Four Feet Tall and Rising

Essential Shorty

Acknowledgments

’ve got a big mouth
.

I came out of the womb wailing and I’ve pretty much been yelling ever since. Over the years, I’ve learned some choice words, and I use them with abandon. Swearing adds some flavor to the yelling. Swearing is like putting whipped cream with a cherry on top of all those regular words. You get more for your money. Swearing is an art.

So I swear and I yell. A lot. I’ve got opinions and I make them known.

And yeah, I’m not an idiot. I know my big mouth isn’t the first thing people notice about me. I’m short. Shorter than most but taller than some, and in a world where short ain’t shit, you gotta do something to make sure you don’t get swept underfoot. Hence my big mouth. It’s gotten me into trouble and it’s saved my ass, and while it may not be the first thing you notice about me, I guarantee it’ll be the thing you most remember.

It’s this mouth that leads people to believe I’ve got a Napoleon complex. Like I’m overcompensating for my perceived handicap. Napoleon complex, my ass. That bastard was five-six—what’d he have to complain about?

Plus, I got good reasons to yell.

I yell ’cause somewhere in a Los Angeles basement, there’s a pit bull with duct tape wrapped around her muzzle, being trained to kill while money changes hands. I yell ’cause on some news program in Denver, there’s a politician demonizing pit bulls to further his own career. I yell ’cause some punk in Tampa’s got his fifth box of pit puppies and I know they’ll end up in the last cage of an animal shelter before they’re two. I yell ’cause humans can be the most brutal and heartless animals on the planet. I yell ’cause a pit bull can’t and somebody needs to.

I yell ’cause pits are my family.

We are the same breed. We are short, muscular and stocky, misunderstood, and much maligned. We’ve got hard heads, short hair, and our “bad” reputations precede us every time. We are judged by the actions of a few. We are treated like the enemy before we even make your acquaintance. We are feared. We are banned. We are excommunicated.

Pit bulls and ex-cons, we got a lot in common.

Except, I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, and I’ve got no patience for stupidity. I can’t sleep all day and I much prefer a good cigar and red wine to a bowl of mashed beef. I might stand at crotch level but I’m not gonna sniff you. And trust
me, if you raise your hand to me, I won’t be the one ducking and cowering.

On second thought, I guess, in most ways I’m not like a pit at all.

They’re much, much nicer than me.

was ripped from my mommy’s womb on
the 10th of February, 1969, in a doctor’s office in West Covina, California. My mom is a Little Person, and Little moms just aren’t big enough for a baby’s head to be delivered naturally, so like the three kids born before me, I came by C-section.

First in the lineup was my sister Linda, born in 1960. She was what Little People call tall, what others might consider to be of average height, and from the nuts of a different daddy, a fact I discovered much later when I was in prison and started researching my genealogy, digging into my family’s past to try to understand how I ended up behind bars and why I was the way I was. I found a birth certificate and a marriage license that proved Linda was born two years before my parents even met and married. It wasn’t the only secret I unearthed. There were lots and lots of secrets.

Another of those secrets was Michael, a baby boy born less
than two years after Linda. Michael’s baby picture hung on the wall of our living room, a constant reminder that Dad’s first son had died young, barely two months old, of pneumonia. But the truth was Michael didn’t die of pneumonia. Michael died of double-dominant syndrome. Michael inherited two “bad genes,” two dominant achondroplasia (dwarfism) genes—one from Mom and one from Dad. Usually a baby that is double dominant doesn’t even make it to delivery. The mom miscarries or there’s a stillbirth. But Michael somehow beat the odds and made it to the world just in time to leave it again.

So Mom and Dad got back in the bedroom and tried again, and on December 18, 1963, my sister Janet was born. Like my sister Linda, Janet was born tall. The chances were fifty-fifty that the babies would come out “normal.” Mom and Dad rolled the dice three times and won twice. They were so proud. Two tall daughters. Success.

Why they waited another six years, until 1969, before they had me, I don’t know. They were Catholic but that didn’t mean Mom wanted a big family. Babies are usually hard on Little women. Most of them have at most one or two kids ’cause they suffer from so many miscarriages and problems. But I guess Dad always wanted a boy. Having lost Michael, and with the odds in his favor, he decided to roll the dice one more time. Plus, Mom had handled her other pregnancies without much trouble, so it seemed like everything would work out again.

I was the heaviest baby of all. Eight pounds plus. They knew the minute I came out that I had achondroplasia. It’s easy to tell, trust me. You know if you have a dwarf child.
Back then, there was no way to predict such a birth. Now, doctors can diagnose dwarfism in the womb, giving parents the option to terminate pregnancies. They can even spot the chromosome that indicates double dominance. Now, even dwarf parents, who would be least likely to care if their child is Little, can still choose to terminate a double-dominant pregnancy. There will be fewer and fewer of us walking this Earth. There already are.

I was a third-generation Little Person, the son of dwarf parents and the grandson of a maternal dwarf grandma. Being third generation, my diagnosis was dismal. The more a dwarf reproduces, meaning the same dwarf, the weaker the genes, the more chances to trigger a double-dominant gene. The doctors told Mom and Dad I wouldn’t live long, and even if I did, they predicted I’d have severe physical limitations, suffer from limb deformities, and be in constant pain. They basically pronounced me handicapped, useless, and dead. They were wrong.

This is why other Little People are shocked when they find out I’m third generation. I should be dead or deformed, and I’m not. I was so physically fit when I was a kid—young and active—it actually caused resentment. Some first-generation dwarves are all fucked up physically. They’ve got back problems and leg problems. They walk with braces, crutches, canes, or are stuck in wheelchairs. I was supposed to die young. I didn’t. I am a rarity.

Looking back, I wonder if my birth was the moment when Dad gave up on me. He’d grown up the only Little Person in
a family full of tall people and he was ashamed of his size. He suffered from a bad case of self-loathing. He saw himself in me; his troubled legacy continuing against his will. Of course, that was never said to me. God forbid the truth be told. No, instead I was told that Dad was happy as hell when I was born. He’d always wanted a boy. He just didn’t know he was gonna get this wonderful specimen.

His entire family descended from a brood of big, bad revolutionaries based in San Antonio, Texas. His great cousin, by marriage, was Jim Bowie, defender of the Alamo, and his grandmother was Anna Navarro, a woman considered to be a serious agitator in the Texas revolution. The Navarros were from Corsica originally, Italians, with some Spanish blood mixed in. The Rossis were also Italian, but northern Italian, with a last name referring to the plural form of the Italian word for “red.” They named my dad Melvyn Louis Rossi. He hated his name. He went by Sonny instead.

There was no history of dwarfism in their family tree, so when Dad was born the son of two tall parents and the sibling of four tall sisters, he was considered a genetic malfunction. He had a broad, high forehead, a pointy chin, and prominent ears. In profile, his dwarf features were even more noticeable. He had a face as concave as a waxing moon. Dad had a typical dwarf nose, upturned and somewhat hooked at the same time. His hands had a kind of built-in V between the third and fourth fingers. It was not something easily seen, but his plump, short fingers didn’t quite close together. They had to be forced. His legs were slightly bowed.