Life Expectancy

male dressing as a female for sexual gratification. 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 game, my father said, "It actually began with Lassie. In every show, she was nude, too."
        "Lassie was always played by male dogs," my mother replied.
        "There you go," Dad said, his point made.
        I escaped being named Flipper when successful surgeries 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 uncommonly stormy night, my grandfather's prediction of syndactyly proved true.
        If I had been born on a night of unremarkable weather, family legend would have transformed it into an eerie calm, every leaf motionless in breathless air, night birds silent with expectation. The Tock family has a proud history of self-dramatization.
        Even allowing for exaggeration, the storm must have been violent enough 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 my strange 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 me than the fact that John Denver's "Annie's Song" 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 most important about August 9, 1974, is my birth-and my grandfather'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 numerous family stories of that night, I can see my father, Rudy Tock, walking back and forth from one end of County Hospital to the other, between the maternity ward and the I.C.U, 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-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer.
        The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.
        Rudy stood birth watch with only one other man, not a local but a performer with the circus that was playing a one-week engagement in a meadow at the Halloway Farm. He called himself Beezo. Curiously, this proved not to be his clown name but one that he'd been born with:
        Kon-rad Beezo.
        Some say there is no such thing as destiny, that what happens just happens, without purpose or meaning. Konrad's surname would argue otherwise.
        Beezo was married to Natalie, a trapeze artist and a member of a renowned aerialist family that qualified as circus royalty.
        Neither of Natalie's parents, none of her brothers and sisters, and none of her high-flying cousins had accompanied Beezo to the hospital.
        This was a performance night, and as always the show must go on.
        Evidently the aerialists kept their distance also because they had not approved of one of their kind taking a clown for a husband. Every subculture and ethnicity has its objects of bigotry.
        As Beezo waited nervously for his wife to deliver, he muttered unkind judgments of his in-laws. "Self-satisfied," he called them, and "devious."
        The clown's perpetual glower, rough voice, and bitterness made Rudy uncomfortable.
        Angry words plumed from him in exhalations of sour smoke: duplicitous" and "scheming" and, poetically for a clown, "blithe spirits of the air, but treacherous when the ground is under them."
        Beezo was not in full costume. Furthermore, his stage clothes were in the