I Was a Teenage Dwarf

by Max Shulman

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  I Was a Teenage Dwarf

  Stories

  Max Shulman

  DEDICATION

  Some men love women, some love other men, some love dogs and horses, and occasionally you find one who loves his raincoat.

  Me, I love a hotel.

  It is near Ocho Rios on the north coast of the island of Jamaica, and it is called the Tower Isle Hotel. It is spacious and serene and impeccably run and situated on a warm white beach on the warm blue Caribbean.

  Here, in this blessed haven, I put this book together. Here, if luck is with me, I will soon return.

  —M.S.

  FOREWORD

  Following are a bunch of true experiences that I wrote at various times of my life. All the experiences are about girls, because that is what my life is about—girls.

  I’m not oversexed, mind you. But I’m not undersexed either. Let’s just say I’m sexed.

  My interest in girls started when I was very young. I can’t give you the exact date, but looking back it seems to me that one day it was Slinky Toys and the next day it was girls, and that’s the way it’s been ever since.

  Even now in the winter of my life—I will be thirty-two next birthday—my interest in girls continues unabated. I mention this not to brag, but to give hope and comfort to my older readers.

  The following stories cover the high points in my life from the age of thirteen up to the present. Rereading the stories it occurs to me that there is a remarkable unity of outlook. You could call this consistency. On the other hand, you could call it arrested development. I leave it to you to decide. To help you make up your minds. I have placed after each title my age at the time of composition.

  I hope you like these stories. I need the money.

  —DOBIE GILLIS

  CHAPTER ONE

  GIRLS: THEIR CAUSE AND CURE

  by Dobie Gillis, aged 13

  At the time of which this true life experience takes place, there were many droll and amusing things at John Marshall Junior High School, of which I am a student. Like for instance there was a water fountain in the gym which a kid named Dickie Sutphen fixed with a screwdriver so no matter how easy you turned the handle, the water shot right up to the ceiling. There was a girl named Gidgie Tremblatt who played the cello in the school orchestra and she was so little that you couldn’t even see her behind the cello, and when she played, it looked like the cello had arms. There was a kid named Jimmy Anderson who had a swan that chased sticks like a dog and followed him to school every day. There was a kid named Chris Byron who could make a pinhole in an ice-cream bar and suck out all the ice cream without breaking the chocolate.

  There were lots of other droll and amusing things at John Marshall Junior High School, but, for my money, the drollest and most amusing thing of all was a chart in the office of Miss Finsterwald, the school nurse. This chart gave the average height of boys and girls of junior-high-school age, and it said (this’ll kill you) that the average height of a thirteen-year-old boy was 62.6 inches and the average height of a thirteen-year-old girl was 61.9 inches.

  Well, I don’t know who made up this chart, but I’ll bet my last nickel that either they were drunk or else they did their research among the pygmies of Central Africa. It just so happens that at the time of which this story takes place, I was a thirteen-year-old boy of 62.6 inches tall, and if that is the average for thirteen-year-old boys, how come every thirteen-year-old boy in John Marshall was taller than me?

  But, frankly, that is not what bugged me. I mean it is possible to have a normal, healthy association with another boy even if he happens to be a few inches taller. I mean when people see you together they don’t right away start to nudge each other and snigger.

  What bugged me was not that every thirteen-year-old boy in John Marshall was taller than me, but that every thirteen-year-old girl was taller. Except for Gidgie Tremblatt, the girl I told you about who was invisible behind a cello, I only came up to the noses of all the girls in the eighth grade and, in several cases, only up to the collarbone.

  And I’ll tell you something else: most of the other boys in the eighth grade had the same trouble. They might have been taller than me, but the girls were taller than them. During the daytime when the girls wore flat shoes and the guys jumped around a lot, it was pretty hard to tell, but when they went to a dance or a party or like that, and the girls put on heels, there wasn’t half a dozen guys in the whole class that came over their girl’s eyeballs.

  As you can see, this was a grave problem for all the boys in the class, but for me it was an out-and-out disaster. Here I was, one of the smartest boys in the class, but a failure with women. I mean I just couldn’t get a date to save my life. Like I would come up to Bonnie Morgan or Karen Jamieson or like that—girls I have known since kindergarten and have always treated like a prince—and I would say, “I got a couple of tickets for the Bo Diddley concert. How about it, hey?” And they would say, “No, thanks, Shorty.”

  Well, naturally this bugged me because if there is one thing in this world I go ape for, it’s girls. I always say that a guy without a girl is like only half a guy. All the same, I couldn’t get one, so I began to brood and sulk and pick at my food, and my school work began slipping. Lots of times in class, looking around at all the girls I couldn’t have, I would lose control and start to whimper out loud and the teachers would panic and send me to Miss Finsterwald’s office to lie down, which is where I got so familiar with that chart that showed the average height of boys and girls.

  At first I thought the chart must be right, and it was John Marshall that was wrong. I mean I figured that by some cruel quirk of fate, I had happened to land in a school full of freaks. But I soon found out this wasn’t so. It just so happened that my grandma and grandpa had a golden wedding, and I saw cousins of mine from California and Delaware and like that, and I checked with all of them about the size of girls in their area, and it was the same all over: they were giantesses!

  Well, this bugged me even more because now I began to think that there was some strange, sinister force loose in this country—some obscene power that was making girls grow like sunflowers—and I got so shaky thinking about it that I finally decided to discuss it with my father, who is a doctor, on our Palship Walk one Saturday morning.

  I’m a little embarrassed to tell you about our Palship Walks, but I guess I better. It’s one of my mother’s kooky ideas, which Pa and I fought against like a couple of madmen, but it wasn’t any use at all because when Ma gets an idea in her head you can’t knock it out with an elephant gun. She’s a wonderful woman, you understand. I love her and Pa loves her and whenever she gets sick, everybody in town comes running over with a jar of soup, but just the same, there is no use denying that she has got one of the truly hard heads of this country.

  Anyhow, Ma got on Pa’s back a few years ago about him not spending enough time with me. “Herbert,” she screamed, “a man ought to be pals with his son. Why don’t you take Dobie for walks on Saturday morning and talk to him about nature and engines and like that?” Well, Pa and I both started yelling like maniacs because we didn’t want to go for a walk on Saturday mornings. What I like to do on Saturday morning is crack my knuckles. What Pa likes to do is stay in the sack. It is the one morning he doesn’t have office hours. But Ma just ignored us and put on our jackets and pushed us out the door.

  So Pa and I stumbled around for a while, and it was pretty grim. At first he tried to talk to me about nature and engines, but that didn’t work too well because I kept thinking about cracking my knuckles and he kept thinking about t
he sack. Finally we sat down against a big oak tree on a point of land overlooking the ocean and moped till it was lunch time and we could go home.

  After that we didn’t make any attempts at conversation on our Palship Walks. We just high-tailed it out to the oak tree where Pa had stashed an air mattress in a hollow limb and I had stashed a copy of Lolita. Pa blew up the mattress and corked off for a couple of hours while I read the book and then, both refreshed, we went home where Ma beamed at us and kissed us and gave us a special treat for lunch in honor of our palship.

  But to get back to the day I was telling you about, Pa and I got out to the oak tree and he started to blow up the mattress and I said, “Pa, excuse me, but there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

  “You would?” he said, pretty surprised.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said and took the nozzle of the mattress out of his mouth.

  I told him about my researches into the tallness of girls and how it bugged me. “What is the answer?” I said. “Do you think it’s got something to do with the atom bomb?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s the matriarchy.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A matriarchy is a society that is ruled by women,” he said.

  “Like ours?” I said.

  “Precisely!” he said. “But we were not always a matriarchy, Dobie. Not so very long ago this was a man’s country. Women baked bread, washed clothes, had babies, and ministered to their husbands. They did not drink or vote or make loud noises. They were shy, soft, submissive—”

  “And short?” I asked.

  “Of course they were short,” said Pa. “When women looked up to their men, they had to be short.”

  “Gee, that must of been wonderful!” I said. “Then what happened?”

  “A series of catastrophes starting with universal suffrage and culminating in store bread, automatic washers, automatic driers, no-rub floor wax, nursery schools, TV dinners and power steering. It used to be that when a man came home from work, no matter how tired he was, he could depend on it that his wife was even tireder. But now the poor guy comes limping into the house and finds his wife looking like she’s just spent a month in the country. Her eyes are bright, her nostrils are flaring, she’s full of plans. ‘Darling,’ she says, ‘don’t you think we ought to widen the terrace? Don’t you think little Waldo ought to go to school in Switzerland? Don’t you think we ought to have a split rail fence? Don’t you think we ought to flood the den and make an aquarium?’ All the poor miserable husband wants is to crawl into the contour chair and turn on the television, and she’s charging him like a young bull! So finally he just mumbles, ‘Okay, okay, whatever you say.’… Well, Dobie, you give a woman that kind of power and she will surely attain the size to match it. And that, my son, is why girls are growing so tall and now I’d be obliged to you if you’d blow up my air mattress; I’m out of breath.”

  Well, sir, there was no comfort to be had from Pa’s words. Obviously girls were going to keep growing and I was going to keep getting shut out, and if I wanted a girl there was only one thing to do, which the following Monday morning I did: I asked Gidgie Tremblatt to go steady.

  If you knew Gidgie, you would know what a desperation measure this was. Gidgie was one of the authentic nuts of the Western Hemisphere. She never talked softly; she always hollered. She never walked; she always ran. And every place she ran, she always dragged along a musical instrument. Sometimes it was the cello she played in the school orchestra; sometimes it was a trombone, sometimes an oboe, sometimes a French horn, sometimes a snare drum, and once it was a glockenspiel. There was no instrument ever invented which you could put in this lunatic’s hands and she would not learn to play it in six minutes.

  Besides hauling around these instruments like a pack animal, she had this weird habit of bursting into tears for no reason at all. I don’t mean she’d sob or cry or like that; I mean she’d be talking to you about this and that, or maybe she’d be reciting in class, and all of a sudden the tears would come running out of her eyes and run down her cheeks and plop on the floor, and she wouldn’t even notice it; she’d just go right on yacking away like nothing happened. The doctor said she had an extra set of tear ducts and it was nothing to worry about, but just the same, it was a pretty unsettling thing to see.

  But she was short. She only came up to my armpit and, matriarchy or not, I felt confident that she would never catch up with me, so I walked up to her in the hall before class on Monday morning and asked her would she go steady.

  “Would I?” she bellowed like a wounded buffalo. “Oh, Dobie, I have been waiting for this day since nursery school!”

  “Try to keep it down, will you?” I said, looking nervously at the crowd that was gathering.

  “I love you!” she shrieked and her eyes started running like a couple of fire hoses. If the bell hadn’t of rung right then for class, I would of died of mortification.

  Well, I got to admit she did love me and she did try her best to make me happy. She was always bringing me little things to eat and she did my homework and she straightened the part in my hair and, to tell you the truth, it wouldn’t of been too bad if it hadn’t of been for the music. That’s what bugged me: the music. I like music, you understand. When I hear a tune with a good rocking beat, I am out there on the dance floor like Jack B. Nimble. If Gidgie would of stuck to rock and roll, I wouldn’t of complained for one second, but she would only play rock and roll once in a blue moon. The rest of the time it was Bach and Beethoven and even worse; she also composed stuff herself and that was the spookiest of all.

  “Dobie,” she would scream, “you’ve got to try to appreciate good music! Try, try, try!”

  So I would sit in the music room in her house, surrounded by about 30,000 different instruments, and she would hack away on a viola or tootle on a bassoon, crying all the while, and I would feel my legs falling asleep and my head toppling over on my chest, and just before I slipped into a coma, she would play a little rock and roll to revive me.

  This went on every blessed day until I began to fear for my sanity. Believe me, I would of chucked it in a minute, but then what? Where would I find another girl my size?

  And then, out of the blue, miraculously, I found one! I came to class one morning and there was Esme Lauterbach, a new girl in town. A smasheroo she was—a real zinger! Her hair was yellowish brown and her eyes were goldenish green, and her build was round and plentiful. And—best of all—her height was 61.9 inches tall!

  Well, naturally all the guys in the class were ogling her with mad desire, so I knew if I wanted to nail down this little smasher, I would have to move fast. I made up my mind to grab her when the period was over and walk her to the next class.

  As soon as the bell rang, I started for her desk, but halfway there I got stopped cold. I saw her take a little brown leather case out of the desk, open it, pull out a wire that was attached to the case, and stick it in her ear. Well, that bugged me, you may be sure! Was it a purse? Was it a hearing aid? Or what?

  Everybody was gaping at Esme, but she didn’t pay any attention. She just walked down the hall with the leather case in her hand and the wire in her ear. She was kind of smiling to herself and her feet were moving in a little rhythm step.

  That’s when it came to me—when I saw her feet moving. All of a sudden I dug it. She was carrying a portable radio—one of those personal portables that you plug in your ear and only you can hear it.

  Then I knew what I had to do, and I didn’t waste a second. I came running up to her, held out my arms, and said, “Dance?”

  “Crazy, dad,” said she. She stepped into my arms and laid her cheek on mine so I could hear through the ear plug too. It was Danny and the Juniors singing “At the Hop,” which gave Esme and me a chance to do some cool jiving all the way down the corridor to the history class while the whole school stood and watched us with their mouths open, including Mr. Lambretta, the principal.


  And so began the happiest time of my life. Golden day followed golden day; I never knew such joy existed! There was only one bad spot, and that was when I had to tell Gidgie it was all over between us. Gidgie was a creep and pretty wild and all, but just the same, she had a good heart and I hated to break it. I tried to let her down as gently as I could, but before I even got two words out, she started to cry, but I mean really cry—all four ducts open and pumping. I hung around and patted her for a couple of hours, and finally she got control of herself and gave me a dreary little smile and said, “Okay, Dobie, if that’s what you want, I hope you’ll be very happy.”

  I shook her hand and said, “Thanks, Gidgie. You’re a real human being.”

  Then she started to cry again, but I couldn’t pat her any more because I had to go home for supper.

  But except for this moist episode with Gidgie, life was beautiful. Esme and I got along like a house afire. She was just as wacked about music as Gidgie was, but this time I didn’t mind, because Esme was strictly a rock and roll bug, which so am I. In fact, Esme told me she liked rock and roll better than anything in the world, and in her book, the real geniuses of our time were not the guys who were shooting missiles at the moon but the guys who compose rock and roll music.

  Well, of course I couldn’t compose rock and roll, but I could sure dance it, and, brother, we did plenty of that! They made us stop jiving in the corridor at school but every day after school we went over to Esme’s house and danced up a storm. On Saturday I would tear over to Esme’s as soon as I finished my Palship Walk with Pa, and we would dance the whole afternoon away. Saturday nights we went to the Teen-Age Canteen and danced till ten. Sundays we soaked our feet in brine.

  Well, like I said, golden day followed golden day, and sometimes I would get a nervous feeling that things were too good. Something terrible was bound to come along and louse me up. I knew it in my bones, and I was right.