Four Feet Tall and Rising

by Shorty Rossi

  I found an apartment in Long Beach, and my old cellie from Folsom, Ray, moved in with me. He was back out of prison again and needed a place to stay so he could get some distance between him and his old ways in San Francisco. Living together was just like old times. Only this time, we had our own rooms. We fell into our usual dynamic. Ignore each other if we weren’t feeling social, hang out when we were. It was good to have Ray back in my life.

  The gigs with Dave were few and far between, so I took a second job to try to get ahead. I applied to be a personal banker at Bank of America. I took the class they offered, and passed their test with a score of 100 percent. They hired me for their Glendale office, to work the night shift. I’d work at Universal all day, take the bus to my Bank of America job, get back on the bus, fall asleep until I’d reach my apartment in Long Beach, sleep for an hour or two, get back on the bus, and head to Universal. It was a vicious cycle.

  That went on for four months, until one evening at Bank of America, my supervisor called me into his office. He put me on the phone with the corporate office. They said, “We just pulled up your criminal record. Is this you?” I must have muttered under my breath, “I’m through.” My supervisor laid it out for me: “You’ve got a choice. You can resign, or we can terminate you.” I chose to resign.

  The next day, I called Janet and told her what happened. She must have told Linda, ’cause a few days later, Dad called to chew me out. He thought it was a travesty that I’d lost such an important job, asking, “What are you gonna do with your life?” I’d defend myself. “I’m dancing onstage! I’m enjoying myself. I don’t have to report to fucking nobody.” It was true. Despite the grueling schedule, the sweaty costumes, and the kicking kids, I enjoyed performing. My dad thought I needed to settle down. “But why? I missed ten years of my fucking life. Let me catch up!” He pushed. “You’ve gotta be like everyone else. With the home and a car and a wife and some kids.” It made no sense to me. “Hello! Why? So I can be fucking miserable like you? No, thanks!”

  I wasn’t worried. I knew I’d find something else. The only place that would hire me was a phone sex operation. I processed the credit card information as the girls sat beside me, filing their nails and picking their teeth, yelling, “Yeah, daddy, do me, do me!” Learned my lesson with that job. Never call a phone sex line. There’s nothing sexy about it.

  I didn’t have a car and I was getting about four hours of sleep a night. I’d head home on the Blue Line, fall asleep, make it all the way to Long Beach, and be halfway back to Los Angeles before I’d wake up. I was so used to the structured life in prison. In Folsom, I sat around and watched the same TV shows every single day. The same newscast in the morning. The same news in the afternoon. Mr. Belvedere. Frasier. The Golden Girls. My life outside was a complete disaster. I loved my job at Universal, but nothing was consistent. Did I wanna go back? Hell no. But the structure was comforting and in some weird way, I missed it. Real life was chaos.

  It didn’t help that the Bride of Chucky was stalking me. Eventually, I had to petition the court for a restraining order. She was infuriated that I had had the nerve to abandon her, and I wasn’t sure what she would do. I made sure the restraining order had explicit language saying she wasn’t allowed to be inside the Universal theme park. It didn’t matter; she snuck in.

  I was up onstage, shaking and shimmying and playing with the audience, when I felt a cold chill go up the white of my chipmunk stripe. There she was, glaring at me with those crazy eyes. The Bride of Chucky surrounded by sweet, innocent kids. I almost fell off the stage when I saw her. I felt my mouth go dry, and I panicked. Then I remembered, I had a few minutes backstage between scenes. As soon as the lights went down, I ran backstage and ripped off my Alvin head. I grabbed an assistant stage manager and terrified her with a frantic “Call security! Now!” There was no time to explain. My music cue came up and I had to run back out onstage. As I danced and tumbled, I caught a glimpse of Heather house right. She was closer and I swear to God, the veins in her neck were throbbing. Thank God, there was another short break between scenes, and I ran off as fast as I could. Once again, I ripped off the Alvin head. By this time, security had mobilized. I gave them the super-abbreviated version, which sounded wacked-out and breathless: “Restraining order. Crazy bitch. Audience. She might try to kill me!” To be honest, I was more afraid of the Bride of Chucky than I’d ever been of any Neo-Nazi. Neo-Nazis at least followed gang law. This bitch was off the reservation.

  But it was my cue again, so I suited back up and ran out for the finale. Through the eye holes, I could see the security guards in the audience trying to find her. There were kids everywhere, and Heather was their same height. They couldn’t really tell where she was, so I started dancing and trying to point at her with my tail, nod my chubby chipmunk cheeks in her direction. Finally, one of the guards caught on, and a swarm of seven security officers circled her. I just kept dancing my heart out as they lifted her up and carried her past the terrified parents pulling their kids closer. She was screaming like a banshee, “I AM NOT LEAVING HERE UNTIL I GET TO SEE HIM! I WILL CUT HIS FUCKING DICK OFFFFFFFFFFFFFF!!!!!!!”

  I didn’t need another girlfriend. What I needed was a car and a dog.

  First things first. I bought a Mercury Capri convertible from my friend Kacie, then I bought a leash, a few cans of food, and a bowl for water. Ray and I drove over to Lacy Street and stepped into the North Central Animal Shelter. An old friend of mine, Garrence, was working there. The shelter was in desperate need of renovation, and the barking and smells were what I expected. What I wasn’t prepared for was row after row of abandoned, brutalized, and scarred pit bulls. In the ten-plus years that had passed since I’d had to leave Coco with Little Al, pit bulls had been demonized. The Centers for Disease Control had published a study on dog bite–related fatalities, and determined that “pit bull terriers or mixes thereof” and Rottweilers accounted for a larger percentage of fatalities than any other breed. The result was pounds full of bully breeds.

  But here’s the thing, that report ultimately said that “generic non-breed-specific, dangerous dog laws can be enacted that place primary responsibility for a dog’s behavior on the owner, regardless of the dog’s breed. In particular, targeting chronically irresponsible dog owners may be effective.”* In plain English, don’t blame the breed, don’t blame the dogs, blame the owners. But that didn’t matter. Pit bulls were now the enemy. Their reputation got so bad, and their numbers were so overwhelming, that the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals renamed them “St. Francis terriers” to try to help get them adopted.

  The North Central Animal Shelter wasn’t nearly as proactive. The place was the Folsom of pit bulls, filled with stocky, wounded warriors trapped behind gates. Their accommodations were not so different from the ones I’d left behind—concrete floors, flimsy bedding, a steel bowl, and food through a slot. I shuddered at the similarity. My God, there were so many. Dozens and dozens of pit bulls sleeping, staring, pacing, shaking. How in the hell could I possibly only choose one?

  Garrence said, “Let me know if you want any of these.” That’s when I saw her. She was a thick girl with a short, silky coat and floppy, folded triangles for ears. She wore her brown fur like an open jacket, exposing a white chest and tummy. The white continued up the front of her neck and circled her mouth and nose, then met again in a thin line that traveled right up the middle of her square head. The effect was as if she’d glued two brown pork chops on either side of her face. She had high cheekbones, Nixon-like jowls, and soulful, searching eyes. It was love at first sight.

  I looked on her card and it said she was being euthanized. I said, “Garrence, what the hell!” He explained that she was on death row, scheduled to be euthanized that day. That did it. This brown-eyed girl was coming home with me. I said, “No, she’s not. I want her.” Garrence pulled her out of the cage and took her up front for processing. Only, the vet wouldn’t let me take her home. He said she nee
ded to be fixed, and that I could come back later in the evening to pick her up. Fine. I left. But later that night, when Ray drove me back to the shelter, the vet still wouldn’t release her. They hadn’t fixed her, and in fact, they were just getting ready to put her down. If I’d shown up ten or fifteen minutes later, she would have been dead.

  All those anger management classes I’d taken back in the Youth Authority went flying out the damn window. I started screaming and cussing and yelling and demanding to see her. It wasn’t an approach that worked well with a city employee. The vet wouldn’t tell me why she was being put down, and he wouldn’t give her to me. I yelled, “I already paid for her. I paid for her to be fixed!” He told me to pick out another dog and he’d apply the fee to it instead. I didn’t want another damn dog. I wanted my girl. I yelled at him, “Well, keep her tonight and fix her in the morning and I’ll come back.” The guy just eyed me, saying, “I don’t like your attitude.” I’d had it by now. I screamed at him, “I don’t like your fucking attitude!”

  The vet walked away to go get a security guard. Things were getting pretty nasty. Garrence pulled me aside and said, “Shorty, there’s a gate in the back. Just take the dog. You paid for her. I’ll let her loose back there. Go on.” Ray rushed out to get the car and I snuck into the yard, where I found my brown-eyed girl waiting. I checked over my shoulders to make sure nobody was looking before I pulled the leash out of my pocket. It’s like the sweet girl read my mind. She bowed her head and let me wrap the leash around her neck, and then we made a run for it. She seemed to know exactly how to get us out of that hellhole. She pulled me toward the back gate, and we both ran as fast as our legs could carry us. With some pushing and some prying, whooooosh, she was out, then whoooosh, I was out, and we were free!

  Ray was waiting in the alley with my old, red Mercury convertible already running. My brown-eyed girl hopped into the backseat and I rode shotgun. We tore out of there like bats out of hell, laughing our asses off and knowing we’d done the right thing. They could keep my ninety dollars for a spay job they never did. I had my girl. My panting, pretty, stolen Geisha. We were Bonnie and Clyde. I caught a glimpse of her in the rear-view mirror, and I swear to God, she smiled.

  Adopting Geisha inspired me to volunteer with a group called L.A. City Camp, which took kids out of the projects for a day and brought them to Disneyland or Universal Studios. I didn’t realize how little effort it took to have a big impact on kids. I was just doing it to have fun. I didn’t realize that in the process of having fun, the kids were actually learning and seeing a new world. With kids that young, there was real potential for change, and I saw a change in me, too. I could relax and be myself around Geisha and the kids. I didn’t have to worry about backstabbing. I didn’t have to worry about kids trying to betray me. These kids were pure of heart.

  L.A. City Camp was started by a white guy named Bruce McAllister, who’d been so moved by the Rodney King riots, he wanted to help. He was a behind-the-camera guy who actually walked into the projects to figure out how to be of service. Everyone thought he was insane, but the nonprofit grew and grew until it had a board of directors and tons of celebs involved. I enjoyed working with them, but then I went to a few of their fund-raisers, and it seemed to me like they were more worried with how everything looked than the kids they were supposed to help.

  I decided to start my own nonprofit instead. I teamed up with two guys, Terrell and David, and we started the Watts Youth Foundation, which many years later morphed into Shorty’s Charities. We did basically the same thing that L.A. City Camp did, but on a more one-to-one scale. I knew the parents personally. We’d take the kids to movie sets, Universal Studios, a tour of the Queen Mary, even to fly kites. Wherever we went, whatever we did, Geisha went with us. The kids got used to seeing her, being around her, and even taking care of her. They’d willingly pick up her poop. Well, maybe not so willingly, but they had to learn how to take care of her if they wanted her to be around. They’d bring bags of food for her. I could see that she made a real difference with them. They stopped being scared of pit bulls, and started seeing them in a new light.

  Seeing Geisha with the kids set off the first spark of an idea. What if I could convince kids in the projects that pit bulls weren’t dangerous and shouldn’t be used for fighting? How could that change things? Could I change things? I started reading every book I could get my hands on to learn the history of pit bulls. There were lots of different versions about their past, but most seemed to agree that originally they were bulldogs used for boar hunting and bull baiting. The books showed paintings of the dogs, dating as back as far as the 1500s, and they looked a hell of a lot like pits to me. Three hundred years later, once bull baiting was outlawed in England, they started breeding the bulldogs with terriers to make them smaller and more agile so they could use them for ratting and fighting. They purposefully bred the dogs to be people-friendly, so when the handlers would jump into the ring to separate them, the handler would be safe. Dogs that showed aggression toward humans, even in the middle of a fight, were usually killed.

  As for the American Pit Bull Terrier, it was a combination of English and Irish stock brought to the United States for use as cattle dogs, “catch dogs” for pigs, and for fighting. When the American Kennel Club was formed, they refused to recognize pit bulls because of their fighting history, so a man named Chauncy Bennet formed the United Kennel Club specifically for the purpose of registering the breed. They’d been in America for hundreds of years, and through generations of selective breeding, they’d gotten bigger, more muscular, and stronger. The terrier part of them was nearly gone, which is why most people referred to them as pit bulls instead of by their full names.

  I’d sit backstage between performances, dressed as Alvin, and read Pit Bulls for Dummies so intensely it looked like I was trying to memorize lines. One night Dave almost didn’t wanna interrupt me, but he had a lead on a good job and he thought I’d be interested. A Little Person had dropped out of the Los Angeles cast of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and they needed someone to replace him fast. Was I interested? Hell, yeah, I was interested. Another job performing, instead of processing credit cards for the phone sex girls? “What do I need to do?” I quickly threw together an audition video, showing them my dance moves and telling them about my experience working as Alvin. I shipped it off to the New York casting office, and got the job.

  Everybody knows that if you go to New York City between November and January, the Radio City Christmas Spectacular is running at Radio City Music Hall, but not everyone knows that they also have road companies that do a touring version in theaters all over the United States. Some of the companies “sit down” in a major city for a full holiday, like in Los Angeles or Miami, but other companies split their time between say, Branson, Missouri, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

  All the shows, no matter where they were, ran for ninety minutes and followed the same script. They started with the Rockettes performing “Ring Out Those Bells,” which would cause Santa to show up at the theater. There’d be more Rockette dancing, then a scene from The Nutcracker where a little girl would dream about opening her presents on Christmas Day, and dance with toy bears played by Little People in costumes. There’d be a bunch more singing and dancing with wooden soldiers, and then the show moved to Santa’s workshop, where Little People played his elves.

  The Los Angeles show ran at the Universal Amphitheatre, which is now the Gibson Amphitheatre, so I could actually keep doing my Alvin gig, and take on the extra Radio City show without having to give up either. I’d finish a Chipmunks show in the theme park, strip out of costume and run to the amphitheater, do a Christmas show, and then run back to the theme park and jump onstage as Alvin again. I’d run back and forth all day long. The only way I was able to handle both shows was because out of all the scenes featuring Little People in the Christmas Spectacular, I was only needed for one. All the other Little People were dancing in the Nutcracker scene, as baby bears, as moving sn
owmen, and as elves in Santa’s workshop. Me? I only had to work for five minutes, as an elf in Santa’s workshop. The guy I’d replaced had serious mobility issues and they’d only been able to use him as an elf. All the other Little People were pretty pissed off with me that I collected a full paycheck for five minutes of work. I didn’t do shit and I got paid great, $1200 a week, on top of my Alvin salary. Like I’d hoped, I was able to quit processing credit cards for the phone sex company and joined AGVA, the union for dancers and theme park performers. I was a full-time performer now. I’d found my calling.

  That’s when I met Allison. Allison Queal had been doing the Radio City show for years and she didn’t like that I’d just waltzed in and landed the primo gig. She hated even more that I had the nerve to sleep in the dressing room while she was out there dancing her Little legs off. During the run, we couldn’t stand each other. It was a mutual hate/hate relationship.

  But Allison noticed something else I was doing besides sleeping between gigs. Whenever I heard about a gig that needed a Little Person, I’d hook up one of my fellow cast members with the job. I had my hands full with the Alvin and Radio City gigs. I couldn’t take on any more work. So I’d turn down the jobs, but promise to help them find someone. I’d step into the dressing rooms and hook people up. It was a pretty easy way to turn all that animosity into goodwill.

  After the Radio City show closed for the season, I got the idea that maybe I should open a talent management company for Little People. I was always trying to find an angle, always trying to find my next gig, and I thought, “Look at my Little People. They can be my crack. I can sell them, loan them out. I can be the pimp of Little People.” I’d watched Uncle D. run his business for a year. It was the same principle as selling drugs. Little People were the product. I just needed to find a way to market them.