Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
One I can handle. Two, no problem. But the lobby of this hotel is absolutely swarming with dwarfs. There's an old bald dwarf wearing wire-rim glasses, a hipster dwarf sporting a snazzy goatee, Gen-X dwarfs in T-shirts that say NORMAL PEOPLE WORRY ME, a gang of teenage dwarfs cruising by with the insular telepathy of teenagers everywhere -- they don't have to look at each other to know they're all there, marching shoulder to shoulder through the clueless adult world. There are dwarfs with normal heads and dwarfs with the classic pushed-in dwarfy look -- big forehead, retracted nose, and bulged-out chin, as if God had pushed his thumb on the bridge of their nose and everything else squeezed out accordingly. A few have jumbo-size heads. Some have robin's-breast chests that make them look like tiny superheroes. Others zip around in motorized wheelchairs and scooters, a few lying flat and others kneeling and some scrunched down into their chairs like crabs into shells. And there's one-over by the placard that says WELCOME TO ATLANTA, WHERE LITTLE PEOPLE ARE SPECIAL PEOPLE -- who isn't much more than stick legs jammed into a head. And another one all twisted and folded into himself like a human pocketknife, his muscular arms festooned with tattoos. And let us not overlook the dwarf women, like that classic California sand bunny with the teased blond hair...or that Bianca Jagger look-alike...or that cute little thing in the tank top, showing off her tanned belly. Dwarf babes, who knew? And who knew that flat-chestedness would be such a rarity, here in the lobby of the Atlanta Airport Marriott Hotel at the start of thefortieth annual Little People of America convention? Their big butts and big boobs make them almost a parody of the Playboy ideal. Or a rebuke.
And look at this, here in the hallway leading to the convention office, this innocent little baby riding a tiny tricycle. How sweet, how adora--
But wait. Something is wrong. The baby looks like a baby, exactly like a baby, with a perfect bald baby head and puffy white baby cheeks. But real babies can't maneuver like that, can't frown with that look of worried intelligence. Real babies can barely keep their heads from wobbling around like dashboard trolls. And it's not just me. The other people standing in the hallway are also watching him with the same charmed and confused expression, clearly feeling the same oddly pleasant subliminal dislocation.
And that pretty young woman with the lank hair and exhausted eyes? She's about two feet taller than most of the other people in the hall and she's been watching the not-a-baby like a mama hawk. And now she's zeroed in on me, following my lips as I make verbal notes into my tape recorder, eyes boring away like she's trying to see right through me -- right through me into my corrupt and voyeuristic soul. To put us both at ease, I step over and ask if she'd mind answering just a few questions, please.
"I have a lot of questions for you," she says. "Where are you from? What are you writing?" She's so upset she's starting to cry.
"I -- I'm a reporter," I say. "I'm here to cov--"
"Who said you could be here? What did you put on that tape about my son?"
"I have permission to be here," I say, feeling the eyes of the dwarfs in the hallway upon me. Can they see into me too? See the teenage poseur with the morbid streak and the dog-eared copies of Franz Kafka and Zap Comix; see him toking up for that memorable midnight screening of Todd Browning's Freaks on St. Marks Place when everyone chanted along at the wedding banquet of beauty and the dwarf: we accept her, we accept her, one of us? Man, how juvenile that seems now. These are real people, not some clever transgressive ficciones. Even the most twisted of them zip through the lobby in their custom wheelchairs, looking for a friend. So I talk on, alarmed by her alarm, trying to reassure her, telling her I'm here to write an article for Esquire magazine and I talked to Lee Kitchens of the Little People of America and even joined the LPA myself -- paid my hundred dollars and joined. But she isn't listening. She's glancing around, grabbing my arm, looking for help. She asks someone to watch her son and tugs on my arm, pulling me down the hall toward the LPA office. "I want to find out what you're doing here," she says, still on the verge of tears.
I tell her it's okay, I'm coming, please don't worry.
"Some people are very exploitative. I want to know what you're doing."
I don't argue with her. She's so upset, it's clear that the last thing she needs is an argument. I want to tell her I'm not some kind of Hard Copy scumbag but a genuine sensitive guy and serious writer who just spent a whole nightmare summer helping his mother deal with the cancer behind her nose, a summer of CT scans and MRIs and sonograms and echocardiograms and angiocardiograms and two complete physicals and at least a dozen debriefings of her medical history and hours and hours of waiting in hallways alongside patients slumped in wheelchairs and stretched out on gurneys with their chemo-yellow skin and that disturbing radioactive peach fuzz that clings to their bald heads like some kind of mutant postnuclear algae...and she just had surgery and is in the hospital recovering at this very moment and the radiation treatments are next and I just came here for a little friggin' relief. I've outgrown the weird science phase, really...
In the Little World. Copyright © by John Richardson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
