Big Chooch Diary & Memoir Comics #4

Spring 2022

Memoir & Diary Comics

by Brian. J Kelley

No. 4

Big Chooch

To the Reader, A childhood friend shared that when he takes international clients around Philadelphia he has a hard time detailing just what it’s like to grow up here. “It’s just different,” he emailed.

There’s an intimacy in the shared experiences of city kids. My friends and I came from ancestors who ground their way through immigration, then the Depression and multiple wars. Our families were blue collar laborers who got their kids an education who then had my generation...we were given more than anyone.

Surrounded by people willing to get dirty, generous souls and hustlers, those willing to do a little more, those willing to take a shot...every one pushing one another to take a swing.

Our childhood was the twilight of the large, extended family living and eating together.

Family meals still happened, sure, but my friends and I shared in the steady, slow exodus of family moving from the neighborhood to the Jersey suburbs and the Jersey shore.

The daily, homemade food we grew up with was so good. I ate tomato & red onions with a little vinegar and oil as a salad one day and then as a sandwich on toast the next. We had handmade pasta, meatballs, apple pie, cheesecake, Italian wedding soup....

But as our family meals dwindled, so did all of that good food.

My friends and I were rough around the edges, even the book smart ones and we became surrogate family for another> Daily over roast pork sandwiches, beer and wine, guys swapped auto parts, pot, cartons of cigarettes, concert tickets, football pools, street lottery tickets, car radios and rims cut from cars.

So, when I step back & look at the comics that came out of me this time, I see the city. I see its influence on me. I see my baby steps in leaving the city. And I see the parts that will never leave and that I could never leave behind.

Big Chooch Comics #4; April, 2022.

Published by Brian J. Kelley. P.O. Box 193, Kemblesville, PA 19347. Write to me snail mail or email at bjk925@gmail.com.

Visit me on IG bjk925 or on Twitter @RealBrianKelley. ©2022 Brian J. Kelley.

ISSN 2769-3198

MEMORY from my mom

Digging through family photographs, I found this photograph of my grandfather.

He stands with a friend in front of poster of wrestler Maurice Tillet--the man who many claim as the inspiration behind Shrek. In 2014, After researching Tillet, I wrote a poem inspired by MY grandfather’s photograph.

Maurice Tillet

by Brian Kelley

Frenchmen can be happy about everything but sad only for love.

Born to French parents, a freak, in the Russian Urals, a physical question mark, Maurice Tillet, speaker of five languages, laughed at by children who called him La Singe, the monkey, laughed at by audiences who know him as Shrek.

Ashamed, sadness overwhelmed him, so he ran to the sea to reinvent his life on the water, where sailors, too frightened by sea monsters, torpedos, kamizee pilots, do not care what you are.

Suffering from the incurable acromegaly, no sailors spoke to the face which never smiled, no sailor argued with Tillet, gunner on a French destroyer, honorably discharged, and hired to frighten children away from Paris movie houses.

Discovered by an American promoter chasing the money, the French Angel, with hands as big as plates, hid from daylight in hotel rooms and movie theaters, for wandering the streets caused riots and fainting women, because his bones thickened and misshaped a good man into the grotesque.

Begging to return and fight for France, when Hitler marched through mountains, the Ugliest Man in the World, rejected by the U.S. Navy, rejected by his homeland, would never fight for either.

Fearing a woman would see his face, never know him, and only desire his money, The Angel, never to marry, turned over large sums to the French Red Cross, visited VA hospitals, filled a library in San Francisco and read every book.

Harassed by a U.S. senator, to fight a U.S. senator for the world title, to prove that wrestling was not fake, not a sham, not an organized racket, The Angel turned the other cheek.

Forced to strip in the ring to share his horrible misfortune, to become a misshapen specimen of manhood, Tillet earned $100,000 in one year to be laughed at, and shamed.

Mocked by grown men escorting women, Tillet made his peace with it, found happiness in life, speaking and eating painfully slow, supporting twenty French war orphans, for their entire lives, and living his own full life, by taking what he was given, and turning it into a positive.

Remembered, by those who knew him, by those who saw beyond the skin, as a warm, friendly man, with intellect and compassion.

Remembered, by those who knew him, by those who saw beyond the skin, as one of those rare souls you no longer remember because of appearance.

Pretty much sums up my daily attitude about my melanoma.

Brian Kelley is a middle school teacher and now a cartoonist. He is the author of the autobiographical comics series “Big Chooch Comics” and his work has most recently appeared online at “Hobart: another literary journal” and more recently at the website Graphic Medicine (graphicmedicine.org). He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania with his wife Karla and a menagerie of dogs and cats.