'Guinness' deserves record for tender moments

Christine Jacques, Special to the News

Published May 6, 2005 at midnight

Text size

More Books

Raise your hand if a child has ever announced to you breathlessly, "Didja know that the World's Longest Fingernail measured 25.5 inches, and belonged to a guy in India?" It looks like all hands are up. And is anyone surprised?

It's a fact: Kids love the Guinness Book of World Records. Many a road trip has been enlivened with speculations about why a rugby team would want to smash a piano, and then pass the remains through a 9-inch circle.

Steven Church is still fascinated with the Guinness Book of World Records, which he first discovered at a grammar school book fair. His new memoir, The Guinness Book of Me, celebrates that fact, alternating between the monumental moments of his own life, and his musings on Guinness record holders, such as tree eater Jay Gwaltney (who, for the Guinness record, ate an 11-foot-tall birch tree, branches, leaves and all, in 89 hours).

Church, who lives in Fort Colins and holds an MFA in fiction from Colorado State University, was attracted to The Guinness Book of World Records, he says, because he often felt as much a misfit as the people in its pages.

"I felt rather freakish as a child," he writes. "Years of sickness as a toddler made me thin and weak, but when I began to recover, I grew at a rapid pace, until at age ten I inhabited a 5'7", 160-pound frame that just seemed too large for my personality. I felt awkward, clumsy, and totally misfit for childhood. In Guinness I found people who had become heroes and freaks by both accident and intention, and I could tell that nobody really knew what to make of them either. They didn't fit into easy categories of understanding."

Church veers between wanting to be famous, like Shridhar Chillal (World's Longest Fingernails), or normal like his younger brother Matt.

Ironically, standard-issue Matt is larger than life. He triumphs in BMX bike races, wins state band contests, and hopscotches the beams of a four-story building under construction. Church imagines that they could be the Flying Church Brothers, a motorcycle stunt team like Billy and Benny McCrary, who also rank as the World's Heaviest Twins.

But Matt ends up holding a record in the Church family for a shockingly different reason. "Matt was the first to die," Church announces bluntly.

The moment of Matt's fatal car crash, at age 18, hits the reader like a bucket of cold water, and Church's grief for his brother infuses the Guinness Book of Me with a stark and unmistakable sadness. Matt's death is not a GBWR event, but still ranks as one of the author's worst moments, a Church world event.

But there are lighter moments, too. Church frames Matt's death in another memory of his brother, under the heading "Danger Boys, World's Greatest. "

In this vignette, the boys' father tows his offspring across a frozen field in a saucer sled tied to his pickup. He reaches speeds that render riders airborne.

This is the sort of thing that qualifies for the Darwin Awards, if it goes wrong. But for Church, there's no question why anyone would want to do such a thing: "I will ride the sled because I want to, because it's expected of me, because I trust my father and because I want to live like my brother does, like Dad taught us," he writes.

If Church sounds macho, don't be misled. The author also finds the words to express those pesky feelings that men allegedly don't express. Grief is a constant theme. So is regret.

Church is sorry that he bullied a classmate to the point of nightmares. He's sorry he frightened a teacher with blistering diatribes in his journal, when she broke her promise not to read it.

He anguishes over hurting his son once while playing. "I wanted to pin a badge to his chest that read 'Hello, my Dad was just being a father and playing with me and I accidentally got hurt.'"

And he realizes how his own father must have felt during Church's many trips to the emergency room. To his credit, though, he doesn't make these moments a martyr to his own ego or to his father's. Rather, he maintains, "these things happen. Children get wounded. They develop scar tissue. It gets easier."

The words are simple, yet effective; Guinness becomes an intimate book without the smarm.

Church thinks his own scars may be his only ticket to a Guinness World Record. He has more than the usual number, enumerated in the chapter titled "Scars, Most on Right Side of the Body." The most vivid mark is on his face, a souvenir of a mad bicycle ride down a driveway. His cheek was torn open by the garage door track and exposed his cheekbone. Sixteen stitches and 18 years later, the jagged scar prompts one observer to say "Wow, you've lived all that time looking like a pirate."

The remark "wouldn't be funny if it didn't hurt just a little bit," Church says. "Could I be that big, bad and scary?"

Not as big, bad and scary as some of the faces in the Guinness Book of World Records, which is exactly why Church loves the book. If he were a turtle, Guinness would be his shell - protecting him from feeling completely alone.

"I turn to my Guinness friends, I turn to stories, hoping that the right kind will set me free," he says.

As for the rest of us, we could do worse than turn to The Guinness Book of Me.

The Guinness Book of Me

• By Steven Church. Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $22.

• Grade: A-

Christine Jacques is a freelance writer living in Golden.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News