Four Feet Tall and Rising Read online

  Mom enrolled me in kindergarten at Blythe Street School and I stayed there through sixth grade. I hated Blythe Street. I was teased, and the teachers were cruel. There was one teacher, Mrs. Taylor, who’d swat me on the hand with her shoe. She did that one too many times. Finally, I took off my shoe and clocked her in the head with it. My nasty disposition, it started way back when. Needless to say, they moved me to another class.

  It was in third grade that my dwarfism became impossible to ignore. All the other kids had growth spurts and I sort of stayed put. Their fingers lengthened, my fingers stayed plump. Their faces lost the last traces of baby fat, my cheeks stayed pinchable. Their legs shot up to their hips while my knees bowed like a cowboy, as I posed for the 1977 Mrs. Titmus Grade 3 class photo. I may have outlived the doctor’s proclamation at my birth, the one that said I’d die before I saw my toddler years, but I hadn’t been able to escape his more accurate prediction: that I might suffer from malformed bones or abnormal bone alignment. My arms and legs refused to grow. I could walk and I could run and I wasn’t handicapped in any way, shape, or form, but that didn’t stop the kids from choosing me last for any game we played. That didn’t stop them from staring and whispering and keeping their distance. The kids, my classmates, stopped being innocent kids and started being nasty bullies.

  I began acting out, always getting into trouble, putting tacks on the teacher’s chair just to stir up some fun. I was never the highest performer in the class, so I masked my frustration by becoming the class clown. I had it in me to be good, but no one ever asked that side to show itself. I was a smart-ass with my family, too. At the grocery story, I’d knock shit over or I’d yell, “Mom, pull out your teeth!,” ’cause Mom wore a partial upper denture. I don’t know why I found it so fascinating that Mom didn’t have teeth, but I just couldn’t get enough of teasing her about it. Either of those acts got me a beating “when we got home.”

  I was ten or eleven the morning I discovered Dad also wore dentures. I had to go bad, but my sister was in our shared bathroom. I snuck into Mom and Dad’s room to use their toilet instead. I figured they were asleep; they wouldn’t hear me. But stepping into their room was a big no-no. We were never allowed to go in there. On the sink was a jar with a full set of teeth floating around. It freaked me out so bad, I yelled out, “Who’s the one without the fucking teeth?” Mom woke up and whispered to me, “Don’t wake your father.” I knew I was in serious trouble, but I didn’t care. I wanted an answer. I kept yelling, “Mom! Smile! Open your mouth!” until she finally did. Then I knew the truth. Dad had no teeth. When he woke up, I got a serious whipping. It was totally worth it. For the rest of our lives, every time I wanted to piss him off, I’d goad him with a “What’s the matter? You put Preparation H on your dentures this morning? ”

  My parents decided to take me to Little People of America events so I could meet other Little People and their families. These events started back in 1957 when Billy Barty got on TV and made a national public appeal for all Little People in America to join him for a gathering in Reno, Nevada. Twenty Little People showed up and Little People of America was formed.

  The basic mission of that nonprofit group was, and still is, to organize parties and gatherings where people under four foot ten can meet. They also do parent and peer support, adoption, medical education, scholarships, and grants. They also publish a national newsletter so everyone can brag about themselves or gossip about each other. In all, Little People of America has about seven thousand members with some seventy local chapters that meet on a regular basis.

  Dad hated the events, as he was in complete denial about being a Little Person, but Mom must have convinced him I needed a wider community of support. She thought maybe the camaraderie would help me settle down and stop being such a menace. I made a friend named Danny Norvall. He lived in Van Nuys. We went to a Little People BBQ on Labor Day and a Little People Christmas party. My dad drew the line at the annual Little People Convention. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized the convention was a booze- and fuck-fest. If I’d known that earlier, I probably would have begged to go, but by the time junior high school rolled around, I wanted no part of the Little People community. Everybody just sat around complaining about how miserable they were physically or how hard school had been for them. To make matters worse, everybody gossiped about everybody else. If a Little Person farted in L.A., another Little Person in New York heard about it.

  I found no comfort among my people. Where I found comfort was among animals. My sister Janet had a dog named Pepe, a mutt who’d been around before I was even born. Pepe was diagnosed with a tumor, and Dad was too cheap to pay for the surgery, so we buried Pepe in the backyard. It wasn’t a traumatic loss for me. Pepe had always been Janet’s dog.

  Then Mom bought a chocolate brown Doberman and named her Coco. She was a beautiful dog. She had a sleek coat and light brown “boots” on each of her four paws. I loved that she would nuzzle her warm brown nose against my neck and stare at me with her soulful eyes. The fur around her eyes was lighter and made her look as if she had brows.

  Dad may have been too cheap to save Pepe’s life, but somehow he found the money to crop poor Coco’s ears. I was flabbergasted that he agreed to spend that money on a dog. He was so tight; he couldn’t shit a greased BB. We’d go to a restaurant and he’d leave forty-three cents on the table. I knew we’d never be able to go back there, or they would spit in our food. He saved every penny he made, out of fear. He was terrified that medically something would happen, and he’d be broke. So I was shocked when he even willingly paid for Mom to take Coco to obedience training.

  When Dad was around, Coco was never allowed inside the house, though I’d sneak her in occasionally so we could sit on the brown plaid couch and watch TV together. I got close to Coco. I played with her in the backyard. When things got heated in the house, I’d crawl into the wooden doghouse beside her and fall asleep. It was pretty comfortable with all the blankets I put in there for her bedding. Coco liked to hide under a white sheet and pretend I couldn’t see her. Eventually, Mom would walk outside, find me and Coco tangled up side by side, and make me sleep in my own bed. If I could have lived in Coco’s doghouse, I probably would have.

  On every family vacation, it was me and Coco in the back of the AMC Hornet wagon—and by “family vacation,” I mean Dad’s idea of a vacation: camping, fishing, and hiking. I hated camping. I hated fishing. I hated hiking. Dad would yell at me on the boat ’cause I wouldn’t shut up. I was bored out of my mind. One time he hit me so hard, I thought for sure he was gonna knock me overboard. I got so mad I threw my pole into the damn lake.

  The only other vacation we took as a family was to see his mom and sisters in Texas. His sister Margie was very wealthy. Her husband owned an air-conditioning business and they had a huge house. I loved visiting my grandma Elsie in Texas. She was a tall woman with a big smile, pointy nose, and bright eyes. She loved to give me hugs. I knew when we stayed with Elsie, we were gonna get some good, traditional Italian food, and that she would let me sip her wine. We’d get to sleep in real beds and there’d be no cheap meals around a campfire. Plus, I learned a lot from Elsie. She talked to me like I was an adult and not a kid. I liked being with her.

  I was also lucky enough to get to travel with Nonnie before she was confined to a wheelchair. Nonnie worked as a secretary at the World Vision headquarters in Monrovia, California, for years and years. She was on a set salary, and her rent was paid by the company. They were very good to her. They even paid for her to take vacations. When I was four, she took me to Italy, but I was too young to remember anything about it. When I was twelve, Nonnie asked if I wanted to go to Canada with her. My sisters didn’t wanna go. They were teenagers and too cool to hang with their grandma. Me, I was way into British crap at that point, so I said, “Hell, yeah!” I thought if I went to British Columbia, I’d get to have four o’clock tea.

  We took the train from Los Angeles to Seattle, stayed in Seattle for
a few days, and went to the top of the Space Needle. Then we took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia. Nonnie knew I loved trains, so she took me to a museum that told the whole history of the steam engine. I loved it. I wanted to stay at the Empress Hotel ’cause there was a huge castle in the water but we stayed at the Best Western instead. We went to a restaurant called The Gatsby that had a Roaring ’20s theme. I was impressed with how clean the city was, how they even hung flower pots from the street lamps. When we came back through customs into the United States, I mouthed off to an agent, and told him to get his hands off my bag. Even at twelve, my lovely personality was already in place, but I never, ever argued with Nonnie. Not once.

  Living with Dad and his cheap-ass, racist ways, I used to daydream about how I was gonna break free, own my own house, buy this or buy that, and have the best of everything. It’s not like we wanted for nothing. We had everything we needed, but it was always from a thrift store or was the generic brand or a thousand years old. The most expensive room in the house was the garage, his domain. We were treated like second-class citizens while Dad had the best.

  I decided, if I ever wanted to make good, I’d have to become a lawyer or a businessman. I wanted to be part of the corporate world. I wanted to own my own company, and I wanted to be in charge. I was obsessed with a British TV show about a department store and the people that worked there. They had a corporate executive room and I could just picture my own executive room and my corporate office. I wanted my own British butler. I loved The Jeffersons. I was inspired by George Jefferson and how he succeeded and took over the world. I watched Falcon Crest, Dynasty, and Dallas. All the early ’80s shows were about greed. I thought in order to get ahead I had to step on somebody else. I used to tell my friends, “I’m gonna conquer the world. Imagine me as president! ”

  For Halloween, I never wanted to be a superhero. I wanted to be a businessman. One Halloween, I was so inspired by J.R. Ewing on Dallas that I dressed up as an executive cowboy. I wore a white button-down shirt, dress pants, and a matching vest with a tie. I finished off my ensemble with a straw cowboy hat, sporting peacock feathers in the band. Every time I yelled, “Trick or Treat!” I had to explain who the hell I was.

  I decided to make good on all these Halloween costumes and open my own business. I knew money was my ticket out of that house, and Dad didn’t give any of us an allowance, so I had to find another way to save money. I saw an opportunity at pet stores. Pet stores always needed mice, either to sell as pets or to sell as food. I went to the library and read books about how to raise and care for them. Dad was okay with me having a room full of mice ’cause it was a job. If they’d been pets, it would have been a whole other story.

  I made enough money that I could buy a couple of parakeets and finches. I went back to the library and started researching how to care for them and breed them. I built an elaborate set of cages in the backyard to house them. At one point, I had twenty birds and an aviary in the yard. My mom got really into it too, and helped me care for them. The only animals she wouldn’t help me with were the garter snakes. When I started keeping them, the rest of the family steered clear.

  With the money I made, I opened my first bank account at California Federal Bank on Sherman Way in Reseda. I was underage, so my parents had to set it up and cosign on all my deposits and withdrawals. ATMs were new, and Mom and Dad weren’t too keen on that, so to get money out of the bank I had to forge Mom’s signature on the slips. It took me a while to figure out that if I had an ATM card, it would be much easier to get my money. I forged Mom’s name one last time and applied for it. I had to check the mail every day to make sure my parents didn’t intercept the card. It came in the mail, and I was in business. I deposited the money from the birds and mice, but I spent it as fast as I could make it. I was a Michael Jackson fanatic. I had to get his Thriller album. I was still into trains and had an elaborate train setup in the backyard. And, of course, I had to buy a bike. My parents got suspicious and checked my bank account. I lied and said the bank stole my money. They didn’t buy it. I got the ass-whooping of my life.

  I also used some of the money to buy a typewriter. In my mind, having a typewriter was an essential component of being a businessman. I even typed out corporate rules for my future company. Rule Number One was I’m The Boss. Rule Number Two was Everyone Has to Dress Up. I began insisting on wearing suits to school. Inspired by an old 1920s photograph of Nonnie’s dad, my great-grandfather, I bought my first fedora. I didn’t know it yet, but I had just determined exactly who I was gonna grow up to be: a businessman wearing black suits and fedoras. It just took me a long time to get there.

  My dad hated my new persona. He wanted me to become a mechanic. He wanted to teach me how to build things. I wasn’t interested. I didn’t wanna get my hands dirty. I didn’t want oil all over my suits. Dad would announce, “When you’re old enough, I’m gonna get you a job at Lockheed.” I didn’t want a job at Lockheed. “There’s good money, good benefits, good insurance.” Dad had full medical coverage. We had a house, a roof over our heads, and food on the table. But we were all miserable. I wanted no part of it. To straighten me out, Dad took to berating me with “faggot,” convinced I wasn’t manly enough ’cause I didn’t wanna work with my hands. He threatened to throw out my typewriter, so I stored it under my bed, just like he’d had to do as a kid with his tools. And just like his dad, he beat the shit out of me anytime I did something he deemed “gay.” My dreams of opening a business had to stay hidden.

  To get Dad off my back, I took a job at the Exxon gas station down the street from my house. I pumped gas for tips, and I met this young guy who worked there, Richard. I was in the Cub Scouts, believe it or not, and he’d been an Eagle Scout. He was into guns, and used to make his own ammunition. He taught me how to make homemade ammunition and had me label the baggies .22 or .45, and then he’d sell the shells at gun shows.

  Richard was much older than me, twenty-one. I have no idea why my parents let me run around with a guy that much older. Dad was probably relieved to see me pumping gas instead of typing memos. Whatever the reason, they let me travel to gun shows with Richard or go out target shooting. The first time I shot a gun, I almost shot his girlfriend’s foot off. I couldn’t aim, and I didn’t realize there would be a “kick.” Richard wanted to take me on a hunting trip. I never wanted to kill an animal, but any excuse to get out of the house was a good one.

  We drove somewhere out in the mountains. I got a shot off and was able to kill a deer. But I didn’t see any sense in it. I told Richard I didn’t wanna go hunting anymore. I said, “Let’s go shoot shit. I’d rather shoot a damn car window, just to destroy something, just to make noise, before I ever shoot another animal.” He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand me. But me, I felt like … to hell with humans. I’d rather be with Coco than talk to a fucking human. I’d rather live my life alone with dogs than with humans. He threw that deer in the back of his old, red-ass Ford, then he dropped me off at the house. I didn’t eat the deer, and I never went hunting again.

  By the time I was in sixth grade, Reseda was a changed town. All the blue-collar union jobs were disappearing, and the neighborhood was slipping from middle class to working class. White families were moving away and Latino immigrants were moving in. Income levels went down, gangs started sprouting up, and the schools emptied. The city started busing kids from Pacoima into Blythe Street School to keep the doors open.

  As everything around him changed, Dad’s racism reared its ugly head again. I was allowed to have friends over to the house as long as they were white. It never made sense to me. How could a Little Person be a racist? How could Dad be a racist when he’d been judged his whole life for being a midget? He knew what it was to be treated differently.

  Nonnie taught me that everyone was the same. She never had a racist bone in her body; she wasn’t raised that way. Maybe having parents that worked in the circus, she met different people, and that gave her a more open mi
nd. However she came to her opinions, it didn’t matter. She passed her acceptance of diversity on to me and I listened. My dad may have been a racist ass but Nonnie’s influence won out. I became friends with Sean and Oscar.

  They were Mexicans from Pacoima. It was like they were from another world. They felt different like I felt different. I couldn’t do everything the tall kids could do. The gap between me and my classmates had widened into a chasm. Before the Mexican kids showed up, I was basically alone with my difference, and when you get treated differently, you act differently. Once Sean and Oscar showed up, it was like my people had arrived. They understood that I understood what it was to be different in an all-white suburban school. A bond of friendship began, and the closer I got to Sean and Oscar, the more my white friends drifted away. Not that I had so many to drift.

  I wasn’t even close to my own sisters. They were so much older than me, they considered me a child, not a brother. If Mom and Dad left the house, they made Linda or Janet babysit me. Both sisters saw me as a nuisance. I did my best to live up to their expectations. I gave them hell. Tearing around the house, running off into the neighborhood and making them chase me through the streets, slapping and hitting them, walking over their board games and kicking all the pieces loose, changing the TV channels. I always got a beating when Dad got home.

  By the time I got to sixth grade, my sister Linda was in high school and she’d become a real slacker. She ditched school and smoked weed. Janet was the exact opposite. She was Little Miss Prissy Straight-A Student. She never got in trouble. Me and Linda tried to get her to smoke a cigarette once so we would have some evidence against her. She wouldn’t take a puff.