Do You Mind if I Put My Hand on it?: Journeys into the Worlds of the Weird

‘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 town called Villa Bella on the north-east coast of Brazil, where her sister lives. I fly from Vegas to Houston and we then meet up and fly together to Brazil. I was quite anxious about whether she would actually catch the flight, as up until now, on the phone and on email, she’s been mercurial to say the least. But something told me, particularly after looking at her website (which is a masterclass in self-promotion), that this was another media appearance she wasn’t going to miss.

I wander around Houston Airport, dazed by a heady mix of jetlag and weak American lager. And there she is, standing outside a Hudson News, looking lost. And glamorous. She’s wearing what looks like a woollen bra, in tartan, and a matching miniskirt approximately one centimetre in length. All the clothes look incredibly tiny. In keeping with the Mrs Beckham theme, it looks like she has stolen one of Posh’s outfits and forgotten she is a size 12, not a size 6. Her skin is caked in a glutinous light-brown make-up/fake tan. She looks like her entire body has been dipped in a vat of the caramel bit of a Cadbury’s Caramel. Her hair is blonde and brittle; I’d suggest it’s been so long since it was the colour God intended that now even God can’t remember what colour it was supposed to be. She’s wearing heels that approximate in height to all the Harry Potter books piled on top of each other, and her ability to stand for more than five seconds in them involves a similarly impressive amount of wizardry. And her breasts…

Ah yes. Her breasts. Why we’re here. Well, they are very large. But they are not on the Minka scale. Instead she looks like a sexually frustrated cartoonist’s impression of a woman. Like a supersized Jessica Rabbit crossed with a Russ Meyer actress, and a bit of Babs Windsor thrown in for good measure. And there is something comical looking about this lady and it’s not just her top-heavy profile. She looks more like a character than a real person. She is a sort of walking human caricature. And I’m about to get on an airplane with her. Fortunately we are allocated seats at separate ends of the plane, allowing me to keep my powder dry in terms of questions and avoiding a syndrome the great Les Dawson used to refer to as ‘having the fight before you get in the ring’. I sip my Caffeine Free Diet Coke, thus experiencing no physical emotion whatsoever and wait for the hours to pass, only to be occasionally stirred by the sight of the inflated, tartan-clad blonde making her way to the loo. In the context of this flight, she is a vision, an airbrushed, bouncing bombshell, clashing wildly with the grey plastic backdrop of this American Airlines 737 and its jaded passengers.

We arrive in Brazil, and she seems to perk up once she strides into the airport. Every footstep of her faux Jimmy Choos can be heard for miles. The shrill clatter of her heels announces that Sheyla’s coming home. She is speaking at double speed, perspiring slightly, and is fidgety. It feels like she is morphing into her public persona and is somehow preparing to put on a show. As we walk through the sliding doors into the public part of the airport, there is the sound of shrieking and general excitement. They are calling out her name. Flashguns on cameras are splashing light onto both of us, and I’m feeling like a spare part, knowing they’re not here for me, but I’m there anyway – a feeling Denis Thatcher undoubtedly had for about three decades. There are perhaps thirty people gathered, with all permutations of camera equipment with which to capture the moment. Bizarrely, in the mêlée, a woman rushes up to me and gives me a hug! Now this is my first time in Brazil, so perhaps this is what happens. Or maybe she has never seen someone quite so tall, thin and pale in her country before, and feels the need to touch me to see if I’m real. With a little help from Sheyla as interpreter, it transpires that Balls of Steel – a late-night TV comedy show I presented for Channel 4, is shown in Brazil. This is a surreal interruption to an otherwise surreal arrival. Luckily Balls of Steel appears not to be a ratings monster here, as, apart from some odd looks and whispering in an elevator later that day, that’s the last time my global fame is to interrupt this journey.

There are placards with Sheyla’s name scrawled across them, being held aloft. Quite poorly scrawled. It always amazes me that people who make placards, in all walks of life, couldn’t have a better sense of production value. Be it striking workers, protesting students or celebrating football fans, I’m always wondering whatever happened to good quality marker pens, and fabric suited to the painting materials being deployed. And couldn’t someone decide in advance what the size and style of the font will be? And surely only the person in the group with the greatest artistic skill and command of the English language should be allowed anywhere near the paint itself. I don’t think this is unreasonable.

And speaking of paint, these placards for Sheyla lack the whiff of authenticity. And as there are lingering, emotional hugs all round with her ‘fans’, it starts to look more like a reunion of family and friends, than the arrival home of a Jordan-like icon. Even the most rabidly ambitious starlet doesn’t kiss fans on eight different parts of their face. Interrupting the adulation for a second, I ask, ‘So Sheyla, how do they know that you are here?’

‘Ah well, like, obviously, I talk with the local news about what’s going to—’

‘You give them a little tip off?’

‘Yeah’, she says.

Oh, well that answers that. I’m used, in these journeys, to dealing with people who are as evasive as they are unique. Not Sheyla. It seems it’s not just her tights that are transparent. We leave the media scrum (5 per cent local media, 95 per cent uncles and aunties), we jump into a waiting taxi and head to her sister’s place, where I’ve been promised a Brazilian barbeque, which sounds like a violent variation on the Brazilian wax, but which I’m hoping is a meal. Villa Bella is a seaside town not in the mould of what you’d expect from the Brazilian coastline. Not a particularly eye-catching beach, no soft drinks concessions, no sun umbrellas, no six-pack-clad dudes working out on the sand and no local girls showing off their legendary South American derrieres. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of beachfront entertainment either – it seems to be one of those seaside towns which is more town than seaside. It’s Hove to Brighton’s Copacabana.

We drive through a nexus of fairly rundown streets, featuring motor parts shops and local eateries that would take some personal courage to enter; the drooling Rottweiler at the entrance being the most welcoming member of staff. The town is ramshackle, scruffy and a bit untidy, but it has a certain ugly duckling charm. And with young kids happily playing football on the street – no doubt preparing to thrash England at the 2030 World Cup – and with mums hanging their washing on lines while exchanging the latest gossip, this place does feel like a community and there’s a warmth in not only the temperature. We reach her sister’s house. It is a tired-looking, small, white building, accessed via a narrow iron door and up a flight of stairs. The myriad gates, spikes and bars on the windows in this town betray the darker side of Brazilian life.

Sheyla rings the doorbell. Her sister answers and greets her with a hug. She and Sheyla are very alike, but she looks altogether more real and sensible. Siblings are often a useful way of gauging just how much plastic surgery someone has had, as they are by definition a control in the experiment – a walking ‘before’ photograph. Her sister’s softly weathered face suggests that all her time is taken up with a job, being a mother and being a wife. A glance at Sheyla’s face doesn’t tell you anything, because like the rest of her, it isn’t hers. These are two siblings that have demonstrably taken different paths in life.

I’m invited to sit and enjoy a coffee from a flask. I’m told the coffee is a fine-ground variety of Brazil’s finest, boiled and left to settle, after which sugar is added. Flying across the Americas and changing various time zones has left my head feeling like it left my body weeks ago, so the coffee is a welcome elixir. I needn’t have bothered – Sheyla is a walking stimulant. We’ve been in the house for five minutes and she strides back into the living room, wearing a different, dazzling outfit. I am to learn that she changes outfits more often than Beyonce at an awards ceremony. She is clutching a variety of medicinal-looking empty plastic sacks and tubes. These are her implants. The secrets of her success, the tools of her trade. And they look nearly as awful inside someone as out. She has saline implants – essentially salt-water-filled plastic bags. There is a little valve in each implant which a tube is inserted into, through which the solution can be squeezed, allowing you to inflate to a degree you are comfortable with. Sheyla is comfortable with an uncomfortable amount. Currently her breasts contain 4000 centilitres of fluid per breast. But this isn’t enough, apparently.

‘So if you have these implants filled up to the brim, how big will that make you per breast?’ I ask.

Sheyla, matter of fact, says, ‘I will be 5,500 per breast.’

‘Will that make you the holder of the title, the number one biggest implants in the world?’

‘Yeah, if I fill 5,500 each one that will make me the large implants in the world.’

‘Really? Number one?’

‘Number one of the whole entire world,’ she says, like a wide-eyed contestant in a beauty pageant. Her English is pretty good, but not perfect and has some idiosyncrasies, including making her sound quite childlike.

‘And how would that make you feel to be number one?’

‘Yeah I always wanna be remembered so every time the people remember about breast implants, they got to remember of me.’

‘Is that important to you, that you go down in history, that you will have a legacy?’

‘Yeah. I did this for my ego, to be happy, to be remember, so that in only a little bit more time, I will be ready to stop. But I wanna keep my size for at least a year or two, because I want to have fun with that, I wanna have a lot of fun with my breasts,’ she declares bouncily.

I’m not sure what it means exactly. But it’s illustrative of the fact that Sheyla comes across as implicitly comical, and speaks, I think unintentionally, in comical sound-bites. At regular intervals, she refers to her adoration of Dolly Parton, which seems appropriate, as there is obviously something quite bouncy, comical and not entirely real about our Dolly either. But because of her heavy Brazilian accent she tends to chop the ends off quite a few words, and regularly announces, often with a tear in her eye, ‘I just love Dolly Part. I want to be Dolly Part. Dolly Part is so beautiful and I want to be her.’

‘So you are going to be a world record breaker for a year or two, make a bit of money?’ I ask.

‘Yeah.’

This is an unconvincing response. She is clearly not lacking business nous but something tells me fame is the bigger prize. Though somewhat manufactured, her airport arrival felt like the kind of thing she lives for. Already I have the sense that while Minka’s large breasts were solely about making money and indulging her husband sexually, Sheyla’s breasts seem to be about her, and the persona she’s constructed. We move upstairs for the long-promised barbeque. We eat on the top floor which has a roof and a floor, but no outer walls. Quite a feat of engineering, though not intentional I think. It looks like a part of the house which hubby hasn’t had enough bank holidays to complete, much to his wife’s chagrin. Every man has a bit of his home he hasn’t finished. It’s worn by all of us as a badge of pride. This man’s unfinished bit is an entire storey of the building – more power to his elbow.

The open nature of this top floor provides a vantage point over the whole city, which is bigger from on high that it looks in the back of a Fiat Punto taxi. The barbeque delivers. It’s decidedly un-British – not a burnt Taste The Difference sausage in sight. Just soft, sumptuous meat that would have the most ardent vegetarians reconsidering their position. A variety of just bloody enough lamb and beef, alongside some freshly broiled ham expertly grilled by a family friend. He has the air of someone who is inexplicably always there, even though there isn’t really a reason for him to be there, rather like a badly written sitcom character. There were a flurry of Seventies sitcoms that seemed to feature a policeman sitting at the table, drinking tea. For no apparent reason. But this particular gentleman at Sheyla’s sister’s place is a bone fide alpha male and he strikes me as someone it would be nice to have around, in any house, at any time. A man who understands how to cook dead animal, who knows how to hang a hook that will stay up and how to recalibrate the engine on a Mark 4 Volkswagon Golf. A proper, actual, man man. Now you’re talking.

As we delve into this protein fest, Sheyla noticeably strains with her back.

‘Do you ever get a bad back?’ I ask.

‘Yeah my back pain. The pain is a lot. Before never hurt, but now they hurt. So when I go to a restaurant like now I just rest my boobs on the table.’

I pull a face of surprise. ‘Really?’

At which point there plays out one of those moments that I will take to my grave. Like shaking hands with the smallest man on Earth, or hugging someone called Dennis who has turned himself into a cat, it’s pretty amazing. I am watching a woman rest her breasts on the table in order to rest her back. It’s an utterly bizarre act of comedy, and practicality. And it raises the key themes so far in my encounter with Sheyla – hilarity, and a sense of – what the hell are you doing to yourself? There was a hardiness about Minka, a resolve that made her look like a pro when it came to carrying her accessories around. It’s just business. With Sheyla, the whole enterprise feels more impulsive and emotional and I’m not sure that she, or her back, will take the strain for long.

After eating almost an entire farmyard’s worth of barbequed animal, it is time to hit the mall, and time for part two of the Sheyla show. She insists on bringing her make-up artist and close friend, a detail which indicates what this visit will entail, and she doesn’t disappoint. At the entrance to the mall a small crowd gather, taking pics and staring. After many minutes, we enter the shopping centre itself and Sheyla tends to her fame the way you are supposed to tend to a log fire – enjoy the heat when it’s roaring, and stoke it up a bit when it goes down. In those brief moments when nobody is taking an interest, Sheyla shrieks, giggles and if all that fails, wiggles her breasts.

Let’s be clear about this – there’s no irony being deployed. No Babs Windsor tongue firmly in cheek, with a wink to the knowing audience. Sheyla is just simply wiggling her breasts so people will look at her. End of, as an indigenous Londoner would say. Look at me, I’m wiggling my breasts. Look! Wiggle wiggle wiggle! It goes without saying, it’s unedifying, but I guess this is what you do if you have no discernible skill and if fame is the game. Sheyla has made herself unique in a way nature failed to do. Paul McCartney was born with the power of melody, Picasso the power of the paintbrush and Shakespeare was good at plays. With no such obvious gifts, or the education or opportunities to realise any talents lying dormant in her, what’s a girl who wants to be a star to do?

Amid the mostly positive public reaction to Sheyla’s arrival, there is a black sheep in the adoring family. A middle-aged woman utters some remark about her being ugly. This woman is in a group of one saying it, but isn’t there a silent majority, even the people snapping Sheyla on their mobiles, who also think that what she has become is ugly? Because let’s be honest – it is – isn’t it? The passing party-pooper is surely just the less deceived in this whole affair, and the more honest of her fellow shoppers. Sheyla’s reaction to the heckle is characteristically ebullient.

‘What do you think about that?’ I say. ‘She called you ugly. That’s not very nice is it?’

‘She is old, she is old, she is unfashionable.’ I’m chuckling at Sheyla’s brass. It’s a great line. Even if it doesn’t actually answer the question. I push the issue.

‘It’s got to hurt a little bit, hasn’t it?’

She pushes her head back haughtily. ‘Just make me laugh,’ she says. Reaching for another, more on-message passer-by, she says, ‘Look, she say I am beautiful.’

‘Oh well, that’s better isn’t it,’ I say. ‘You love this, don’t you, you know, you are running after people and helping them with the camera and showing yourself off.’

‘Yes, you know, because I like the attention, it’s good for me.’

Is attention really good for anyone? I personally think you’re damned if you don’t get it, but double damned if you do. This is a problem Sheyla seems to desperately want. She suddenly grabs my arm and frogmarches me to our next photo opportunity, at a swimwear shop. I’m beginning to eel somewhat compromised at this point. My interviewee is driving this whole thing. Should I be a bit worried, um, you know, journalistically? I have travelled many thousands of miles, I have a limited amount of time with my subject, and I need to understand why she has made these choices in her life. But this seems unlikely to happen because when I turn my back for three seconds, I discover she has squeezed into a bikini designed for a five-year-old and is dancing around inside the shop, declaring, ‘I like my boobies. And I love Dolly Part.’