Four Feet Tall and Rising

by Shorty Rossi

  It was true then and it’s still true now. No woman wants to deal with a guy that’s never home, flying all over the country. Even if I am home, I’m home with anywhere from three to six pit bulls in the house, on the couch, sleeping in my bed at night. Most women aren’t happy about a house full of dogs, but there’s no way I’m putting them outside. Any woman who tells me to put my dogs outside would find herself sleeping on my porch. My pits are my family. Love me, love my pits.

  Linda wouldn’t let Geisha into her house, and she was terrified ’cause she was a pit bull. Mom and Dad now had another reason to berate me: “You’re gonna be killed by that dog!” I was glad to get out of there, and after that visit, I didn’t speak to Linda again.

  Once we got settled in Indianapolis, I sent a long e-mail to all of my family, excluding Janet, letting them know I’d had enough. I was tired of the shit. Linda was always starting fights. Creating drama. This kind of petty arguing had been going on since I was a kid, all the back talk, and nobody was ever happy with me. I let Linda have it. “I’m tired of the lectures about my career. The dog isn’t gonna kill me. We fucking visit with each other, and everything is peachy keen, and then the minute I leave, you turn around and talk shit about me.”

  As for my parents, I couldn’t have a phone conversation with Mom without Dad listening in on the other line. Mom couldn’t even write an e-mail to me without Dad reviewing it first. It was a constant battle to have a relationship with my own mother. I was through playing their games.

  The only family spared my rampage was Janet. To this day, my sister Janet has never asked me any questions about what happened on that night I was arrested. She may have sat through the trial, but she never needed me to tell my version of the story to her. Once I tried to, and she said, “It’s done and it’s over with and you’re not doing those things today. You’re my baby brother and you can’t ever do anything wrong in my eyes.” No matter what path of wrong I took, Janet was always there for me. I was grateful to call her my sister. I still am.

  I was assigned to share a two-bedroom apartment with a Little Person named Ronald Lee Clark. Ronald was originally from South Korea, but his mom had left him at a police station when he was two years old. He was adopted, through the Little People of America organization, and ended up being raised by an American family in a small town called Choctaw, outside Oklahoma City. He seemed like a bit of a diva to me. He’d been a cheerleader for Christ’s sake. Ronald wasn’t thrilled to find out he was rooming with Geisha, Shitty the farting cat, Hood Rat, and two ex-cons. He didn’t have much of a choice.

  Ronald and I lived completely different lifestyles, but for the tour, we had to find a way to get along. We were sharing a rental car. I am the kind of guy who likes to be in my dressing room way before I need to be. Ronald was the kind of guy who didn’t mind getting there five minutes after his call. He was always late. He liked to play things by ear. He’d hem and haw about decisions, and say, “When I wake up, we’ll figure out a way to share the car.” That wasn’t cool with me. I wanted a schedule. If we had to be at work at two, then I wanted the car for two hours and he could have it for two hours before we needed to be at the theater. There were a few times when he had to get a cab to work ’cause he wouldn’t move his ass fast enough for me.

  There was another Little Person on tour with us named Sebastian Saraceno. Sebastian and I got along a lot better. Sebastian is an American of Sicilian descent, so we had our Italian heritage in common. He’d been working entertainment in Florida for a bunch of years, doing live performances with various radio stations and the Salerno Theatre. Seb was the kind of guy who couldn’t nibble grapes in a grocery store, he was so by the book, so honest. That was his character. He was anal-retentive to the point of being annoying. Organized to the cue. I could tell that about him immediately. He was decisive. I respected that, and it helped that he was on tour with his girlfriend. They were living together, so he wasn’t up in my grill all day long like Ronald. Seb didn’t get on my nerves.

  Eventually, we all became friends. Even Ray got along well with them. The whole gang of us would go out together and hang out. We ended up doing three more tours together. There are three pictures in three different shows of Seb and Ron holding me up, drunk. I introduced both the guys to Allison, and we added them to our roster of talent for Short Entertainment. We became tight.

  Our apartment was on the creepy side of town. It was unsafe for the Rockettes to be living there, so eventually they moved the entire cast and crew to the Marriot Residence Inn. I was allowed to have Geisha—the hotel knew about her—but we had to keep the cats a secret. Then Ray decided he wanted to adopt a Boston terrier. We found a mom-and-pop pet store, and showed up with Geisha on a leash. Ray was looking over the Boston terriers when the woman who ran the place came over to admire Geisha and give her a rub between the ears. “Such a beautiful pit bull. As a matter of fact, we’ve got a box of pit puppies in the back. Their mother was hit by a car.”

  She took us behind the counter into the storage area, where a cardboard box of what seemed to be wiggling worms turned out to be six motherless pit puppies. As I leaned down to take a closer look, one cute guy stuck his head over the side of the box. He was mostly white, with a patch of black on his right hip and right shoulder, and a nearly perfect black circle around his right eye. I wasn’t even looking for another dog, but I knew right then and there, he was mine. I bent down and whispered in his floppy ear, “I’m getting you.” So much for the Boston terriers. We had our Mussolini.

  As the Radio City tour was wrapping up its final performances, I had no plans for what to do next. I got it into my hard head that I needed to conquer New York City. I was off parole and free to move, and I thought I could expand Short Entertainment to include the Little People of New York. I mistakenly assumed there would be industry jobs and auditions available. Nobody else was repping Little People in the city. I thought I’d carve a niche for myself. Plus, I’d given up my apartment in Long Beach, so there was no “home” to go home to in Los Angeles anyway. Why not give New York a try?

  The rents in Manhattan were outrageous, and forget trying to find a place for two pit bulls, two cats, and two ex-cons. I was about to give up on my plans, when I sat down backstage after one of the Radio City shows with Candace, the mom of one of the kid stars in the show. Candace and I had become friends during the run, and we often met after the bow to share a cigarette or a cigar, or go grab a drink. Candace heard the disappointment in my voice. She said, “Why don’t you look in Pennsylvania? We’re in Wilkes-Barre, and it’s just ninety minutes from the city.” She assured me that she made the drive back and forth all the time for her son’s auditions. Candace sweetened the deal by promising me a job as an emcee for her dance competitions. She owned a whole slew of dance studios across the Northeast, called the David Blake Studios. She was a busy lady who promised she could keep me busy, too.

  Now, any driver in Los Angeles will tell you they’ve spent ninety minutes in traffic just to get to the grocery store. Ninety minutes behind the wheel was not a daunting prospect to me ’cause I didn’t really understand that driving from Wilkes-Barre to Manhattan actually took two to three hours. On a good day. Ignorance kept me blind, and I started searching for apartments through online newspapers and found a three-bedroom house in Glen Lyon for $460 a month. Glen Lyon looked like it sat right outside Wilkes-Barre, so I figured it was essentially the same kind of neighborhood. I was wrong. Glen Lyon was an old coal-mining town that was stuck in 1942. All the businesses had closed in the ’70s and rows and rows of houses stood empty. All the young people had moved away, and everyone left was old and had known each other for generations.

  When the tour was over, Ray and I said good-bye to Ronald and Seb, packed up the Capri, and moved to Glen Lyon. Our arrival was greeted as though aliens had landed in a spaceship. People stared out their windows at us. A white midget and a black guy would have been bad enough. We had Noah’s Ark in our car, and we’d even a
dded to the family, adopting a gray, black-and-white pit bull puppy from a woman in upstate New York who’d rescued a litter that’d been abandoned by their mother. We named her Bebi, and moved her into the house with the rest of the zoo.

  Nobody would talk to us, and Ray seemed to be the only black man within a fifty-mile radius. There were no auditions for Little People in New York, so there was no need for Short Entertainment to open an East Coast office. Allison was still in Los Angeles, running our business, but she’d always been better with handling talent, while I was the one who stirred up jobs. Now the only work I could scrounge together was emceeing for Candace, which I had to supplement with California unemployment checks. We’d made a big mistake moving.

  That fact was confirmed when cops showed up on our front porch. I was in our basement and Ray was on the second floor of the house when Geisha and Mussolini started barking their heads off at the front door. Something was really wrong. I heard Ray clomping down the stairs, so I ran upstairs. The dogs just wouldn’t stop, no matter how much we yelled. Something was really, really wrong.

  When I made it to the living room, there were three cops on the porch. One had his foot against the front door and his gun drawn. I froze in place, and Ray did, too. No sudden movements. We were used to the LAPD. I yelled over the barking dogs, “What’s going on here?” The police yelled back, “Did you call 911?” Ray and I just looked at each other. Neither one of us had called. “Is your phone off the hook? A phone off the hook will trigger an automatic call to 911 after a period of time.” Sure enough, one of the dogs had knocked a phone off the hook. Ray righted the phone, but the police weren’t going away. “Can we talk with you for a moment?”

  Ray put the dogs away as the Pennsylvania good old boys made themselves at home in our living room. “Where y’all from?” I told them L.A., hoping they’d soon leave, but knowing we were in for a long night. The main guy loomed over me. “What the hell are you doing here?” I explained to him that I ran a talent management company. “Out of Pennsylvania?” he said. I clarified: “We work with a dance company in Wilkes-Barre. The David Blake School of Dance.”

  Apparently, I’d said the magic words. Suddenly, all the cops relaxed, and everyone got friendly. “You work for Mark and Candace and them? Well, that’s a relief! Everyone in your neighborhood thinks you are drug dealers!” All the cops had a good laugh. “You gotta realize, we don’t get that many midgets and colored guys around here.” I thought Ray might explode, but I shot him a look like “get over it.” Technically, Ray was a fugitive. He was still on parole, but never reported. No need to make trouble when we’d just gotten ourselves out of a mess.

  Once word got out who we were, our neighbors transformed from enemies to friends. Our next-door neighbors were the Kielbasa Kings of Glen Lyon. They invited us over for dinner, for fresh kielbasa. We were an overnight sensation. It made life a bit easier, but I was still miserable in Pennsylvania. Then Jerry was killed.

  Jerry was supposed to be moving out to join us when I got a call from an old friend, Darrell. Jerry had been in and out of prison for drugs, selling not using. He finally had stopped doing that shit, and had been out so long in this stretch that he was no longer on parole. But Jerry still loved to play dice, craps. He was always going back to the projects to play. He just couldn’t break completely away from that neighborhood. The projects were still home to him, even though he didn’t technically live there. He had to be around that world to feel comfortable. He was “institutionalized,” as I call it. It cost him his life.

  They were rolling in front of the gym. There was in-house beef going on with a gang. That gang came over and just started shooting anyone who was standing in front of the gym. Five people were shot. Jerry was shot in the head. He had nothing to do with what was going on.

  Before that phone call, I’d always been an on-again, off-again recreational pot smoker. When I lived in Long Beach, I’d been more than that. I was smoking so heavily, it was slowing me down. Allison pointed out to me that the pot was making me lazy. It was affecting my daily life, but it calmed me way down, so I kept it around.

  When Jerry died, I couldn’t smoke anymore. I’d smoke and think about him getting shot. I’d smoke and think, “If Jerry had just moved out here with us, he’d still be alive.” It made me so sad. I smoked my last stick of weed in Pennsylvania, then called up Debbie in Vegas and told her, “I’ve gotta get out of this hellhole.” She convinced me to move to Las Vegas.

  A few months before we were supposed to move, Geisha went into heat. None of my dogs were neutered or spayed. It wasn’t something I considered important to do at the time, so Ray and I undertook the futile attempt to keep Mussolini away from my girl. We had no plan about timing their feedings or their pee breaks so they wouldn’t run into each other. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. It was inevitable. Mussolini would be a dad.

  I may have read a lot about the history of pit bulls, but I knew nothing about breeding or responsible dog ownership. When Mussolini hopped on top of Geisha, he got stuck, and couldn’t get loose. I was about to have a heart attack. I thought something was wrong with my dogs. I called Diana at the local pet parlor, freaking out. “They’re stuck!” She had to calm me down. “That’s what happens. Don’t worry. They’ll naturally release each other.” Diana was right, but I knew we were still in trouble. Geisha was pregnant, and we’d have a litter of puppies to care for when we were supposed to be driving across country to our new life in Vegas.

  Two weeks later, Bebi went into heat. This time, we locked Mussolini in a bedroom on the second floor, convinced we could keep him from becoming a dad for the second time. We were so stupid to think something like a door could hold Mussolini back. I was in the basement and Ray was asleep in his room when, being from L.A., we heard an earthquake. Wood splitting, things breaking. Pennsylvania isn’t exactly home to ground-shaking events, so it took me a minute to realize the commotion was Mussolini. He’d busted through the second-floor door, and was on top of Bebi, humping away.

  Now I had two pregnant dogs and a lease on a house in Vegas. Debbie was expecting us, and I’d given Candace notice about my job. What could I do? We were gonna have to wait until the puppies were born, then pack everyone and everything into a Penske rental truck. We’d just have to pull the Capri on a trailer behind. We couldn’t all fit in that convertible now.

  Nine weeks later, Geisha gave birth to seven puppies, and two weeks after that, Bebi had seven more. Our basement was a puppy mill. Stepping over puppies, feeding, watering, and making sure seventeen dogs and two cats had used the bathroom was a full-time job. Ray took over their care while I packed up the rest of the house for our move. It was January in the freezing northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. The weather was god-awful all across the country. What were we thinking?

  It never even crossed our minds to adopt the puppies out. We thought we needed to keep them with us for at least four or five months, until they were weaned. We didn’t know they could be weaned in a matter of weeks. It also never crossed my mind to take them to the pound. These dogs were my responsibility and I had to step up and care for them.

  We built crates into the Penske truck, to keep the puppies from bouncing around, and put the poor cats into crates of their own. Every two to three hours, we had to stop to take the puppies out of the crates, clean them up, and make sure all the dogs and cats and humans were fed, watered, and pooped. At one stop in Tennessee, I returned from the rest stop to find Ray totally overwhelmed. Fourteen puppies were running amok on the rest-stop grounds. Total strangers were chasing them and trying to catch them and help Ray get them back into their crates. I wish I could say the rest of our drive was uneventful, but pretty much every stop turned into a melee.

  By the time we got to our house in Vegas, we were exhausted. Debbie came over and helped us unpack. The house was great. The biggest house I’d ever lived in for my entire life. It had a big backyard for the dogs, but I was in over my head. The hous
e was overrun. I was spending more on pet food than I spent on my own groceries, and I wasn’t finding easy success breaking into the casino entertainment circuit like I’d hoped.

  I took a job working at a pet resort, where rich people “dropped off” their “babies” for some pampering and luxury, instead of sticking them in a kennel during a vacation. The owner of the resort was a dog lover who showed Chows. Working with over a hundred different dogs a day, I learned everything there was to know about dogs. It took me a while to learn their body motions, and what those movements meant, but I watched them closely. I watched how each of the dogs interacted with one another and how each of the breeds seemed to respond in a given situation. The only dogs I couldn’t read were Chows. Nothing they did made any sense to me. It took me a long time to understand them.

  In my free time, I volunteered for the local NSPCA, helping out at the pound. I learned to become a vet tech, a vet assistant, giving shots, medications, helping the surgeries, doing anything and everything for the dogs. I couldn’t stand seeing pit bulls in those cages. I started rescuing dogs one by one, with no thought as to how I’d feed, house, and keep them. I just couldn’t stand to see them left there to die.

  The pound was a completely different world from the pet resort. It reminded me a lot of going from my childhood in the suburbs to living in the projects. The dogs at the resort had every possible amenity provided for them. The dogs at the pound were forgotten souls, biding their time until they were put down. Country club versus Folsom. I took it personally.