He Thinks Big

Mark Cieutat may be short in stature, but he stands tall in courage, ambition

The big rig idles like a fierce, grumbling beast about to devour a meal, the compressed air released from the brakes creating an imposing and recognizable "HIIISSSSS."

The sudden, startling sound is enough to make the feet tingle with a fight-or-flight adrenaline rush, at least for those who aren't familiar with the fine art of negotiating such a monstrosity.

Unfazed, the top of his head barely meeting the wheel well, Mark Cieutat leans against a tire as he takes a break during a delivery to Haywood Mall.

He is used to the hissing sound. He grew up around trucks — the BIG transport kind his father, uncle and brother drive. But to say he grew up is only partly true.

In literal terms, he didn't grow much. At a height of 3 feet, 11 inches, Cieutat barely stands taller than a preschooler and weighs about as much as a kindergartner.

What a sight it must be, he imagines: a 27-year-old man in the body of a child scaling daunting steps into a towering white rig's cab.

The sight is even more unsettling when it becomes clear he isn't aiming for the passenger side; he's getting behind the wheel, shoving that thing in gear and just … going.

As a "person of small stature," as he prefers to call himself, the taming of such a large beast is metaphorical, a feat filled with a not-so-hidden meaning.

"I like to think big," Cieutat says in the twangy dialect of his good ol' boy home, Gay, Ga., just outside Atlanta.

It's a ride he didn't know he would be taking, owning a one-man, one-truck shipping business (aptly named TOO Short Refrigerated Transport Inc.).

Two years ago, fresh out of West Georgia University with a degree in finance, he found jobs in the business world — even a mere interview — tough to come by.

Even with the job market the best it had ever been, Cieutat says he couldn't get people to take him seriously. His voice sounds like that of a young man's played a speed faster on a tape recorder.

Everyone thought he was a child, some prankster on the phone. In person, bank managers looked at him and told him exactly how everything wouldn't work.

"Over the phone, everybody tells you, 'That position is filled,'" he says. "You look in the paper two weeks later and realize that's not true."

So, after some reflection, he looked to his roots. The men in his family drive trucks. Why shouldn't he?

His dad (a father whom Cieutat says would make McGyver proud) built a foot stand for his son that made the gears and pedals reachable.

For a while, Cieutat had two trucks and an employee before he realized he hated management. Now, he alone takes work whenever it comes, traveling all over the Southeast.

Work comes often. He meets a lot of people, some pleasant, some scornful, some unknowingly condescending.

As Cieutat waits for employees of Great American Cookie Co. to bring a loading cart for their delivery, two teenage girls walk by with a male friend.

The girls coo as they look back at Cieutat leaning against his rig: "Awwww, cuuuute." The teenage guy gawks and laughs, playing the role of a too-cool cut-up.

While it might be the first time they've seen such a sight, it's not a first for Cieutat. He's heard the patronizing tone, subtle and not-so-subtle, before.

Why is it OK to stare at anyone for any reason? That's what Renee Hendrix wonders.

For five years, the 29-year-old Hendrix has worked at Great American Cookie Co. at Haywood Mall, making her way up to manager.

She knows a little about Mark's position. She observes as people stare at him when the two share casual conversations about corporate mergers, a favorite topic of the finance major.

She aspires to something greater, she says, maybe owning one of these big cookie stores if she works hard enough.

Mark's life, to her, is inspirational.

"He's got more heart than 10 of those people put together," Hendrix says. "He amazes me. He gets out there and works harder than anybody."

Cieutat, meanwhile, is virtually oblivious to what people think of him. He long ago accepted the notion that hundreds of eyes at a time might be watching him and only him.

He remembers the elderly women who saw him in the cookie store and said, "Oh, isn't he cute, he's waiting for his cookie." He knows they didn't mean any harm. Neither did the old fellow who warned him to step out from behind the rig.

"All you can do is laugh," Cieutat says.

He has fashioned his life in such a way that nothing seems odd for him. He spends more time looking outward than looking in. As a result, he's hard-pressed to examine himself, mostly shrugging when faced with deeper questions of how such shortness has molded his life.

Doctors have not been able to explain why he and his 20-year-old brother, Jody, who is a quarter of an inch shorter, didn't grow normally.

Neither can they explain why his 29-year-old brother, Sean, is 5 feet, 10 inches tall, of normal height like their mom and dad.

He has hydrocephalus and requires a shunt to drain fluid in his head. A Vitamin D deficiency has weakened his teeth so that every one of them has needed capping.

Otherwise, he's just short. And that makes life interesting.

Like buying clothes. Cieutat knows a thing or two about the latest styles; if anything, being forever locked into children's clothing virtually assures him of remaining hip.

Still, clothes for the youngest of children are usually placed higher, which adds to the challenge of wading through Elmo and Sponge Bob Square Pants shirts.

Every now and then, he'll buy a Dr. Seuss shirt for the fun of it.

Cieutat doesn't have to, but he helps unload the 30-pound boxes he delivers. He likes the exercise, which is quite a workout considering that he's lifting half his weight.

On the road, he orders kids' meals. It's quite enough.

Such are the details of being an extremely short man.

But when asked to reflect on the deeper challenges — staring down discrimination as he endures other people's stares — he's reluctant.

Or possibly unable.

The Cieutat brothers' parents — dad, Leon, and mom, Joanne — raised their children on equal ground, says Mark's younger brother Jody. Self-reflection is not a strong point.

Tall brother Sean never failed, Jody says, to treat his little brothers roughly, like a big brother should. "He still beat the crap out of us and held us up to the ceiling-fan blade," Jody says.

Like his older brother, Mark tried his hand at driving in stock-car races, only to realize he liked the pit-crew gig better.

From lessons such as those, Mark has learned to be an adviser to his baby brother in a way no other family member could.

When Jody doubted whether he should pursue a bartender's license, Mark encouraged him to see the benefit of being small. Who wouldn't want to frequent the bar tended by the short guy?

Thinking big started at an early age for Cieutat. He was always drawn to scale large things.

At age 4, his mother says, Mark was watching as kids his age but three times his size climbed to the top of a playground slide.

At 2 feet tall, barely the size of a baby first learning to walk, Mark asked his mom whether he could go, too. From the get-go, Joanne says, she knew she would never try to hold her child back.

She just held her hand under him in case he fell. He doesn't need that hand as much now.

"He climbed that thing, slid down and came around and said, 'Oh, I'm going to do that again.' But that's the way he's always been. Anything he's wanted to do, he's always done."

And now her little boy is grown, whether anyone who looks at him recognizes it or not.

 *****

(February 18, 2004) 

LARGER THAN LIFE  

Mark Cieutat was more than just a delivery guy; he was an inspiration

Mark Cieutat was a man trapped inside a child's body, but his size spoke nothing of his stature.

He conquered every challenge in his path - the doors shut in his face, the patronizing jeers, the growling big rig he drove not to prove everyone wrong, but to prove to himself he could do it.

But there was one obstacle he could not overcome: a man, police say, who was intent on robbing him. Instead of his money or his truck, Mark lost his life.

And what a life it was.

Here was a 28-year-old independent businessman with his own trucking company, who turned to the family trade when no one would give him a job out of college, despite a business degree in hand and stellar grades.

At 3 feet, 11 inches tall, with the voice and body of a preschooler, Mark was larger than life, those who knew him and love him say.

He touched lives everywhere he went … and he traveled often and to many places.

As the owner and driver of TOO Short Refrigerated Transport Inc., Mark virtually lived on Interstate 85, whether it was Raleigh or Charlotte or Atlanta or here in Greenville.

Or Montgomery, Ala., where he died on the same stretch of road that was the means to his livelihood, in a crash police say was caused by an attempted robbery.

For years, Mark made his way from his home in Gay, Ga., to Greenville delivering cookie dough to the Great American Cookie Co. in Haywood Mall.

Mark was more than the delivery guy, said Renee Hendrix, manager of the Haywood Mall cookie company location. She first met him 10 years ago when his dad began teaching him the family trucking business. "We looked forward to the truck coming every week to deliver," Hendrix said, "not for the work of it, of course, just because we knew he'd be coming. He was an inspiration."

So much to overcome

It was during a delivery to Haywood Mall shortly before Christmas 2002 when this reporter interviewed him for a story in The Greenville News.

"I like to think big," Mark said that cold morning as he helped unload a delivery at Haywood Mall, all the while strangers gawking at him.

And he did think big.

The top of his head barely reached the wheel well of the hulking rig.

The cab's roof was adorned with a life-sized Santa and reindeer, only adding to the contrast between the behemoth and its miniature master.

Leon Cieutat had hand-built a special pedal system to make it possible for his son to drive.

It must be quite a sight — Mark said at the time, in a distinctive, high-pitched Southern drawl — to see what looks like a kindergartner climbing into the cab and taming such a monstrosity.

Mark had long grown accustomed to the stares. By then he was used to the teenage girls — not conscious of their patronizing, condescending tone — who that day cooed, "Awww, cuuuute," as their boyfriends laughed dismissingly.

Doctors could never explain exactly why he or his 21-year-old brother, Jody, never grew to full form. Mark didn't have characteristics of dwarfism.

Nor could they explain why Mark's 30-year-old brother, Sean, who is 5 feet, 8 inches tall, was of a normal size, like their parents.

Mark suffered from hydrocephalus and required a shunt to drain the fluid in his head. But other than that and a Vitamin D deficiency that necessitated capping all of his teeth, he was simply short.

It certainly made his life interesting.

He was always up on the latest styles among the young crowd — the very young crowd. Being forever locked into children's sizes guaranteed that he was eternally hip.

Every now and then, he'd buy a shirt with a popular kids' character just for fun. Happy Meals were more than enough as dinner while on the road.

So much accomplished

Such are the details of what it means to be a little man, or as Mark liked to say, "a person of small stature." But what defined him as a man was much more complex.

What Mark would become, his father said, was evident when he was just a newly walking toddler and Leon came into the kitchen one day to find his son atop the refrigerator.

His son had pulled out all the kitchen drawers and used them as if they were rungs on a ladder. Once he reached the countertop, Mark had stacked pots and pans in an effort to reach his ultimate prize.

"He was sittin' on top of the refrigerator eatin' cookies," Leon said in a gruff vernacular that his son mimicked. "We were in trouble. I knew that from the damn get-go."

From kindergarten to high school, Sean said he never really had to stick up for his little brother.

Mark was adored by his schoolmates, both for his affable personality and his spirited resolve.

"Everybody that met him respected him," said Sean, who lives down the road from the home Mark shared with his parents in Gay. "He accomplished more than what three full-sized individuals would accomplish in two lifetimes."

Nowhere is Mark's dogged determination better told than through his foremost love, auto racing.

Allen Brown, a friend of Mark's for more than 10 years, remembers when he walked around the corner at a junkyard where the two worked part-time and found Mark transfixed, staring at a pile of aluminum scrap.

"He just looked at me and said, 'Al, you wanna go racin?'"

Brown didn't think twice. Mark had raced go-carts growing up. The owner let the two sell the scraps, and they used the money from scrap metal to buy parts to add to the shell of a Mercury Capri.

For a year, Brown said, the two worked every night on the car in Leon's shop beside the house. During the first practice run, when Brown crashed the car, Mark did what those who knew him say he always did.

He took control, he advised, he offered calm assurance.

"When I wrecked, I was hot," Brown said. "He leaned in the window and said, 'Calm down, Al.' He always gave me pep talks; just an amazing little guy."

Sean won a local track championship with that souped-up Capri. Eventually, Mark raced it, too.

In 2000, fresh out of West Georgia University with a degree in business and finance, Mark ventured into the job market. No one took him seriously, and too often, he couldn't even get an interview.

Invariably, the sound of his voice (it sounded like that of a child played on a tape recorder a speed faster) led people to believe he was a prankster.

"Over the phone," Mark said last year, "everybody tells you, 'That position is filled.' You look in the paper two weeks later and realize that's not true."

He soon accepted the notion that he would have to go it alone. His father, his brother and his uncle all drove rigs for a living. He had grown up watching and learning from his dad.

Mark got his plan together (friends and family say he was meticulously organized) and launched TOO Short. He picked up the cookie route his dad had driven, the one that brought him to Greenville.

At one point early in his business venture, Mark had an employee, but soon realized he hated management. He was fine going it alone. His dad said Mark wouldn't have it any other way.

"He was just an independent little man," Leon said. "He appreciated help, but he'd climb a greased pole before he would ask for it."

Recently, Mark had graded 15 acres he owned so that he could build his own shop, another attempt to separate himself from dependence on his family, to be his own man.

He wouldn't live long enough to see it through.

So much wasted

As he usually did before hitting the road, Mark had stopped by to visit his 15-month-old niece, Mallory, Sean's daughter.

It was Feb. 9, and Mark stayed for two hours before he left on his run to Alabama to deliver cookie dough, Sean said. That was the last time his family would hear from him.

Mark stopped on the shoulder of an entrance ramp to I-85 at about 10:30 p.m. and was attacked as he began to pull off, Montgomery police spokesman Huey Thornton said.

As the truck moved, a man jumped up on the steps leading to the driver's side door.

Mark's rig veered off the road and hit an industrial-strength lightpole and concrete base. Mark was killed in the crash.

Police found Jeffrey Jordan, a 45-year-old Montgomery man with no address, pinned between the truck and the light pole. Jordan, whose injuries Thornton said aren't considered life-threatening, is charged with murder and robbery.

At first, Leon said he had to convince investigators that the man they found dead was indeed an adult and a legitimate trucker.

Leon, who visited the crime scene, said he knows his son did everything right.

He noticed that Mark had pulled onto a wide shoulder in a well-lit area, heading down an incline steep enough to pick up a good head of steam before merging.

Exactly as his father had taught him.

In 32 years of driving rigs, Leon said he has never had so much as a scratch on his truck as a result of a collision. He taught Mark that there is, in almost all cases, no such thing as an accident.

Leon instilled in his son the importance of vigilance when driving, and Mark followed it, his father said. Mechanical failure, he taught, is the only accident, and even that can be avoided with periodic check ups.

His parents' nagging fear that Mark could at any time be "easy prey" apparently came true, Leon said, but he believes Mark was not as easily overcome as his attacker likely imagined.

"The satisfaction," Leon said, "and what keeps me halfway together is, I'd give a million dollars to see this man's face when he reached in to get a kitty cat and found out he grabbed hold of a … mountain lion."

It's little consolation, but a father must find comfort in any harbor. He lost a son who had overcome so much, only to forfeit it all to needless violence.

"To get caught by a guy like this … what a waste."

Picking up the pieces

In the wreckage lay a son, both in the sense of a father's child and that of an extinguished star that once radiated life into others.

He was buried Saturday.

All along the lifeline that Mark drove to maintain his independence, the same gravity by which he pulled people to him is now an equally powerful void.

The response from customers at a Great American Cookie location in Atlanta was so overwhelming that store workers had to direct calls of concern to the family.

In Montgomery, at the Eastdale Mall location where Mark was to have made a delivery that night, manager Kaye McCord said everyone who knew him is "devastated."

"I just feel blessed that I got to meet somebody like him," she said.

Hendrix, the manager of the Haywood Mall location, said she will miss the long talks the two often had about managing and finance and corporate mergers.

And, she'll miss the laughs, miss the sure smile and joke du jour that Mark always greeted her with.

It was a little inside joke they had, partly for laughs and partly so that Mark could escape yet again having to explain that he was a man in a child's body.

With only three years in age separating the two, Hendrix said their favorite stunt was to play along with anyone who thought Mark was her son.

"Is that your child?" people would ask. "I'd say, 'Yeah, that's Mark, that's my son.' He would just look at me and grin. In a way, he was. He was family."

Now his family must learn to live without their heart and soul.

It was Mark who nudged younger brother, Jody, 21, along as he considered bartending school. Jody was more self-conscious about his small stature, but with his brother's help, he finished the course.

When Jody was 12, he was the "go-fer boy" (go fer drinks, go fer sandwiches) as Mark and Brown were building their race car.

Now, he finds himself trying to piece together the details of the business his brother has so suddenly left behind.

Jody said he will keep the trucks running. One he will fix up extra nice just to have around to remember his brother.

"I don't know anything about log books or anything about running a company, but me and my brother are going to run this company and continue it," he said. "I'm not going to let it fold, seeing as how he worked so hard to get it."

But the void is deep, and Mark's reassuring presence is there only in spirit and in memory. Big brother Sean could use Mark right now, he said.

It was Mark who gave Sean a job with TOO Short when he got laid off from Delta Airlines.

And when Sean would stop off at auto parts stores and buy frivolous extras for his truck, it was Mark who would sigh like a patient father who just can't get through to his son.

Not long ago, when Mark saw the unnecessary chrome Sean had bought for his rig, he simply shook his head and calmly, dryly admonished, "Yep, that's gonna to make you a whooooole lot of money, isn't it?"

Sean often found himself looking down at Mark while simultaneously looking up to him. A little man with a spirit larger than life, short in size but not in stature.

"He was just as much my older brother as he was my younger brother. We're gonna miss him like crazy. In my eyes, he was 7 feet tall."