I paid very little attention to The Underground City or the ten-foot chicken, the 62-MPH roller coaster, The Space Shuttle, The Early American Village, or Winter Wonderland.
I had gone on that expedition expressly to see Gnomeland.
Age eleven, I had never seen another dwarf, except on television or in drawings and photographs.
When I entered Gnomeland, I could not believe my eyes. It didn’t matter to me that they were all dressed in cute little costumes with bells attached to stocking caps and felt shoes on their feet, that the men wore fake white beards and some of the men and women wore cone-shaped red hats.
I laughed aloud at the buttons some wore proclaiming THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE GNOME.
I saw some with humps and some without, some wizened and ugly and some not, some old, some young—they all looked good to me.
I imagined (or I didn’t) that they were all smiling at me especially, as though we all shared a fantastic secret.
Still, shyly, I stayed by Robot, who must have read my bashfulness as some sort of reluctance.
“Are you bothered by this, Sydney?”
“Bothered?”
“By this … commercialization?”
“I’m not bothered,” I told him, not really sure what he was talking about. I added, “Anything but,” longing to speak to one of them, to get my nerve up to say something.
But all I managed was a futile tug at the arm of Robot’s coat when he said all right, next was the boat ride through The Underground City.
“Come on, Sydney!” Robot called as I fell behind. “Get ready to row row row your boat!”
A hunchback dwarf with a fat cigar in his mouth stood at a microphone singing, “You’re gnomebody ’til somebody loves you….”
I believed that I had died and gone to heaven.
When I got back to Twin Oaks, I wrote to Gnomeland, asking how old you had to be to get a job there, and enclosed a stamped self-addressed envelope to be sure of an answer.
I remember you but stay in school, a Mr. T. Kamitses wrote back. Get an etucation. Anyways, this is the last year Gnomeland will be at Stardust Park, for our contrack was not renewed. Good luck!
I kept the letter. Even with its bad news and bad spelling it was the only communication I’d ever had with another like me.
Six years later, walking through Stardust Park, I thought about that day.
That day was the beginning of when I knew I’d make it.
Of course I knew she was Little Little La Belle the instant I saw her by the shuttered cotton candy stand.
I was walking along, looking for some sign of the trailer camp mentioned in this note awaiting me when I’d checked in at The Stardust Inn:
Hey, Roach, remember your old buddy Digger Starr? Me and Laura Given got married and now have twin daughters. I’m playing my last year for The Bombers. We got a trailer parked in the trailer camp near the park if you can make dinner Fri. night about 7. Our rig is the silver one with the babies yelling inside (ha! ha!) so show up for a special dinner in honor of the sellebrity. (You.) It will be swell to see you so show up from your old buddy, D.S.
If I had to go anywhere at night, I liked to figure out my route ahead of time. I looked for well-lighted bus stops and streets with stores along the route, figuring out any moves I might be forced to make by gangs of kids, or a dog, or a mugger.
If the trailer park was close to the Inn, I planned to take a taxi, and this was what I was working on when I saw her.
I had a chance to look at her before she spotted me. Aside from Dora, who appeared on national television as The Dancing Lettuce Leaf in the Melody Mayonnaise commercials, she was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen.
I’d only seen Dora on the tube, watching sometimes for hours to catch a glimpse of her, so Little Little La Belle was the most beautiful dwarf I’d ever seen in person.
If I had conjured up an ideal female out of my imagination, I couldn’t have surpassed what I saw standing by COTTON CANDY in the late afternoon sunlight. She had long blond hair that shined and spilled down past her shoulders, and unlike the girls at Leprechaun Village she wore a dress instead of pants. She had long legs for someone so tiny, and she was thin and still tanned from summer.
The great disadvantage of being The Roach was that, without my shell, few people knew that was who I was. Some of my groupies who waited for me regularly when I made appearances had come to know me without it, but mostly I was an anonymous dwarf.
I think I am by nature a performer, and away from the hot lights of local TV stations, or the crowds at some place like The Golden Dragon (in long lines to receive one free fortune cookie in honor of its opening), I am not pushy. I see my hump reflected in watery patterns of store windows and pull my sweater down where it rides up in back, and cover my buck fang with my hand. I have my downs.
They pass. I am normally noisy, dancing to my radio and tapes in my room over Palmer Pest Control, cracking jokes and amiable around people, and in my daydreams stepping before the footlights like Michael Dunn, who played the dwarf in the movie Ship of Fools. Sometimes I see myself beating a tiny tin drum like Oskar in Günter Grass’s book … and sometimes in my act I sing under my shell, imagining myself singing windowpanes to pieces as Oskar did. I am a closet tenor who dreams of stepping out of his closet, and out from under the shell, to thrill the crowds with “Danny Boy.”
When Little Little La Belle finally did look in my direction,
