasy?’
‘No.’
‘Even though you like the big boobies?’
‘She had big boobs before, they are just bigger now that’s all.’
‘Quite a bit bigger,’ I say, and it’s an understatement.
‘Which is fine. But she was plenty big before.’
Hmm. I’m not convinced.
This is as far as I feel I’m going to get with Woody. The best I can say about him is that he isn’t breaking any laws. But I do feel their relationship is unequal, and unbalanced, like Minka’s very body. I just hope at some point she does retire, because although material comfort is alluring to almost all of us, I feel that for Minka it’s reached the point at which the material stuff is the tail that wags the dog of their life. Before I leave to pack my bags in my tiny room in one of the Pyramids, I put this to her. Wouldn’t she give up the endless strain on her upper body and having to sit by the pool, naked, in her fifties, sixties and even seventies, being photographed for her website by her husband who’s telling her, ‘Close up. Smile. OK. Turn your butt around…’ Wouldn’t she rather be playing tennis?
‘When I am playing tennis I am not in the business. Sometime I wanna get out from, you know, I am telling you true, do I love it tennis? I love it. Just bottom line is money.’ She says, wiping a bead or two of sweat from her brow.
‘But wouldn’t you rather live in a small house and drive an old car and then only play tennis?’
‘No, no,’ she says.
I have my answer, but it’s not the one, for her sake, I really want to hear.
Taking one last glance at Minka’s iconic décolletage, my eyes are once again assaulted by the stretched, veiny horror of Minka’s chest. Brutal, barbaric, inhuman; none of these words overstates the case. The idea that anyone would consider going even a millimetre bigger than this is unthinkable. But these journeys are all about the unthinkable. Meet Sheyla, a young Brazilian television celebrity, who’s about to have an operation that will give her an extra litre and a half of size per breast on top of what Minka has. That’s five and a half litres per breast. And she’s almost as petite as Minka. What’s she thinking? Can I stop her? The flight’s booked; I’m on my way…
PART 2
The World’s Most Enhanced Woman Sheyla Hershey’s story
Well, if Minka is a living legend, and a symbol of a bygone era in terms of enhanced women, Brazilian model and media personality Sheyla Hershey is distinctly about the twenty-first century. Just twenty-three, she boasts a reality show in the US and can even more proudly boast she hasn’t so much as taken her top off. Not that the images I see online leave much to the imagination. Pouting glumly at the camera, she looks like a bleach-blonde equivalent of Posh Spice, but one whose figure suggests she’s enjoyed rather a few more steak dinners than Posh has. She is perhaps aping the Marilyn Monroe shape, but with two distinct additions that would have Norma Jean turning in her Hollywood grave. Sheyla lives in Houston, Texas from where she earns an apparently decent living modelling and making numerous TV appearances, including her own reality strand on CBS television. There are lots of references to her online as the Brazilian Jordan – God what a thought.
So why am I swelling my carbon footprint further, to meet this woman? She is, at this moment, flying to Brazil to have another breast augmentation. This, if it goes the way she wants it to go, will increase her breast size to 55 cubic centilitres per breast, which would be a world record. It’s too good an opportunity, in exploring this world of enhanced women and what motivates them, to meet a woman who is in the process of getting bigger, or indeed about to be the biggest. Who knows, I might even be able to talk her out of it…
Sheyla’s flying back to Brazil, to a beach