I am a tall man. I am not an astonishingly tall man, but taller than most. Our shorter readers will know the feeling of craning their necks up to talk to someone like me. The last time I had to do that was talking to a varsity basketball player in college.
I’m not trying to show off. Being tall isn’t all high shelves and unobstructed views at concerts. People hit me in the face with their umbrellas. My head touches the roof in the back seat of a Prius. Most of all, I have chronic neck pain. And there are few people who sympathize with these experiences. They don’t know what it’s like up here.
What warm embrace of fellowship I felt, then, to hear about the Las Vegas Tall Club. It is an organization specifically dedicated to promoting “tall awareness.” To become a member, you must be at least 6-foot-2 as a man and 5-foot-10 as a woman.
My friend Mike had found the club through a college scholarship it offers. It’s designed to encourage tall high school seniors “to look at themselves as vertically gifted, not just tall.” They reserve the right to measure an applicant upon request.
“You goddamn tall people, only looking out for your own,” said Mike, who is not vertically gifted.
The Las Vegas club is actually one local chapter in an international organization, founded in 1938, that now has dozens of locations across the U.S. and Canada. Groups include the Boston Beanstalks, the Portland Skyliners, and the Golden Gate Tip Toppers. Tall Clubs International organizes a yearly convention, sends out monthly “Talkin’ Tall” newsletters, and semiannually crowns a Miss Tall International, whose mission is “to advocate for change in various industries… for TALL people everywhere.”
Here was a whole lofty community, hundreds of members connecting above the low-slung quotidian like a network of mountaintop radio towers. Mike could never understand all this.
So I drove out to the club’s weekly meeting one evening. Though insecure about my short stature — I was just above the height threshold — I was comforted to know there would be plenty of taller people to commiserate with about umbrellas, Priuses, and neck pain. We would exchange tips on high-backed chairs and foam rollers, stretching techniques and physical therapists. And who knew what untold wisdom they’d pass down to me from the upper spheres.
Blinking as my eyes adjusted to the dim light of the bar, I scanned around for a group of heads near the ceiling. I must’ve been early. I was about to order a beer when a man in his mid-sixties, roughly my height, tapped me on the shoulder.
“Are you here for the Tall Club?” he asked. Yes, yes, I was! “I could tell from your height,” he said, nodding.
He showed me to their table, where there were four others. They were all in their fifties and sixties, with two married couples among them. We all shook hands and introduced ourselves. None of them seemed enormous, but they were all seated — most people didn’t realize my height until I stood up. I sat down too, and then came the pregnant pause.
“How tall are you guys?” I blurted out.
They were all the minimum height: the men were 6-foot-2 and the women 5-foot-10. It took me a moment to process. I was 6 feet 3 inches. I was the tallest person at the Tall Club.
“But you guys have taller members that just aren’t here tonight, right?” I asked.
“We used to,” one of the men said wistfully, “but the really tall people, they just don’t live as long.” The other members looked solemn. We sat in silence for a moment, thinking about death.
“How did you hear about us?” asked one of the women, and I told them about my short friend Mike, who had found their scholarship.
“Ah, the scholarship,” one of the men said. “We haven’t offered that for a couple of years now. We just weren’t getting enough interest.”
“The problem is that the younger generations don’t want to meet people in real life,” another added, gesturing around the near-empty Blue Ox Tavern that Wednesday night. I nodded in agreement.
The conversation soon turned toward work, careers, lives — things unrelated to our vertical gifts. They all knew each other very well, the kind of intimacy you only build over years. Who could begrudge them that camaraderie, a weekly meeting of tall friends? Certainly not I. But were they still promoting tall awareness, I began to wonder? My neck gave a twinge of pain.
“So, what kind of work are you doing as an organization?” I asked, trying to refocus the agenda.
“Not so much these days,” one of the women told me. “Back in the ’70s the national leadership was doing important stuff like lobbying for more legroom on airplanes, but we haven’t had as much energy since then.”
“We still host a barbecue, though!” another offered.
I wondered if a tall barbecue would be different from a normal one. Truthfully I’d never experienced any height-based issues at a cookout.
Mike liked to barbecue.
“Well the real reason I wanted to come here,” I said, trying to reinflate my hopes, “is because I have chronic neck pain ... you know, because I’m tall ... and I thought you guys must have similar experiences.”
“Mmm. Not really.”
“Nope.”
A few shakes of the head.
“I do remember this one time,” said one of the women. “I was at a big Tall Club meetup with other chapters, and I spent a while talking to this seven-foot guy. Afterward I definitely had a little crick in my neck!”
I nodded glumly.
Well, maybe Mike had neck pain talking to me. Maybe we could relate to each other. Like the videos of horses that are friends with cats.
“So,” one of the women asked me, “are you going to join the club?” It was a $25 yearly due.
“What kind of stuff does membership get you?” I asked.
She looked around at the others, all of them seeing perfectly eye to eye, seated around the same lacquered-wood table they’d sat around for years.
“Well ... you get to be a member.”
