Lori D’Angelo

SMALL MEN

Ever since seeing the movie Tiptoes, I decided that finding a small man is the way to go. In the movie, Carol (Kate Beckinsale) falls in love with Steven (Matthew McConaughey). She doesn’t find out until she gets pregnant that Steven, her seemingly perfect boyfriend, comes from a family of dwarfs. Dwarfism is genetic, and Steven can’t handle it when their baby turns out to be a dwarf too. Eventually, Steven’s dwarf brother, Rolfe (Gary Oldman) helps Carol raise the baby when Steven can’t. He turns out to be a wonderful father.

If the portrayal of dwarves in the movie is accurate, then small men are much more sensitive than regular-sized ones. Now I know it’s dangerous to generalize, but regular men are so very insensitive. Take Bob, the last guy I dated, he claimed that he really needed money to help pay off the $60,000 student debt he wracked up as undergrad. He could have had a full-tuition scholarship, but he blew it drinking and partying and then took eight years to graduate. So I nicely offered to lend him some money, but to do this I had to get a cash advance from my credit card. A better man wouldn’t have accepted. Now I’ll be paying off the interest until at least 2010. And what did he do with the money? Bought himself a vacuum sealer and an industrial-sized freezer.

I think the dwarf idea is a good one. The only thing is I’m not sure how to meet small men. There’s a web site called http://www.littlepeoplemeet.com/, but since I’m not a dwarf (I’m like a giant to dwarves at 5’ 6’’.) I feel like I can’t join it. It might be a violation of trust. I mean I might go on there, meet a nice guy, and then what if he found out I was normal-sized, would that put an end to the relationship? Would he say -— How could you do this to me? –- then stomp off melodramatically on his little legs. I’ve thought about placing a personal ad, something like normal sized Single White Female seeking man of small stature. But I wonder would that make me seem weird?

The thing is I’m not weird. I’m perfectly normal. I’m just sick of dealing with average-sized men. They feel such a sense of entitlement about everything, which I’m beginning to find unbearable. Even some of my students. Average guys are some of the ones who come up with the worst excuses for missing class. Such as, I had a doctor’s appointment. My insensitive response: Isn’t there any other time that you could schedule it? How many times do I have to tell them that you can only miss so many classes before you fail? This one student who didn’t turn in a crucial 100-point-assignment, I saw him out partying on a Monday night.

Granted, I was out partying too. This was back before I had given up hope on finding a man through the bar scene especially in a town overrun by undergrads. Because I look young, students are always stopping to ask me, sometimes in a flirty way: So are you a sophomore? I am tempted to answer, I am practically old enough to be your mother, even though this isn’t true and no one would believe this. Still, I feel like because of their immaturity, any relationship with an undergrad would be the emotional equivalent of Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate all over again except for real. That thought is terribly depressing. I am not yet thirty and therefore not old enough to be Mrs. Robinson or even Demi Moore with her young lover/husband on her arm looking like a cherub next to her too-skinny-to-be-real body.

Later, I turned to the Internet. I wrote about how I liked to write and met a poet/warrior. (Only his poetry was bad and he never actually fought in a real war or even belonged to the real military.) After that failed, I let friends set me up. Next, I took to meeting people through a liberal church group. Through Next Gen of Church Leaders, I met Allister, a man who was 32 and bald. See, he wasn’t that old, but he looked old. And he had acne and bad breath, so when I thought about kissing him, my stomach turned. I tried to be nice and give him the I’m-just-interested-in-friendship-right-now-because-I’m at-a-transitional-period-in-my-life speech. Still, he insisted on driving up from Arlington, Virginia, to see me and cried when he told me about his last failed relationship and I thought, I’m too pretty to be wasting my time on this loser. He asked to see my CD collection. I made up excuses why not. He stayed for a weekend. On Sunday, I took him to church. For some reason, it really annoyed me when he told me that his church was better than mine.

I’m sick of all these average-sized men. I’ve been trying for so long. My first bad experience with a man came early. It was the tongue-in-my-ear-on-the-first-date scenario. After we went bowling and he kept trying to help me hold the ball. So okay, I was bad, but him helping me lift the ball off the ball-holder or whatever you call it was not going to change that. Next we went to see what felt like the longest movie ever made. Finally, during the middle, if there was a middle since it was Pulp Fiction which is told in violent chunks and is not a great first date movie to begin with and seemed to drag on and on, I asked him to take me home. He did not call again, and for reasons I can’t fully explain, I was disappointed.

In my quest to find the perfect small man, I decided to ask around. You know go the six-degrees-of-separation route. So I casually asked co-workers, So do you know any eligible dwarves? That’s subtle, right? Well, I guess there just aren’t that many out there because when I asked about it, no one seemed to know any dwarves and more than that, everyone gave me a strange look, a look like what the hell is wrong with you, like I’ve tried to walk off with the department stapler in my pocket or something. So, I decided quickly, since I don’t want to be known as the weird girl with the fetish, to drop the topic. I mean maybe all the eligible small men really are taken. This makes me sad.

Alone at night in bed, I imagine me and my dwarf lover, the logistics of how it would work. He would probably be on top since I would probably weigh more. And I would What a wonderful little man you are. Maybe I need to move somewhere bigger, somewhere like a New York City to find my perfect dwarf man. But this seems too drastic. This would entail quitting my job, finding another one, and not only another one, but one that pays enough to enable me to pay ridiculously priced New York City rent. Maybe it would be worth it if I knew for sure that I would find the little man of my dreams, but there are no guarantees.

Then a great thought occurs to me. Maybe the place to meet dwarves is right under my nose, has been all the time—The Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. I check their website and they are not due to come through town until April. I decide to buy tickets for all five days even if some of the days are matinee shows and I have to take off work. Then another thought occurs to me—What if there are no dwarves in the circus anymore? It’s been years since I’ve been to one. Or worse yet, what if there are dwarves and I can’t meet them? I mean what if they don’t allow the patrons and the performers to mix? What if they are like Hollywood stars and make you keep your distance? This thought is too horrible to bear. I do what I must. I sign up for ezines at the circus website.

Then I decide to try the Internet again. I am getting desperate. I go to http://www.dwarfdate.com/. This site is for little people and their friends. I am a friend. Maybe I can create an online account there. I decide to be optimistic and try. Who knows? This could be the way I meet my future husband—a sensitive strapping 4’ 5’’ specimen of masculinity. Maybe he would be smiley like Doc or smart like Grumpy with his Lou Grant-like pessimism. (Come to think of it Ed Asner was kind of short and definitely sexy). And maybe not, maybe I won’t find my little Mr. Right, but I can dream, can’t I?

Lori D'Angelo is an MFA student in fiction at West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in Pequin, Red Ink Journal and Hamilton Stone Review. She is also a reader for the online literary journal, Swink.