Everything a dwarf needed to figure out, Knox had figured out. Even though he didn’t have a hump like some of us, and was this miniature marvel of a good-looking guy, he never called himself a midget or a little person.
He’d stand on his box and shout, “The word is ‘dwarf’!”
He’d lecture us that blacks didn’t get anywhere calling themselves “colored” or “Negro”; that all of us were duty bound to call ourselves the worst thing anyone could call us: dwarf—“And make it beautiful!” he’d roar.
He was the only dwarf I’d ever met whose mother and father had been dwarfs, too, though I’d heard of a few such cases. There was a dwarf who’d played in a major league baseball game who’d had dwarf parents. He was Edward Gaedel and he’d played one game for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, as a stunt. But the vast majority of us are flukes in our families.
Knox had appeared in an act with his folks in a series of second-rate carnivals, where they were billed as The Inch Family. He was also the only dwarf in Leprechaun Village who’d been earning his living since he could walk, in one form or another of sleazy show business, until both his parents died. He liked to dress all in white, and said it was because of all the years he could never wear white, when he was working carnies in dusty lots, or on the road for weeks with no place to get his clothes cleaned.
Some of them in the dorm didn’t like him; some were fascinated by him; all agreed he had the smarts, and we called him “Opportunity.”
There was a time in Skaneateles, New York, where I’d been sent away from a job on a cold February night because the hostess of the Valentine party hadn’t been told I had a hump. She said there was no way I could play Cupid, since I was supposed to appear practically naked. Anyway, she said, Cupid wasn’t a hunchback. Instead of the hundred dollars I’d been promised, in addition to a hotel room and meals, she gave me a twenty, and said to please leave before the guests arrived.
Later on in my large, comfortable room at The Skaneateles Inn, feasting on filet mignon and watching the snow fall on Skaneateles Lake, I gave silent thanks to Opportunity Knox.
I also learned, from then on, always to mention the hump, though later, as The Roach, that never mattered. I had my plastic shell covering me as I performed.
Mr. Palmer said, “Sydney, you’ll have a room with a view, color TV, a separate bath—nothing but the best! You’ll be put up at the Stardust Inn. I’m staying there myself!”
Although I’d never been in La Belle, New York, I knew about the Inn. As a youngster, I’d gone with others from Twin Oaks for an outing at an amusement park on the outskirts of La Belle: Stardust Park.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m glad to do it.”
“Sydney,” he said, getting off his desk, “La Belle has a fine library, too.”
The few times we’d traveled anywhere together, I often had Mr. Palmer leave me at the local library while he took care of business.
I was comfortable in libraries, and reading was my passion.
Once, on a job, when I jumped out of a cold cherry pie at a George Washington’s Birthday bachelor party, the guest of honor and I got talking.
He told me he was a psychologist, and he wanted to question me about my life-style. He was drunk—they always are at bachelor parties—and when he found out how much I read, he leaned into me and suggested, “You’re overcompenshating, Shydney.”
“For what?”
“For being sho short,” he said. “You want to know sho much sho people forget your shize.” Before he fell face down into his plate he added, “You esh-esh-cape that way, too.”
After I became The Roach, I read even more, and then I think I was overcompensating, not for being a dwarf, but for being a high school dropout.
That was something I didn’t thank Opportunity Knox for; it was his example I’d followed. He used to tell us all we needed was to say that we’d graduated from high school. “You can fake it!” he’d say. “You can fake anything!”
Once he told me, “We can’t walk to where we’ve got to get, Sydney, because our dear little legs won’t get us there as fast as the competition’s. So we’ve got to jump!”
In his room at the dorm in Leprechaun Village he had one of those signs that said THINK. THINK had been crossed out, and HUSTLE had been written over it. Then HUSTLE had been crossed out, and SCHEME! had been written over that.
Mr. Palmer shook my hand. “Sydney, then it’s settled? You’ll make your appearance at halftime, do the guest shot for the little La Belle girl’s party, and I want you to have dinner with Mr. Hiroyuki and me one night. The rest of the time you’re on your own…. Do you still read and watch TV at the same time?”
“Yes,” I said. “That way I don’t miss anything.”
“From my way of looking at it, you miss two very important things,” said Mr. Palmer. “You miss the point of what you’re reading and the point of what you’re watching.”
He laughed and slapped my back, and we started toward the door together.
I remembered something else from my days at Leprechaun Village: a dwarf with bad legs, like mine, whom we called Artoo-Detoo, because he walked like the robot in the old film Star Wars.
“Imagine thinking back to a time when you were another
