“I became a CPA largely to avoid competition."

David Covey

"All this talk of the shortness of Michael Dukakis. Listen, he's two inches taller than me." It's been getting to him, says Josh, this nitpicking about the Democratic presidential candidate's height. "This tongue-in-cheek use of 'short' in headlines — 'Did Dukakis sell Jesse short?’ That kind of thing. Or the bad jokes. ‘Beware of Greeks bearing lifts.’ And in northern California, there's a cafe that has a chair holding four phone books piled one on top the other. A sign on the top phone book says, ‘Reserved for Gov. Michael Dukakis.’

“Nobody actually says it, but don’t you think that the persistent mention of Dukakis’s ‘five-seven’ indicates that his height, or lack of same, is an issue? That there’s something wrong, amiss, out of order, about being five-seven? Perhaps it’s just variance from the norm, we Americans loving our norms so. But everyone now knows that Mike is sixty-seven inches high. Listen, I bet you can’t tell me. Hew tall is George Bush?”

Josh is five feet five inches tall in stocking feet — four inches below the norm for American males. He’s burly in shoulders and chest, short of leg; his inseam is twenty-nine inches. ‘‘The Dukakis thing has brought up a number of not pleasant thoughts and some anger at what looks to me like the stereotyping and ‘niggerization’ we short men have undergone. Statistics seem to indicate that men taller than five-ten are more successful financially, more likely to hold executive positions than shorter men.

And any poll taken on shortness in males finds that people more easily feel respect for the tall man. would more willingly be led by the tall man, will ‘look up to' the tall man and look down on’ the short man. Biology, when it comes to the short man. is, it appears, ‘destiny.’ ’’

Opening a battered copy of Mirror, Mirror: The Importance of Looks in Everyday Life by Elaine Hatfield and Susan Sprecher, Josh reads, “ ‘Our day-to-day vocabulary has an apt phrase for describing a very short man who, burdened from often an early age by his little-valued and sometimes deprecated shortness, invests extraordinary energy in demonstrating that he is at least equal to, and possibly better than, any taller man. He is, often disparagingly, said to have a ‘Napoleonic’ orientation.’

“All this talk about short men’s ‘Napoleonic complex’ outrages me — and this idea that short men try to offset their lack in stature by being tyrannical and domineering that we call ‘Napoleonic’ has entered into cultural currency as fact. No one questions it.

“Apparently, we perceive tall men, not short men, as the natural repositories of power. For a short man to attain to power must seem so incongruous that it is described as pathological in much the same way that successful women have been perceived as ‘aggressive’ or blacks who demand equality of opportunity as ‘pushy.’

“Is it any wonder that a short man, attempting to gain power, would be pushy, loud-mouthed, overaggressive? Look at J. Edgar Hoover, about five-seven, I believe. ‘The Little Bulldog,’ he was called, behind his back. He made sure official biographies described him as ‘just under six feet.’ He had a platform behind his desk for his chair, so he'd appear taller. Pitiful.

“There’s also another angle on this Napoleon issue, which is about power itself rather than male shortness. I dispute the existence of this height-specific so-called Napoleonic complex as something pathological in short men.

The quest for power itself is pathological. It is only that the quest for power shows itself in all its pathetic silliness, its hubris, for more obviously in short than in tall men.”

(In fact, Napoleon was five foot six or seven, average height for a nineteenth-century Frenchman. According to author Arno Karlen, the widespread notion of Napoleon’s shortness comes from inaccurate translation of old French feet into modem measurement.)

The summer before Josh entered seventh grade, he and his neighborhood buddies in Alpine were at a hardware store. “There was a measuring tape on a wall. We took turns standing up against the tape. I was four-ten. My friends were all over five feet — five-three, five-four. Until then I hadn't thought of height differences. It was just. ‘Some of the guys are real big.’ That morning was a revelation; ‘I am very short — very, very short.’ You know, when you get thrown — hard — onto a sidewalk and the wind is knocked out of you? That’s how I felt. And I felt: doom. Doomed. I was going to be short. Midget. Half-pint. Pipsqueak. Pygmy. Tom Thumb. Shrimp. Peewee.

“ Peewee. that was my father’s father’s nickname. Gramps was five-one. Dad was five-two. and aging, he’s shrunk. So he’s not more than five feet, flat out, now.”

Even before that morning at the hardware store. Josh believes he knew he was shorter than his friends. He was vaguely aware his father was not as tall as other fathers. "Dad’s size was never talked about. It was avoided. One of those subjects too shameful to discuss.

"When my brother, three years younger than I am [Josh is forty-four), went into sixth grade, he was even shorter than I’d been. My parents — both had college degrees — then did something that still strikes me as if it can't be true, that it didn't happen. But it did. They took Little Bro — Tim — to the pediatrician, asked about getting him growth hormones' — some kind of pituitary extract. Tim took that for about a year. But he wasn’t growing. My folks were always sticking him up against this height chart they’d penciled in the garage. To see if the hormone was working. Poor fucker would stand, getting measured. When he was in junior high, they took him to L.A. to see about surgical intervention — getting bone added to his legs. It was crazy.

Apparently they couldn't find a quack who’d do it. Tim, today, isn’t any taller than I am, and he’s obese.

“Mom and Dad never outright said, ‘Tim is too short.’ There was never, never any stated reason for why all this was going on. Too shameful.

“It was maddening in high school to watch basketball players walk by with their hands resting on the head of their girlfriends. The few girls short enough to not be unobtainable were already taken. I don’t know what percentage of women are over five-five, but it must be half.

(The average height of U S. females is just under five-four.) All of those over five-five were, to me, when I was a teenager, automatically ruled out as dates, dancing partners, even friends. I was never friends with a tall woman.

"People tell me, ‘You don’t act like a short man,' and that's given to me like a compliment. It’s the same compliment a woman gets when she’s told. ‘You think like a man.’

"An old guy who remembers Gramps described him to me as ‘a banty rooster* so Gramps must have seemed cocky and blustery to his peers. This same guy went on and on to me — chortling all the time — about Gramps. How he was a ‘natty dresser,’ how in a photograph he had of some men’s group, Gramps ‘didn’t come any higher’ than the shoulders of everyone else. How Gramps was ‘the most perfect little waltzer,’ that he recalled him at a formal dance looking like one of those tiny grooms on a wedding cake. Then this old fart sighted me in on the scope of his hunting rifle and said, ‘You’re not so tall yourself. Neither’s your father or brother. But you’re both taller than your grampaw.’

“Short men overcompensate,’’ says Josh. “You read that all the time. My reaction, the first time I read something like that, was ‘Why haven’t I had these overcompensation problems?’ But I’ve come to realize I do. I’ve developed a coping mechanism, ever since childhood, when I figured out that people didn't as readily consider short men as possible leaders, athletes, desirable sexual partners. So what I did was I abstained from competition.

“I became a CPA largely to avoid competition, came back to my home town because I was afraid I couldn’t start a business anywhere else. Married my wife because I figured she was as good as I could get. No,” he laughs, "that isn’t true.

"But it is true that no one ever kicked sand in my face, called me ‘Shorty’ or ‘Pint-size.’ ” He can recall no incident in his life that rose specifically from his being short. "I have tailored my life to avoid incidents that might shove the fact of my shortness in my face.

"The most startling incidents, to me. are encounters with other short people. Example. I walked into a bar. At a hotel where a convention was in progress. Saw this really short guy. standing, talking to two tall guys. ‘God,’ I thought, he’s really short, so short he’s kind of silly looking in a bar situation.’ Suddenly it came to me, ‘He’s no shorter or perhaps even taller than I.’

"But no. No football player ever picked me up and set me down like I was no more than a rag doll — although I’ve imagined scenes like that and worse. As a teen-ager, I was given to fantasies about myself as knight in shining armor, rescuing the distressed damsel. Those reveries were frequently interrupted by the appearance of a larger knight, by me, the all-conquering hero, conquered by some six-two sonuvabitch.”

Ian Fleming's Goldfinger: “Bond had always mistrusted short men. They grew up from childhood with an inferiority complex. All their lives they would strive to be big — bigger than the others who had teased them as a child. ...It was the short men that caused all the trouble in the world.”

Terry, a five-six, thirty-one-year-old mustachioed entertainer, was traveling the county fair circuit through California this past summer, performing as a juggler, magician, and clown from Del Mar to Yuba City. He's described by his friends as “cute," “impish," and he is. Terry, unlike Josh, expresses little anguish or anger over his stature. He notes, however, that his shortness has no doubt influenced him in ways of which he is unaware, even suggests that perhaps he became an entertainer in part because he is shorter than most men.

Like Josh’s father, Terry’s father is short, five-two. Terry feels his father — "a terrifically outgoing man” — didn’t make any big deal about height and was not significantly troubled by his lack of it. “My mom is a bit taller than he is,” he says. “I remember them once having pictures taken at a studio. The photographer wanted to put a telephone book under dad to make him taller. My mom told the photographer, ‘No, that’s the way it is. That’s how tall he is.’ ”

Terry recalls that his father once tried wearing “cheaters,” or heel lifts, to make him appear taller. “But they weren’t comfortable, and he gave them up.”

For Terry, like most short men, his stature went unnoted by his peers until the last years of grade school in Los Angeles. “Sixth grade," says Terry, "that was weird. I was always being picked on. By bullies. I was Tight in the middle of being short’ — still am. I was below average but not real short. My parents asked the school counselor why she thought I was getting picked on, and she said. ‘He’s just the right size to be bullied. Not so big that he can’t be beaten up but not so small that they'd seem chicken to be picking on him.’ ”

Going to the barber proved problematic. "For kids, they had a special board, with its own cushion. The barber put this board across the arms of the barber’s chair for kids. I used to think, ‘One of these days I am going to be tall enough to be able to sit in the barber’s chair like everybody else.’ I also used to think, ‘Someday I will be able to sit in the front of a car and use the sun visor.’ At my height, I was too low in the seat for the visor to do any good for my eyes."

In the Navy, Terry’s stature made life easier for him in one way. “I was short enough to sleep really comfortably in the racks. Other bigger guys were all curled up.” The Philippines were paradise for Terry. “ ‘We like you,’ the women would tell me. ‘You’re like us.’ ”

Reflecting on the short man/tall woman couplings, Terry recalls walking into a club, “seeing a really short guy, his arm around the waist of a woman maybe six inches taller. He saw me looking at him. He smiled, then winked at me. He knew I knew."

Still single, Terry confesses that when he was in his mid-twenties he tried to date extremely tall woman. “Partly, I guess, I wanted to prove I could be with a tall woman.” Terry admits, too, that he likes "crawling all over a long, tall woman." Then he cackles, saying, “Any time there’s a naked woman, it’s fun." On two occasions, large women, women who were both tall and heavy-bodied, propositioned him. “They indicated that they liked smaller men. To hug and to kiss. Cuddle.”

Being short, Terry concludes, hasn’t been that negative for him. “I don’t think I’ve ever said to myself, ‘I can’t do this. I’m too short.’ I never didn V do things because I’m five-six instead of six-five.”

Ralph Keyes, The Height of Your Life: " In an interview, (a) six-foot endocrinologist told me that the dwarfs and midgets with whom he works seem to be better adjusted psychologically than ‘normal ’ short men. The former group... are abnormal and know it.... Those in the latter group don’t feel abnormal — just inadequate....”

Five-five, forty-year-old, blue-eyed blonde Charlie is a self-described “dashing man about town," “worldly wise," a "dilettante." He moved from Colorado to San Diego six years ago, but he’d prefer that his profession remain unspecified because he doesn't wish to be identified. He is, he proposes, “a classic Peter Pan, a kid at heart" who thinks of himself as “more twenty-six than forty.” At five-five, he says, "You don’t carry the weight, the heft. People tend to look down at and on you.”

As a youngster, Charlie lived in South America, coming to the United States on visits. During one of those visits, when Charlie was ten, his parents took him to the Rockefeller Institute in New York. “There,” says Charlie, “a very brilliant doctor was doing studies on height. My aunt volunteered myself and a female cousin of mine. It seemed I wasn’t growing, whereas my cousin was shooting up like a weed.”

At the Rockefeller Institute, as Charlie remembers it. X-rays were made of his wrists, ankles, etc. Family histories were taken. “Once these work-ups were completed, the doctor could tell within a fraction of an inch how tall you would be at maturity. I was told I would grow no taller than five-five and one-half inches. My cousin was told she would be five-ten. Then they gave my cousin and myself a choice. They could inject me with hormones and make me taller. For her, they could give hormones to stunt growth. Neither of us chose to take the hormones."

If he’d known, says Charlie, “what lay ahead of me as a short man, I would have taken the doctor up on his offer of growth hi rmones." In South America, he was as tali or taller than most people. But when, as a teen-ager, he came to the States to attend prep school, he was shorter than those around him. “I was just such a little shrimp. A runt.

“In prep school, and later at Yale, although basically I was and am a very reticent, very shy person, I learned to bluff my way through.” His peers adopted him as a “pet,” made a mascot of him. “You’re small, you’re nonthreatening. You become the court jester, court dwarf. It used to be, you know, very good luck to carry a dwarf around. So I played that role. I saw very clearly how that role worked. I took advantage. Of the shortness. I used it as a tool. I was invited everywhere. People wanted to have me along. I became everyone’s confidante, the eminence grise. What was I going to do? Take over the world? No.

“I could get away with murder. I was short enough that no one would dare hit me. That would be such a cheap shot. It would be unseemly to pick up on someone so short. You can get away with a lot, being short, and using your shortness in that way actually gives you a power over others. But, at the same time, you feel like a eunuch.”

After Yale, Charlie went to work on Wall Street. “I wanted to be a broker, be on the floor. But I didn’t have the image those people wanted. I came up to everybody’s shoulders. And I was stymied at every turn. After several years, I was still in the back room. Other people who were less capable, had less experience, were moving ahead. I wasn’t." And it was his height, and the “attitude" that went with it, that Charlie believes kept him from success. “I always wonder, ‘Why didn’t I make the choice to take the growth hormones?’ I’d probably be in Wall Street, probably be another Ivan Boesky. I had cousins who did that.”

Is Charlie jealous of tall men? “Yes. Absolutely. You look at yourself and then at someone who’s tall, terrific looking. You say to yourself, ‘Why them and not me?’

“Not that everything revolves around it, your height. But it does inevitably touch on everything you do." It helps, suggests the unmarried Charlie, “if you carry yourself well. Then a lot of people will mistake your size. Women usually perceive me as being taller than I am.

I’ve gone out with women who are very tall. But you go dancing. It’s quite a mismatch."

What advice would Charlie give parents of short males? “Shoot ’em full of hormones.”