Four Feet Tall and Rising Read Online Free Page A

so I stored it under my bed, just like he’d had to do as a kid with his tools. And just like his dad, he beat the shit out of me anytime I did something he deemed “gay.” My dreams of opening a business had to stay hidden.
    To get Dad off my back, I took a job at the Exxon gas station down the street from my house. I pumped gas for tips, and I met this young guy who worked there, Richard. I was in the Cub Scouts, believe it or not, and he’d been an Eagle Scout. He was into guns, and used to make his own ammunition. He taught me how to make homemade ammunition and had me label the baggies .22 or .45, and then he’d sell the shells at gun shows.
    Richard was much older than me, twenty-one. I have no idea why my parents let me run around with a guy that much older. Dad was probably relieved to see me pumping gas instead of typing memos. Whatever the reason, they let me travel to gun shows with Richard or go out target shooting. The first time I shot a gun, I almost shot his girlfriend’s foot off. I couldn’t aim, and I didn’t realize there would be a “kick.”Richard wanted to take me on a hunting trip. I never wanted to kill an animal, but any excuse to get out of the house was a good one.
    We drove somewhere out in the mountains. I got a shot off and was able to kill a deer. But I didn’t see any sense in it. I told Richard I didn’t wanna go hunting anymore. I said, “Let’s go shoot shit. I’d rather shoot a damn car window, just to destroy something, just to make noise, before I ever shoot another animal.” He didn’t get it. He didn’t understand me. But me, I felt like … to hell with humans. I’d rather be with Coco than talk to a fucking human. I’d rather live my life alone with dogs than with humans. He threw that deer in the back of his old, red-ass Ford, then he dropped me off at the house. I didn’t eat the deer, and I never went hunting again.

    By the time I was in sixth grade, Reseda was a changed town. All the blue-collar union jobs were disappearing, and the neighborhood was slipping from middle class to working class. White families were moving away and Latino immigrants were moving in. Income levels went down, gangs started sprouting up, and the schools emptied. The city started busing kids from Pacoima into Blythe Street School to keep the doors open.
    As everything around him changed, Dad’s racism reared its ugly head again. I was allowed to have friends over to the house as long as they were white. It never made sense to me. How could a Little Person be a racist? How could Dad be aracist when he’d been judged his whole life for being a midget? He knew what it was to be treated differently.
    Nonnie taught me that everyone was the same. She never had a racist bone in her body; she wasn’t raised that way. Maybe having parents that worked in the circus, she met different people, and that gave her a more open mind. However she came to her opinions, it didn’t matter. She passed her acceptance of diversity on to me and I listened. My dad may have been a racist ass but Nonnie’s influence won out. I became friends with Sean and Oscar.
    They were Mexicans from Pacoima. It was like they were from another world. They felt different like I felt different. I couldn’t do everything the tall kids could do. The gap between me and my classmates had widened into a chasm. Before the Mexican kids showed up, I was basically alone with my difference, and when you get treated differently, you act differently. Once Sean and Oscar showed up, it was like my people had arrived. They understood that I understood what it was to be different in an all-white suburban school. A bond of friendship began, and the closer I got to Sean and Oscar, the more my white friends drifted away. Not that I had so many to drift.
    I wasn’t even close to my own sisters. They were so much older than me, they considered me a child, not a brother. If Mom and Dad left the house, they made Linda or Janet babysit me.