I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (11 page)

For our part, Ryan and I tried to combat this misapprehension by driving around tourist hot spots and smash-and-grabbing whatever was on hand in rental Sebrings. But there
is
one thing tourists have gotten nearly right about Miami, and it’s couched in the old jape that goes:
What’s so great about Miami, other than the beaches, is it’s so close to the United States!
The implication here is that Miami is this weird sovereignty in but not of America. This is true, in a way.

The chicken to that joke’s egg is the stereotype of the Miami Person. The Miami Person, as far as I’ve gathered, is a balking, Judeo-Latin alloy of dress shoes, jeans, dress shirt half buttoned, white gold—and vacuousness, gaucheness, childishness, ill temper. The stereotype is, I think, meant to be repellent in a cautionary way.
Here’s a person who is unlike your typical American,
it implies.
Here’s a person—an alien—who isn’t really a part of your union, and who seems fine with that.
There’s some truth to this, too.

For all intents and purposes, Miami is the capital of the Island of South Florida, which runs 110 miles from West Palm Beach to Homestead. This island separates Everglades National Park from the Atlantic by as many as 20 or as few as 5 miles. The populace is a true crazy quilt. In Miami, half the people are foreign-born, and about three-quarters speak a language that isn’t English. She is the sixth-poorest city in the nation, Miami, yet one out of every ten of her citizens is a millionaire. People coexist, but on mutually unintelligible planes: Cuban Miami, Haitian Miami, white, black, Nicaraguan, Colombian Miamis. The place is so spread out, and traversed only by private automobile. People can and do drop from their lives anyone with whom they choose not to associate. And since people are so strange and separate, they understand one another only in general. If they have to interact, they do so from a sort of ritualized stance. They believe each other to be their antipodes. How they define themselves is as wrapped up in this opposition as is muscle around bone.

It’s been ten years since I lived in Miami, and three since I stayed more than a few days. This guilts me to no end, for though Miami is a young city with few long-standing ties, her sons are doting. To leave is considered a kind of betrayal. The vast majority of my old friends and acquaintances never did. There were a few besides me who moved out of state, but from what I heard, they came back looking ailed and grizzled; malarial, as though the place had borne something into their blood.

Which is to say: the Island of South Florida is also hermetic-feeling. Mainly because of its monsoon climate, the only one in the country. The weather patterns in South Florida are most similar to those of the Amazon, central Africa, and Southeast Asia, meaning that there are only about three weeks per calendar year when oxygen needn’t be ginned out of the thick air like seeds in cotton. The rest of the time, the simmering out-of-doors
might as well be the surface of some furnace planet; equatorial Venus.

In South Florida, plants grow malignant fruit, and are studded or spiked. (In my neighborhood, we’d check under the kapok tree every week for newly fallen branches, because they made excellent maces in our rock fights.) Ditches never drain, and galaxies of stinging insects float through them. So many people drown in the canals and morasses bordering roads that citizens are encouraged to drive with metal stakes in their glove boxes, to shatter windows from the inside. There are hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, of course. Exotic snakes in car engines; weeds pushing through cement by main force. Mesozoic cockroaches that can
fly.
There, ocean-land air masses rub together like excited hands and produce quiverfuls of the country’s deadliest lightning. I was once caught out on Papa’s fishing skiff in one of those lightning storms. We each grabbed our ankles and aimed our asses at the heavens. If you’re going to get struck by lightning, that’s where you want it, right in the austral kisser. We stayed that way for only a minute, though, smelling ozone and having our hair mussed, because everything in South Florida fills its moment entirely and then vanishes.

It’s the nature of the place. It’s hothouse America. It’s so hyperfecund. It abides nothing. As soon as a tree sprouts or a house is built, the environment conspires to bring it down. It’s tropical entropy, the sped-up cycle of birth and decay.

Dissolution is key. Miami will have you believe that not only can the worst happen—it’s probably marshaling itself in the Atlantic. Or else it’s percolating through your walls like mold, or yawning beneath you like a sinkhole. What’s dread, what’s paranoia, when the ground you’re standing on might fall away at any moment?

“Situational awareness,” Dad was saying, still next to the TV, snorting and blowing to clear his nose. He caught a Rorschach blob in his left hand, pantomimed a little
olé!

He was planning the logistics for our trip to an upcoming Oakland A’s baseball game. The news so far had told him that: 1) There was someone shooting at cars on the 101; and 2) Oakland, crime-wise, was doing what Oakland does.

“Head on a goddamn swivel.” He bobbled his in example. “Look at the size and shape of me—I didn’t get to seventy-one by accident.”

Ever since Dad quit smoking a few years ago, he’s back to being stout through the middle like a capital D. His color is still that of overmilked coffee, which he pounds to get through the day. He is exactly
This Tall →
tall enough to ride rides.

He’s maybe an inch or two shorter than my favorite hockey player of all time, Theo Fleury. Christ, I loved Fleury. I used to watch him on TV with a bagged loaf of raisin bread in my lap, stoking a huge new hunger, me leaning against the shuttered footrest of my father’s Larson-model La-Z-Boy, the one sized expressly for short people, because if I sat on it my knees would be all up in my face. Fleury was the only All-Star who might have been of distant relation. Not only did he seem to whir through the legs of bestriding defensemen, insurgent, on his way to score goal after goal—he also brooked no shit.

Behind the play, Fleury would slash Achilles, give a nice spear along the glass. If an opponent came at him, he would pike his hockey stick and dare the challenger to come through it. When the action was whistled dead, he’d crane his neck and chirp at goons he really had no business giving the red-ass. I’d mold my mouth while watching him, try to feel out his words. In these moments, Fleury’s brows would open up and away like launch silo doors. His eyes showed a horseshoe of sclera above the green irises, a crazy amount of white. And he would nod
nonstop, agreeing wholeheartedly with whatever the big guy was saying—couldn’t wait for it, in fact, the mutually assured destruction.

Fleury is part French, part Cree, five feet six inches tall. He spent his childhood in Russell, Manitoba, a moony snowscape of 1,500, with his alcoholic father and bedridden, depressive mother. His time he bided at the rink. “It was like I belonged somewhere for the first time,” he wrote in his autobiography. “For me, it wasn’t a fantasy. It’s not like I dreamed of getting in the National Hockey League; I was getting ready to go into the NHL.”

Fleury was sent to a nearby hockey school after neighbors and family friends raised the money. There, he met a coach who told him he had the talent to make the pros in spite of his size. Later, when Fleury was in his mid-teens, that same coach recruited him onto his junior team in Winnipeg. In junior hockey, Fleury realized, “I had to protect myself, and the best way to do that was to have people believe I was crazy. This was my competitive advantage. I didn’t have size, but I was volatile. Teams found out that they could beat the shit out of me and I would not back down. I made the choice to live by the sword.”

Fleury roomed with a billet family, but his coach demanded he stay overnight with him two or three times a week. These nights, Fleury would wrap himself with his blanket as tightly as possible and cry himself to sleep. “He’d wait until the middle of the night, and then he’d crawl around the room in the dark on his hands and knees,” Fleury wrote. “He had the blinds ducttaped to the windows so no light could get in. It was the same every time. He would start massaging my feet and I wouldn’t move, pretending to be asleep. He would try to come up higher, but with that blanket wrapped so tight, he couldn’t get at me. [He] convinced me that, if not for him and his help, I would not be going to the NHL. As far as I was concerned, the reason
for my whole existence was to make it to The Show. It was all I had.”

When I was eight, after Fleury had recorded his second hundred-point NHL season, I sent away for a life-size poster of him. Along one edge of the poster was a rule by which you could measure your growth. My notches on it were regular if closely spaced until the period between my senior year of high school and my sophomore year of college. That’s when I had growth spurts and finally crested the thing.

The reason I shot up was a mild case of Marfan’s syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects connective tissue. Long story short, I retained my small-person core but wound up with taffied limbs and thin joints that waggle through all 360 degrees of motion. Also, I have an inverted breastbone—a sunken chest; you could serve salsa out of me—which means that, eventually, my aorta will weaken and dilate, and time or a hard blow might cause my heart to stop.

Accordingly, I’m trapped in that juvenile stage when one feels as though he’s a tiny pilot berthed inside his gawky vessel. (
Splice the main brace! Something the topmast! Christ Jesus, proprioception!
) My shit’s all out of whack. My hands never grew, so they’re furtive-looking. My feet did, but they’re a hindrance, dry-land flippers. I don’t believe I ever relearned how to walk correctly. I lollop with my legs out in front of my hips, until my shoulders begin to slide toward the ground, whereupon I pitch my carriage forward, restarting the whole dynamic. People tell me that this gait calls to mind a lone baker trying to carry a monumentally tiered cake, or Bernie from
Weekend at Bernie’s.
When I glimpse my reflection in storefronts and subway windows, I’m astonished—I’m taller than people! I can’t help but continue to see from a truncated point of view.

Now, popular misconception has it that Napoleon was short. He was not. The confusion can be traced to the British
press of that era, who lampooned Napoleon by depicting him as tiny in cartoons. In fact, Napoleon stood five-foot-six, a good three imperial inches taller than average back then.

Which is interesting, because in 1908 a psychoanalyst named Alfred Adler based his theory of the inferiority complex, aka the Napoleon complex, aka short-man syndrome, on his supposition that Napoleon thirsted for power and conquest and was in general the Western world’s dread retributive agent all because his ass was short.

According to Adler, Napoleon was short and thus felt physically and spiritually inadequate. He compensated for this feeling of inadequacy by inventing a goal—a world where he had power, respect,
puissance
—and directing his every effort toward its realization. He was very successful in his pursuit of this goal, for a time. But, as his life (and winter campaigns) made clear, pursuit is one thing, overpursuit something else.

The Napoleon complex is not included in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The book says there’s no empirical evidence suggesting that shortness correlates with aggressiveness or any other behavioral anomaly. Today, psychologists consider the Napoleon complex a social stereotype, the kind of thinking that lives on through post hoc rationalizations like “He was a little ball of hate, of course he was, that poor, tiny man.”

We’ve had one nonseasonal portrait taken, the Russells. I was fourteen, my sisters sixteen and eighteen, my parents on the windward side of middle age, Papa and Papa Lou hanging on. Last chance together and all that. We drove down to Sears in our funereal best. We ordered ourselves in front of a slate curtain. We stood there clutching one another for a minute and a half. Then the photographer, who had been shielded behind a giant plastic clown’s face, addressed us through its toothless grin: “One a y’all need to step forward,” she said, “because y’all
the
same damn size.
” No one did. Dad and I refused to stand on phone books. Thus pictured, we looked like an intergenerational police lineup called in for a crime a classy dwarf committed.

As a clan, we are pygmoidal. This doesn’t faze the women. The men, however: smallness becomes us.

Papa sometimes behaved as though the membrane separating his self from the outside world was more tightly conscribed than it ought to be. Whenever he thought someone might permeate it, he decked them, or pulled a knife. (It is for this reason that my family’s business is no longer welcome at Alan’s Drugs, the Hyatt Regency Miami, or the carpet samples section of Poe’s Hardware.) He did not much care for my mother and uncle’s abbreviated fame as the Florida State Circus’s
Rolla Rolla Romanchucks!

Papa Lou was more resigned about his stature, albeit in a strangely appealing way, as though he’d been spiritually foot-bound. A favorite story was how his son, my dad, once confided to him on an all-clay diamond, “I’m a little worried about my size, but I think I can become a major league baseball player.” Dad
was
a great ballplayer; in most tellings of this story, he’d just teed off on future All-Star Dougie Corbett when they both were teens in Sarasota. He had the mind for the game for sure. But Papa Lou’s response was “Start running as fast as you can.” Then he outran his son, my father, backward, laughing in his face all the way.

Dad has in his attitude some of both my grandfathers’. Rationalizing a kerfuffle in a subterranean line at Six Flags Over Georgia, he screamed: “Guys like me, in Vietnam, they used to hold us by our ankles and dip us in the tunnels! Who else but little turds do you think gets sent in to flush people out? What do you think that does to you?” Another time, I watched him slide into a seat on a bus that was bracketed by two spectacularly fat men, saying, “In survival school, I listened to Jackson lose his
shit in the solitary box next to mine. Tried to talk him down. I was comfortable, though. Could’ve made a goddamned nest in there.”