The Books: “I Was A Teenage Dwarf” (Max Shulman)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf, by Max Shulman

This is one of the reasons why I love my library, and why I love its alphabetical setup. Because you go from Frankenstein to I was a teenage dwarf, and it’s all normal.

I first read this book when I was about 15 years old. I worked in the local library and somehow stumbled over a copy of it, and I’m not sure why but I picked it up. I sat in the school library during a study period, when everything was quiet and serious, and opened it up. The first two pages made me laugh so loud that Mrs. Wood, the librarian, came over and asked me to leave the premises. I couldn’t stop. I staggered out of the library and stood in the hallway, guffawing like a maniac. I read it multiple times over my high school years. I never got sick of it. It is the story of Dobie Gillis (who, of course, would later be the star of another book by Shulman which would then become a popular television series) – a boy who is the shortest kid in his high school. This does not stop him, however, from being a ladies man to beat the band. The kid is a Lothario. Every chapter in the book details another romance he had – and some of them are so ridiculous (like when his parents take him to France, and he hooks up with a snarling snotty cliche of a French girl) – no, make that ALL of them are ridiculous. Dobie Gillis is not a discerning lover.

I have no idea why this book affected me so much – but it did.

The funny thing is: Max Shulman, nearly forgotten now, was one of the most popular writers of his day, the 1950s. He wrote Rally Round the Flag, Boys, another hilarious book, which was turned into a film. He wrote best-sellers. If you see photographs of him, he looks like all of the Mission Control guys in Apollo 13, buzz cut, glasses, conservative white shirt, tie … but his books are absolute MANIA. And it seems that he loved nothing better than making fun of convention, and undermining all of the common assumptions of the day – using humor. He’s like an anarchist, for God’s sake – most comedians are – but you would never know it from looking at him. He looks like he would belong on Leave It to Beaver, or something like that, but his sensibility is truly subversive. I love that!

Also, any man who creates a character whose name is Loadstone O’Toole – LOADSTONE O’TOOLE??? – is okay by me.

Strangely enough, this book connected me to my parents – in the midst of high school when, you know, I wasn’t really about connecting with my parents. But he was the big writer when they were growing up, so they both knew him, and loved that I was getting such a kick out of him. I remember my mother trying to tell me about Rally Round the Flag, Boys and starting to laugh so hard about the name Loadstone O’Toole that SHE would have been asked the high school library as well, if she had been there!

Here’s a post I wrote about Max Shulman, and my whole journey with his books, and tracking them all down a couple of years ago (before I had become an Amazon maniac, and a genius at tracking down books online – I feel like I can find ANYTHING now) – but maybe 7 or 8 years ago, this was not the case. I had found The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis at The Strand – so that was cool – but I Was a Teenage Dwarf was like the Holy Grail. It had disappeared off the face of the earth.

I mentioned to my dad how I was trying to track down a copy, and he said he would keep an eye out for it. A couple months later, a box arrived at my apartment door – and I opened it up – and inside was 4 copies of Max Shulman’s books – including I Was A Teenage Dwarf! Halleluia! I sat down immediately and read it again, almost nervous that I wouldn’t find it so funny – but nope. I found myself snorting and guffawing yet again. It is such a funny book!!

My favorite chapter is the one that tells the story of his romance with the girl next door. Her name is Red Knees. That is not actually her name – her real name is Alice – but Dobie Gillis refers to her as Red Knees because she’s a tomboy and is always running and falling down, so she always has red scabs on her knees. He calls her Red Knees. TO HER FACE.

So my excerpt is from the “Red Knees” chapter.

EXCERPT FROM I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf, by Max Shulman

I hate Red Knees like poison, but I’ll tell you a funny thing: sometimes I kind of like her. I mean sometimes I can’t help it, she’s so cuckoo. She’s got the biggest braces on her teeth of any girl I ever saw, and her hair is a million laughs because she keeps cutting it with a nail clippers. Sometimes when I look at that comical hair and the braces and the red knees which she keeps skinning because she is always running and falling down, I can’t help myself, I just have to bust out laughing. This gets her pretty sore, which I let her do for a little while and then I grab her and hug her to calm her down. That’s the only time Red Knees is really quiet – when I am hugging her.

Well, enough talk about Red Knees. What I started to tell you about was puberty, which is a subject that does not concern Red Knees because if she is having any puberty, it sure is not visible to the naked eye.

I was saying that I don’t understand puberty. I understand all right about the changes that happen in the body. Some of them are pretty unlikely, but just the same, I understand them. What I don’t understand is the changes that happen in the mind. I mean the mind of girls, not boys. What happens in the mind of boys is very simple: they start thinking about girls all the time. But what do girls think about? What strange, mysterious, evil thing happens that makes them so goofy? Why can you never tell what they’re going to do next?

I’ll give you a perfect example: Tuckie Webb. Last spring at John Marshall Junior High, after my reprieve from military academy, Tuckie and I had a romance that warmed the heart of the entire school. I mean Alma Gristede had been just a feeble flicker by comparison. Every time we walked down the hall holding hands everybody would smile and say, “Here comes Tuckie and Dobie walking down the hall holding hands.” Even Mr. Knabe, the tin shop teacher, would say it, and he hated me like poison because I once used up fourteen feet of sheet brass trying to make a charm for Tuckie’s charm bracelet.

Tuckie and I were together all the time. We came to school together every morning. We went to classes together. After school we got on our bikes and went to the Sweet Shoppe together for a lime Coke, Dutch treat. Every Wednesday night we went to the early show at the Bijou, Dutch treat, Saturday mornings I picked her up at ten and we played tennis, or went to the beach. Saturday night there was always a party at one of the kids’ houses, and we ate little tiny sandwiches and looked at television and kissed each other. Tuckie only let me kiss her on Saturday night, which was all right with me because kissing really takes it out of a guy.

All this was last spring. On June 17 we graduated from John Marshall, which was the next-to-the-last time I kissed Tuckie. The last time was Saturday, our regular kissing night. I tried to kiss her Sunday morning at the station too but her father kept giving me hostile looks. Her whole family was down at the station where she was going to spend the summer as counselor at a girls’ camp.

Myself, I don’t go to camp. I hate greenery. I think trees are nowhere, and grass is about as dull as it can get. To tell you the honest truth, I wouldn’t mind if the whole world was paved.

But Tuckie likes that kind of scam, so she went up to New Hampshire and spent the summer pulling little girls out of poison ivy, and I just stayed home and laid around all summer carving my initials in things. At night I would usually go next door and chew the fat with Red Knees Baker. Red Knees’ parents leave her home alone nearly every night because they have to go out on business. They’re interior decorators. They’ve got this spooky antique shop on the Post Road, all made out of cruddy old barn siding, and they get about four million dollars apiece for brass door knockers and wooden fire-screens and hobnail glasses and all kinds of Early American scam like that. At night they go over to people’s houses to advise them on decoration. When they do, they come into your house and look over your furniture and keep giving you a kind of pitying smile and shaking their heads and clicking their tongues. Pretty soon they get you so shaky that you can hardly wait to run down to their store and stock up on brass door knockers.

While her mother and father go out sneering at people’s furniture, Red Knees stays home alone, and I’ll tell you something you won’t believe: she’s scared. Wouldn’t that snow you? This girl who knows where the Orinoco River is, who’s got more money than Fort Knox, who won’t let man or nature stand in her way when she makes up her mind to go after something – this tiger is afraid to stay home alone at night. On the nights last summer when I couldn’t go over and keep her company, she would barricade the doors and crouch all night behind the sofa.

Well, naturally, I came over as often as I could. I hate to think of any girl crouching behind a sofa all night. And, besides, I didn’t have too bad a time. We played a lot of Scrabble, at which she would always beat me, but on the other hand, I was six times as good as she was at darts and smoking. Her folks would get home about ten, and we’d all go into the kitchen and take out some cottage cheese and Sally Lunn bread and have Early American sandwiches.

So it wasn’t too bad – for a fill-in, that is. Naturally, I didn’t intend to make this a steady thing. I mean spending my evenings with Red Knees. It was only a way to kill time till Tuckie got back from camp. Then, thought I, we would pick up right where we left off – the star-crossed lovers of John Marshall Junior High. Only we wouldn’t be at John Marshall any more; in fall we were going up to Central High School. But that wouldn’t make any difference, I felt sure, because our love, Tuckie’s and mine, was deep and strong and abiding and would easily survive the journey from John Marshall to Central.

Hah! That’s all I knew about it.