Barking at Butterflies and other stories

Short Short Story

In March of last year, I wrote a letter to your magazine which you subsequently published in May. You will recall that I described myself as a bald-headed though virile man of seventy-six with a walrus mustache and a preference for well-built redheaded midgets (female). In that letter, I related the story of my first and only sexual experience with a redheaded midget, and told of the ecstasy I had derived from that brief encounter. I explained that whereas I was now married to a very tall blond woman (five feet five inches), I nonetheless had never forgotten that fleeting affair so many years ago, and was still unable to quell my longings and urgings for female midgets with scarlet tresses. While praising abundantly the various women of height and undeniable girth who have graced the pages of your fine magazine, I asked at that time if your plans for the future included running a centerfold photograph of a nude minikin with an auburn thatch. I also asked if any of your readers shared my feelings about midgets with ruddy locks.

I certainly did not anticipate the overwhelming tide of letters that were published in your July issue, most of them complaining that my comments about female midgets, especially redheaded ones, reflected nothing but the basest sort of male chauvinism. I had not felt, nor do I now feel, that my admitted lust for miniature redheaded women is in any way sexist, and I was quite frankly surprised and annoyed by these accusations, and by the suggestion from one of your readers (Dr. J. M., Seattle, Washington) that my “aberration” (as he called it) was nothing but a role-reversal acting-out of “the Snow White syndrome.” His diagnosis continues to baffle me. Full-blown sex in a king-sized bed with a perfectly formed little woman is hardly the same thing as cavorting with a gang of gnomic old men. I would like to call the good doctor’s attention to the definition of “midget” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: “An extremely small person who is otherwise normally proportioned.”

Needless to say, the storm of protest quite unsettled me. Until then, I had enormously enjoyed your “Letters” column, which I found to be spirited, uninhibited, and literary besides. Such elevated dialogue, it seemed to me, was necessary in a free society, where sexual acts considered strange, bizarre, perverse, or merely monstrous might be revealed as natural and normal through a sincere exchange of ideas among consenting adults. I was surprised to learn, for example, how many men are sexually attracted to women with back problems, especially those wearing braces. Or, as a further example, I would never have dreamt that certain types of women are irresistibly drawn to men who have undergone surgery for the removal of knee cartilage. (For my tardy enlightenment, I thank the young lady who signed her letter M. S., Dallas, Texas, in your giant holiday issue.) And I was thoroughly amazed to learn how many couples use flavored yogurt to enliven their sexual encounters in or out of bed. My own aversion to yogurt remains undiminished, but an understanding of the needs and gratifications of others surely goes a long way toward an understanding of oneself. Returning to the point, the angry and hysterical letters you published concerning the apparently taboo subject of sexual intercourse between a female midget and a male of normal size (I myself am five feet eight and one-half inches tall, and built accordingly) shocked me, dismayed me, and caused me to reassess with regret what are surely preponderantly puritanical attitudes in this nation. It was not until your August issue, however, that the real problem started.

You’ll remember that you published my letter in May of last year, and that you headlined it (somewhat cutely, I felt) SMALL WONDER, and signed it Name and address withheld. Your “Letters” column (as I’m sure you know) warns that “Letters for publication should carry name and address — in capitals, please — though these will be withheld by the Editor on request.” I requested that you withhold my name and address only because it seemed de rigueur. For example, most of the gourmands who wrote in to describe the flavorsome uses to which they had put yogurt asked that their names and addresses be withheld, though God only knows why. To be perfectly honest, I once believed your editors were inventing all those unsigned letters. This was before you published my letter in May, of course, which I knew was genuine since I myself had written it. I assumed, too, that the July issue’s firestorm was equally genuine, and I thought I had seen the last of the correspondence in that issue — but instead, another letter appeared in your August issue. I reproduce that letter now, verbatim, including the precious headline which I’m sure was created by the same editor who headlined my letter.

My first response to L.E.’s letter was, I am not ashamed to admit, anatomical. The very thought of photographing all three-feet two-inches of her in the nude was enough to trigger the wildest memories of what had happened with my first (and last) redheaded midget almost five decades before. Was it possible that your magazine would actually consider running a centerfold of a nude midget? Was it equally possible (vain desire!) that you would assign me to the pleasurable task of photographing L.E. in Oaken Bow, North Carolina?

And then I began to doubt.

Was the letter bona fide, or had it been concocted to spur another avalanche of angry responses from your readers? Immediately, I resurrected my earlier theory that all unsigned or otherwise anonymous letters were written by your staff editors, and concluded that the letter from L.E. had been written by one Louis Edwards, whose name appeared on your masthead — and who apparently had been sloppy enough to have used his own initials when signing his imaginary epistle. I even doubted the existence of Oaken Bow, North Carolina, until I looked it up in the Atlas that night after dinner — and then my entire perspective changed.

Oaken Bow did exist. It was a town in McDowell County, and it had a population of 787, and it could be found on the North Carolina map on page 109 at location D4, which I discovered was in the Blue Ridge Mountains, some twenty miles southeast of Asheville. I cannot begin to describe the enormous pleasure I derived from the simple act of locating Oaken Bow on the North Carolina map. If Oaken Bow existed, then it was entirely possible that L.E. also existed, that L.E. was in fact one of the 787 people living there, a twenty-two-year old redheaded (and red-blooded) midget who had invited me in print (was that legally binding?) to come take her picture in the nude for the centerfold of your magazine! I slammed the Atlas shut and turned to find my wife staring at me. I mumbled something about never having known Tasmania was so close to New Zealand, and then I spent the rest of the night longing for morning to come.

At the crack of dawn, I rose, showered, shaved, dressed, and was out of the apartment by seven-thirty. Instead of going directly to my office on East 40th Street, I went instead to Grand Central Station, where I searched through the out-of-town telephone directories until I found one for McDowell County, with combined listings for Garden City, Glenwood, Providence, Oaken Bow, Marion, Old Fort, and Sevier. My heart was pounding furiously as I scanned the “E” listings, and then my forefinger and my heart stopped almost simultaneously — I had found a listing for a woman named Lillian Eaton! It was the only L.E. listing in Oaken Bow, and I was certain even before I dialed the number that I had found my fiery-haired minikin.

The woman who answered the phone sounded senile.

I asked if I might talk to Lillian Eaton, and she said she was Lillian Eaton.

I asked if there were a younger Lillian Eaton there, her daughter perhaps, or her granddaughter, and she said she was a ninety-four year old spinster, and the only Lillian Eaton in that house, or for that matter in all of McDowell County.

She was also a little hard of hearing. When I asked her if she was by any chance a midget, she said there was nobody named Bridget in that house. I decided she was not the lady who had written the letter to your magazine. (It was interesting to learn, by the way, just how many men are sexually attracted to novagenarians, as reported in your article on Geriatric Sex in the February issue.)

Limp and dejected, I walked the two blocks to my office, knowing full well I would be unable to rest until I had taken a train or a plane to Oaken Bow and searched that town from house to house for my enigmatic, monogrammatic love. (Yes — love! I had already begun to think of her as such, even though I had never laid eyes on the creature.) I agonized for the better part of August. I am a bookkeeper with a large accounting firm, and am rarely if ever required to go out of town on business. But so driven was I by the thought of locating the L.E. who had promised to “oblige me in every possible way,” so determined was I to experience after almost five decades an encore of that first blissful interlude, so obsessed was I that I created an opportunity to absent myself from New York. I told my wife a furniture company we represented had burned to the ground in Old Fort, North Carolina, and that I would have to go there in an attempt to reconstruct their destroyed books. The lie was based on an actual furniture company fire in Schenectady four years earlier, at which time one of our accountants had gone upstate to do exactly what I was pretending to be doing now. On the fifth of September, then, a Friday night — I flew from the airport in Newark, New Jersey, to the Asheville-Hendersonville airport in North Carolina, and then I rented a car and drove to Oaken Bow. On Saturday morning, September the sixth, I began looking for L.E. in earnest.

I could not find her.

I searched through Oaken Bow all day Saturday and part of Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, I canvassed the nearby communities, but none of the people to whom I spoke had the faintest knowledge of a redheaded midget with the initials L.E. On Sunday evening, I went back to the only hotel in town and learned to my dismay that McDowell County was dry, and that the package stores in the nearby wet county were closed on Sunday. Deprived of even the solace of alcohol (I am not normally a drinking man, but my inability to locate L.E. was both frustrating and distressing), I sat in the lobby of the hotel and eventually struck up a conversation with a one-armed former blackjack dealer who mentioned in passing that he had read in a man’s magazine (I don’t believe it was yours) an article stating that certain types of women found one-armed men sexually attractive.

We then began discussing my penchant for midgets, and he said I should have been down there in June when the circus had pitched its tents on the fairgrounds. He said there must’ve been six or seven good-looking midgets in town, wouldn’t have minded getting hold of one of them himself, he said, though his tastes usually ran to larger women.

I asked him if he had happened to notice a redheaded midget, a girl of about twenty-two, and he said there might have been a redheaded midget but he couldn’t say for sure because in addition to his one arm being missing, he was also color blind. (Though he had read in a magazine that many women found it sexually stimulating to go to bed with men who were color blind.) I told him that this particular midget would have had the initials L.E., and he asked me if I mightn’t be thinking about Ellie Carpenter, who was a midget who’d been there with the circus in June, and who used to come over to the hotel every now and then to turn tricks, since what she doubled as in her spare time away from the sideshow was a hooker. She’d been around for two weeks, while the circus was there, and then she’d left when the circus had.

On the plane back to New York, I pondered what he had told me. Was it possible that Ellie Carpenter, a redheaded midget passing through Oaken Bow with the circus in June, had read my letter in your June issue, and had answered it while in Oaken Bow (hence the address) and had asked that it be signed with the homophonic initials L.E. — for Ellie? In November, telling my wife that a furniture store in Sarasota had gone up in smoke, I flew down to the winter quarters of the circus in a further attempt to locate Ellie Carpenter. The man I spoke to had been with the circus for the better part of his life, and he told me that the only redheaded midget they’d employed in recent years was a woman named Else Kopchek, who was twenty-two years old, and Polish, and from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. But she had left the circus immediately after the season, mentioning in parting that there was bigger money to be made elsewhere. She had not even remotely hinted where “elsewhere” might be.

It now seemed entirely possible to me that Else Kopchek might indeed have called herself Ellie Carpenter while turning tricks at the Oaken Bow Hotel, and it seemed further likely that she had not gone back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, it being common knowledge that nobody goes back to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (I certainly hope this casual remark does not unleash another cageful of beastly letters, if you’ll pardon the metaphor. My first letter has caused me problems enough.) The very thought of reliving that thrilling youthful experience with a new and different partner — but oh so similar in size and coloration — was enough to send me to Philadelphia the very next weekend, hoping against hope that soon I might disrobe an elfin Ellie, discard her dainty delicate underthings, pat her seemingly pubescent peaks, probe her pithy pussy, manipulate her miniature mons veneris and Lilliputian labiae, caress her compact clitoris and crisp pauciloquent pubic — please, an elderly man should not carry on so in a public forum.

Suffice it to say, I went to Philadelphia.

I found a man there named Karl Kopchek who told me his daughter was indeed a redheaded, twenty-two year old midget named Else Kopchek. Karl was six-feet three-inches tall and had black hair. He told me he had last seen his daughter when she’d come home for Christmas. At the time, she said she was doing social work in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but he had not heard from her since, and did not know where she was or what she was doing now.

And neither do I.

And that’s why I’m writing to you once again.

Is Ellie Carpenter (nee Else Kopchek) indeed the L.E. who extended her kind invitation to me in the pages of your magazine? If she is, I will of course continue the search for her as long as I have breath, and I will find her one day, I know I will, and then, beware you lovers of yore! We shall scale Parnassian heights, we two, and shatter legends and myths! But, sirs, is she my L.E.? Only you can say, for only you have her original letter, written from Oaken Bow last June but presumably carrying a name and address (in capitals, please) as asked for at the very top of your “Letters” column. I implore you now for your educated advice. Should I now curtail my quest for this carmine-curled, concise, and curvaceous munchkin whom I believe to be the L.E. who first wrote to you? In short, is my minor marvel a myth, or a midget worth pursuing? Tell me, sirs. Is Else Kopchek the L.E. who wrote to you last June? Consult your files, I beg of you, and send me your response in the enclosed stamped, self-addressed envelope. I shall be eternally grateful for your speedy reply.

Name and address withheld.