Some say Max Heck was, in his day, on certain occasions, quite possibly the biggest asshole that ever lived. ("Biggest" meaning two-fold: 1. He is quite the asshole. 2. He is 6" tall with an average weight around 445 lbs.) Max was always big (birth weight 18 lbs), but not really always an asshole. (Though his petite mother, Louise Sumpter-Heck, might've said different had she survived her painful struggle in the back seat of a traffic-halted taxi on the way to the hospital to pass the enormous, two-week late baby.) Bigger than life since birth, that Max Heck.

Society and environment could easily be blamed for much of Max's asshole tendencies and demeanor. Call an 8-year-old kid "fat" enough, and a little attitude can't help but develop in him, fat or not. Still, that was no excuse for him to set that stray kitty cat on fire at the age of 12. He was mad at Billy Thompson from two houses down for saying he looked like a beached whale and should "Go back in the ocean." The poor cat had nothing to do with it. (Asshole.) And he had little real cause to piss in the old man's chili at his first job as one of many 16-year-olds making minimum wage at a fast food joint. Meanwhile, the abundance of free, greasy morsels only added to his already gargantuan weight as well as bestowed upon him the additional misery of bad acne (scars of which would never go away on his round, gelatinous, cratered moon face). The kitty flaming and chili pissing were but two examples of Max Heck's misguided outlets for relieving his anger over the type of life frustrations everyone goes through. The old man maybe winced at Max's rotund form, but he didn't say anything and certainly didn't deserve urine in his 99-cent paper cup of chili.

Some say Max's dad should've been stricter with him, but poor Kenny Heck was so devastated by his young, tiny wife's death giving birth to that monstrosity, that beast of a son he never really wanted. As he pleaded with her to "push" in the sticky back seat of the awful taxi, he knew he'd never be a good dad. And when the love of his life died bringing an unwanted child into the world, part of Kenny just shut down. He became the extremely complacent and constantly distracted kind of depressed that often results in asshole kids when in present in a parent or supposed caregiver. A flaming cat would barely register in his grief and medication-induced malaise. The truth is, Kenny sometimes called his boy "Mack" because he honestly couldn't remember his name. Max never corrected him, just angrily tore the leg off of another grasshopper or dropped chocolate Ex-Lax in some geriatric floozy's milkshake. Displaced aggression? Few would have cause to argue.

Max's only friend... well, if only Max had even been lucky enough to have an "only friend." His life isn't that kind of story. True, that usually happens in these kinds of sad sack sob stories of assholes; there's always someone to help the asshole find a bit of redemption or a smidgen of humanity... a spark of hope resulting from the kindness of another. But Max's life wouldn't even have that, poor overweight bastard. He was a loner. Not content to be alone, but, hey, fuck everyone else. Especially the kids who called him "lard butt" and "Jabba the Hut." (In 1983 an unsigned letter was written to George Lucas saying, "Thanks a lot for Jabba the Hut, George!" after the release of Return of the Jedi. Lucas believed it to be from a gracious fan, not knowing that the note dripped with the irony of an obese 12-year-old boy with yet another taunt added to his list thanks to that movie. Nor did the filmmaker guess that it'd been rubbed all over some poison ivy, giving Lucas the second worse skin rash of his life.)

No one would've been surprised if Max had ended up going on a killing spree or even off'd himself, but he had little interest in either. He figured he'd make everyone he had the misfortune of crossing paths with pay for his hell of a life in little, maddening ways. He'd continue doing wretched things behind people's backs (like throwing red fabric into random people's white loads at the Laundromat every once in a while or keying the occasional car on the walk to his miserable "grown up" job at the grocery store, having quit his fast food grilling gig at the age of eighteen when controversy struck as some sixteen-year-old new hire was promoted above him to cashier, while he languished on the grill) until somehow it'd all end.

His eating was usually due not to hunger but to a deeply ingrained self-loathing he'd had since birth. (His mother's death weighed heavily in the pre-memory he couldn't exactly recall but always felt... Perhaps even further back, some residual guilt lingered all his life over beating those other probably more pleasantly sized sperm to his mom's poor egg). Salty, sweet, and fried flavors as well as a hatred of all he was drove him to shovel that food in his mouth -- not hunger. An avid overeater, Max ballooned to 505 lbs before his bitter, broken-from-birth heart gave out at the young for most, ancient for Max, age of 45. No one really cared, though. Least of all Max Heck himself.