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PART ONE

Welcome to the World,

Jimmy Tock

in the night that I was born, randfather, Josef Tock, made ten predictions that shaped ave birth to me

Josef had never previously engaged in fortune-telling He was a pastry chef He made eclairs and lemon tarts, not predictions

So this world to eternity I am thirty years old and can't for certain see the course of e seems to be a herky-jerky line from one crisis to another

I aish for

This truth is not offered in a spirit of self-deprecation or even hu a lummox is part of my charm, an almost winsome trait, as you will see

No doubt I have now raised in your mind the question of what I in

tend to i to be a trickier task than I first iined

I am not as tall as people seem to think I am, in fact not tall at all by the standards of professional-or even of high school-basketball I a fitness fanatic At most I am somewhat husky

Yet uy" My nickname in school was Moose From childhood, I have heard people joke about how astronorocery bills must be

The disconnect between my true size and many people's perception of my dimensions has always mystified me

My wife, who is the linchpin of er than my physique She says that people measure me by the impression I make on them

I find this notion ludicrous It is bullshit born of love

If sometimes I make an outsized impression on people, it's as likely as not because I fell on them Or stepped on their feet

In Arizona, there is a place where a dropped ball appears to roll uphill in defiance of gravity In truth, this effect is a trick of perspective in which elehly unusual landscape conspire to deceive the eye

I suspect I aht reflects oddly froular fashion, so I appear to be more of a hulk than I am

On the night I was born in Snow County Hospital, in the corandfather told a nurse that I would be twenty inches long and weigh eight pounds ten ounces

The nurse was startled by this prediction not because eight pounds ten is a huge newborn-randfather was a pastry chef who suddenly began acting as though he were a crystal-ball gazer Four days previously he had suffered a ht side and unable to speak; yet

fronostications in a clear voice, without slur or hesitation

He also told her that I would be born at 10:46 pm and that I would suffer from syndactyly

That is a word difficult to pronounce before a stroke, let alone after one

Syndactyly-as the observing nurse explained to ers or toes are joined In serious cases, the bones of adjacent digits are fused to such an extent that two fingers share a single nail

Multiple surgeries are required to correct such a condition and to ensure that the afflicted child will grow into an adult capable of giving the F-you finger to anyone who sufficiently annoys him

In my case, the trouble was toes Tere fused on the left foot, three on the right

My mother, Madelaine-whom my father affectionately calls Maddy or so the surgery and, instead, christening me Flipper

Flipper was the name of a dolphin that once starred in a hit TV show-not surprisingly titled Flipper-in the late 1960s My htfully, wonderfully, hilariously stupid" It went off the air a few years before I was born

Flipper, a male, was played by a trained dolphin named Suzi This was most likely the first instance of transvestism on television

Actually, that's not the right word because transvestisratification Besides, Suzi-alias Flipper-didn't wear clothes

So it was a program in which the female star always appeared nude and was sufficiently butch to pass for a male

Just two nights ago at dinner, over one of my mother's infamous cheese-and-broccoli pies, she asked rhetorically if it was any wonder

that such a dire collapse in broadcast standards, begun with Flipper, should lead to the boring freak-show shock that is contemporary television

Playing her gaan with Lassie In every show, she was nude, too"

"Lassie was always played by s," my mother replied

"There you go," Dad said, his point made

I escaped being naeries restored my toes to the normal condition In my case, the fusion involved only skin, not bones The separation was a relatively simple procedure

Nevertheless, on that uncorandfather's prediction of syndactyly proved true

If I had been born on a night of unreend would have transformed it into an eerie calht birds silent with expectation The Tock family has a proud history of self-dramatization

Even allowing for exaggeration, the storh to shake the Colorado mountains to their rocky foundations The heavens cracked and flashed as if celestial armies were at war

Still in the womb, I remained unaware of all the thunderclaps And once born, I was probably distracted by e feet

This was August 9, 1974, the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States

Nixon's fall has no more to do with " was the number-one record in the country at the time I mention it only to provide historical perspective

Nixon or no Nixon, what I find randfather's predictions My sense of perspective has an egocentric taint

Perhaps more clearly than if I had been there, because of vivid pictures painted by nuht, I can seeback and forth from one end of County

Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the ICU, between joy at the prospect of his son's pending arrival and grief over his beloved father's quickening slide into death

With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoting, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant-fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload It would have served well as the nervous-htmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer

The chain-s clown didn't improve the ambience