Four Feet Tall and Rising (2 page)

They’d never seen the likes of him before. Born in 1936 and growing up in Texas in the ’40s and ’50s, Dad faced the same kinds of problems that black folks were facing: blatant prejudice and discrimination. Much worse than anything I’d ever have to handle. And it wasn’t just that he battled it in the world. He came home to it every day. Though his mom, Elsie, was a practicing Catholic and Italian who raised her kids to believe in the importance of family, she couldn’t control the actions of her husband. My grandfather made my dad’s life a living hell. Which is why we were told he was dead; that he died before any of us kids were born. This turned out to be another one of Dad’s secrets. His dad wasn’t dead. He didn’t die until the 1990s, but Dad never spoke a word about the man.

My mom’s childhood was a bit easier. She was born in Los Angeles but ’cause her mother was Southern, she was given a Southern name: Dixie Lee Brown. My mom’s father, whose name was either Fred Stevens or Chester Brown—depending on which birth certificate he was using at the time—was over six feet tall. Her mom, my grandma, Mary Brown, or Nonnie, stood only three-foot-seven. They were a married couple working in the circus, though I’m not sure which company. By the time they had Mom, Nonnie and Fred/Chester had retired from circus life. Tragically, Fred/Chester died of tuberculosis nine years after Mom was born, around 1945. Mom only half remembered him. Nonnie never remarried.

Mom and Nonnie looked like each other, and for the most part, I looked like them, too. We all had round cheeks and chins, wavy, sandy-blond hair, the same smiles and the same
pudgy, triangular noses. In a world where we were different, we could look at each other and see similarity. It was a great gift. One that Dad never experienced as a kid.

So, at seventeen, he left his family in Texas and moved to Los Angeles. L.A. was, and still is, more accepting of Little People than most of the world. It was the home city of Billy Barty, a well-known film actor who founded the organization Little People of America. There was always work in Hollywood for Little People. Back then you weren’t a doctor or a lawyer, you were a Munchkin. You wanted to be a Munchkin ’cause it paid well. You couldn’t get a job doing other things unless it was demeaning or hard labor, and none of them paid like Hollywood. So most Little People moved west with dreams of tap-dancing down the Yellow Brick Road.

Dad had no such intention. He’d always wanted to be a mechanic, but growing up, he had to hide his tools under his bed ’cause his dad would beat the crap out of him for wanting to work a real job. He just figured his son was a circus freak. That he shouldn’t have any hopes for anything other than a life of freakdom. Grandpa must have thought he could beat the mechanic out of Dad, but it didn’t work. Dad got his first job with Lockheed. He was hired as a riveter for airplanes ’cause he was able to fit into the small places. How he met Mom, I’ll never know. They never talked about their relationship or their past. The only thing I knew for certain about their marriage was that Mom was treated more like a slave.

Dad preferred a regimented life; we all had to work and live around his schedule. Dinner was always at five o’clock. No
matter what. God forbid Mom was one minute late with his dinner, and if I dared to show up at 5:10 p.m., I wasn’t allowed to eat. There was no talking or laughter around the table. Dad would just inhale his food as if eating was a task to get done so he could go sit in front of the TV. There was no meaning or purpose or feeling behind anything he did.

Mom was not a modern-day, feminist woman. She woke up earlier than Dad, made sure his coffee was going, and packed his lunches. I can still see him coming home after work and sitting in the breakfast nook where Mom had his beer and his chips and his salsa ready and waiting. She’d take off his shoes and socks. She waited on him, hand and foot. Her reward? Verbal abuse. And though we never saw him hit her, me and my sisters, we all knew he beat on her. We could hear them fighting in their bedroom. We could see the results.

Verbally, he was just as abusive to my sisters but physically, no. They were fearful of him, even though they were twice his size. When it comes to control, size doesn’t matter. Intimidation is a powerful motivator. Two paddles hung on our kitchen wall, one with holes and one without. They were a constant reminder that violence could happen at any second.

Dad never had to hit my sisters, ’cause he was beating the shit out of me. I might have been the biggest baby born, but I was the smallest kid growing up. That never stopped Dad from whipping the shit out of me. The spankings started when I was a toddler and they were never hidden away. The minute I did something he didn’t like … a spanking. No questions even asked. Mom never tried to stop him. She wasn’t physically
abusive herself. She was a “wait until your dad gets home” kind of mother. She let him do the dirty work.

This is why I spent as much time as I could with Nonnie. I was closer to her than anyone else in my family. She loved for me to visit and stay with her. She always made sure I was entertained. She played with me and sent me cards and letters. She taught me to speak Italian. No one else ever paid much positive attention to me. Everyone else was always screaming about what I’d done wrong. I always knew Nonnie loved me. She was a warm and generous person when no one else was. Nonnie was the most, if not the only, positive influence in my daily life.

When I was really young, Nonnie was a wee bit chubby. She was diagnosed with high blood pressure and her doctor put her on a diet that worked. She lost the weight and got healthier. Dad thought Mom was pudgy, so when they visited Nonnie, he announced, “You need to teach my wife your eating habits.” Right in front of everybody. Mom said nothing, but we all knew her feelings were hurt. Even as a tiny kid I understood that my dad was an asshole.

Around the time I turned four, Dad decided El Monte, California, where we lived, had become “too ethnic.” The neighborhood wasn’t the lily-white neighborhood it had once been, so Dad packed us up and moved us all to Reseda in the San Fernando Valley, another suburb of Los Angeles.

Now, Reseda saw its big population boom in the ’50s, when a house there would cost you less than ten grand. Until the civil rights movement in the ’60s, the home owners of
Reseda kept the area white, white, white. They actually had laws on the books that excluded nonwhites from owning land and houses until the Federal Fair Housing Act passed in 1968. By the time we got there in ’73, not much had changed.

The houses in Reseda were all ranch style and every yard was surrounded by a six-foot brick wall. Dad was the type of person who wanted to be left entirely alone. He was the kind of guy that once he got to a friend’s birthday party he wanted to leave immediately. He was so antisocial he raised the wall surrounding our house by another four feet, so no one could see inside the yard. He put screens on the outside of the house so we couldn’t see in or out. He was convinced someone was gonna rob us. He lived a paranoid kind of existence, and we were all at his mercy. Trapped like prisoners in our own home.

In El Monte, Dad had been a drag racer. He spent his weekends at the speedway, racing those long-nosed, fast cars with the parachutes that pop out the back to keep them from crashing. Our backyard in El Monte had been filled with all kinds of car parts. When we moved to Reseda, the cars disappeared and were replaced by a machine shop in the garage. Dad’s garage was hallowed ground. We weren’t allowed in it. Not one step over the door frame.

In that garage, Dad built anything he wanted. He’d construct furniture, rebuild a carburetor, or tinker with an engine. He turned a two-wheel bike into a three-wheel bike and custom-built his own little motorcycle. If he’d wanted, he could have built a house from scratch, but Dad had no interest in customizing our house. Every Little Person learns
to customize the things around them in order to live a more comfortable life, but Dad only improved those things that he himself used, like the dragsters. Despite his talents, he wouldn’t retrofit our house. Instead of tearing up the kitchen and lowering the counters, we had to use stools or stepladders. When I visited other Little People’s houses, they could stand on the floor and easily reach their tables, their cabinets, their couches, their TVs. My dad refused to make any changes. He could have easily worked around Linda and Janet’s needs and included them in whatever plans he made. But Dad never wanted to admit he was a Little Person and he wanted everything to look “normal”—outside and inside.

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.