Four Feet Tall and Rising (22 page)

RCA Victor and the Buster Brown Shoe Company used pits as their mascots. A pit named Petey was the star of the Our Gang comedies, better known as
The Little Rascals
. It used to be common knowledge that pit bulls had accompanied pioneer families across the country. Laura Ingalls Wilder, of the popular
Little House
series of books, owned a working farm dog, a pit bull named Jack. Theodore Roosevelt and Helen Keller had even owned pit bulls. So why was Denver outlawing an entire breed? Because pit bulls were ghetto dogs, project pups. Pit bulls were a class issue. A race issue. Ever since states started prosecuting dog fights or animal abuse as felony crimes in the late ’70s, the sport had gone underground. It stopped being a pastime of the white elite, and started being the hustle of the drug world, the gang world, the underprivileged. Pit bulls were portrayed as glorified gladiators in every rap video that played on MTV.

The stigma destroyed their sweetheart reputation. They were demonized in the press and they were vilified. The same thing had happened to Chows and Dobermans and German Shepherds in the ’70s and early ’80s, but now it was pit bulls and Rottweilers that were taking the fall. People turned on their TVs and heard sensationalized stories about pit bull attacks, or kids being mauled, and rather than examine the facts of that particular case, they swallowed the Kool-Aid and became fearful.

The dogs were not designed to kill. They had no special
“enzyme” that made them fight. It’s only humans that consciously make the decision to kill. All dogs are capable of violence if they’ve been trained by shitty owners to be nasty, protective, fighting machines. Owners think that allowing their dogs to bark at or charge a door is protection. They think that dogs naturally know how to be guard dogs. They’re too damn lazy to pick up a book and figure out the right way to train their pet. If owners allow dogs to behave badly, they will behave badly. Just like kids.

If some parent isn’t paying attention and leaves their kid in the basement with an unneutered male pit bull and a female in heat, there’s gonna be trouble. If some gangbanger trains a pit bull to help with a home invasion, and the dog tears into some old lady, I can guaran-damn-tee you it wasn’t the dog’s idea to break into that house. For God’s sake, there was a case in Florida where a Pomeranian mauled a baby to death, but people didn’t run out and kill all the Pomeranians. Why were pit bulls being executed?

I’d never felt so powerless in the face of such outright horror. Not in prison, not in the projects, not even at home. If breeding and boarding weren’t solutions to the problem, and entire cities were annihilating pit bulls by the thousands, how would I ever be able to make a difference? What was the solution? I had no idea.

Amid all this
, I decided to go through communion. I’d been baptized Catholic as a baby, but my parents abandoned
their traditions sometime during my elementary school years. Church wasn’t something that even registered for me during high school. At DeWitt, I’d studied the different religions out of curiosity. I studied the beliefs of Muslims, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even the Mormons. Religion intrigued me. I went to Mass a few times at Folsom, but it hadn’t taken hold of me the way it took hold of me in Vegas.

I knew I should do it on my own, with nobody else’s involvement, with no one pushing me to do it. It wasn’t like I wanted to preach at people about the right religion or the right way to live. Every person has to make that choice for themselves. But I’d always believed in a sense of a higher being, even though I personally might never make it to heaven for the things I’d done. Through the years of my life, I hadn’t been a saint. I harbored no illusions about my chances for redemption, but learning about the Catholic traditions reminded me of my grandparents. I wanted to feel closer to them. I started a process called the RCIA, the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. It was a two-year process to learn more about my faith, my own soul, and to prepare for a period called purification and enlightenment. Since I’d been baptized as a baby, I didn’t have to be baptized again, but I still had to be confirmed. On Lent, I received the sacraments of initiation and I officially changed my name.

I’d been going by Shorty since I was in junior high. At Universal, my checks were made out to Shorty Rossi, but that name wasn’t on my Social Security card. When I’d done all that genealogical research in prison, I found I had two birth
certificates with two different names. One was Melvin Louis Rossi and the other was Melvin Luigi Rossi. When I quizzed Mom about the discrepancy, she said the hospital made a mistake, but she wouldn’t tell me which name was the mistake. There was no getting a straight answer from her.

So, in defiance, I said, “Fuck it. I’m gonna change my name.” I picked Luigi Francis Shorty Rossi. I added Francis, my communion name, chosen in honor of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. I loved the story about St. Francis and the wolf. There was a legend that when he’d lived in the city of Gubbio, a wolf was terrorizing the town. Francis had gone up in the hills to find the wolf, and when he did, he made the sign of the cross and said, “Brother Wolf, you have done great evil. People accuse and curse you but let us make peace between you and the people.” Francis walked the wolf into town and explained to the people that the wolf wasn’t evil. He was hungry. If people would feed the wolf, he wouldn’t attack them or their animals. Then he blessed the wolf and let him go.

I could relate to Francis and his wolf. It’s just that in my life the wolf was a pit bull and every city in America felt like they were under attack. That their kids weren’t safe. That the pit bull was evil. How in the world was I gonna come down off a hill and convince people that pit bulls weren’t terrorizing people. It was people terrorizing pit bulls.

Would I ever achieve sainthood? Hell, no. Is there a heaven and hell? I’ll find out. Which one am I going to? I don’t know, but I knew it was important for me to take communion, to change my name, and to be reborn to the world.

It took me
almost two years to successfully land work in Vegas, but when it rained, it poured. Out of nowhere, I landed three jobs. The first, on the Strip, was a show at the Sahara called Buck Wild. There was a four-hundred-pound drag queen who impersonated Dolly Parton. She’d step out onstage, wearing this huge hoop-skirt dress, lip-synching the duet “Islands in the Stream.” When it was my cue, I’d pop out from under her dress, made up like a mini–Kenny Rogers, and I’d lip-synch the rest of the song with her. The audience always peed their pants. I was a big hit, and it was great money for fifteen minutes of work.

I got a second gig, once a week, in Showtime at the Aladdin, and a third gig in Tiny Kiss, a cover band of Little People dressed as Kiss, for a show I’ll call Circus Insanity. Circus Insanity was just that, an insane circus of acts: comics, fire-eaters, glass-walkers, trained monkeys, and contortionists, a kind of sideshow, circus, and carnival, presided over by a “Ringleader,” played by one of the sleaziest guys in the business. He was the producer and star, and he hated me. I was his biggest nightmare.

That producer treated his employees terribly, making promises he had no intention of keeping. I rallied all the Little People in the show together and we went on strike. He screamed at me, “You’ll never amount to nothing without me. You’re a fucking midget!” That was just the motivation I needed.

I walked off his show and formed my own Kiss cover band with Little People. I kicked it into high gear, and got my band booked for every possible gig I could find, and the local papers started covering the “Battle of the Bands” with article headlines screaming, “Who’s the Real Tiny Kiss?” In all of those articles, they mentioned Shortywood, and business for Allison and me kicked into high gear. Casting directors from all over the country started calling our offices to hire our talent. It was a good thing too, ’cause Showtime was canceled, then Buck Wild was cancelled, and all of a sudden work went from three shows to nothing. I was right back where I started, working at the doggie spa and volunteering for the pound, trying to make ends meet. I took some gigs wrestling. For some reason, there are people who think it’s hilarious to see a bunch of midgets beat the shit out of each other. So beat the shit out of each other we did. We’d hit each other with frying pans, tear at each other with cheese graters, and stab each other with thumbtacks. My character was either the referee or the emcee, but that didn’t stop me from ending up under a pile of bodies, or getting slapped upside the head with a baking sheet. There were so many matches where I was thrown through the air and landed flat on my back. I always got up, but after one match, I collapsed. I’d thrown my back out.

I refused to go to the hospital, but found myself there anyway. They did a CAT scan and an MRI, and the doctor showed me all the damage I’d done. This was more than a pulled muscle. All those years of stunts had taken their toll. I had tingling and numbness in my legs, a pinched nerve, sciatica, blah, blah,
blah. It explained why sometimes I’d fall for no reason. I was gonna need physical therapy. I was gonna need major rehab. My performing career was over.

The news hit me like a ton of bricks, but all I could think was, “I miss L.A.” Touring everywhere, living in different cities, getting to see everything, I realized L.A. was my comfort zone. I knew the city like the back of my hand. Okay, driving all the time sucked, but L.A. was my home. With my career finished, almost all my dogs adopted out to good homes, and summer approaching, meaning temperatures well over 110 degrees, there was no reason to stay in Vegas.

Packing just wasn’t an option. I was in bed for an entire month. The only time I’d make myself walk was to get to the bathroom. Hercules was barely a year old, but he wouldn’t leave my side. The monster that ate drywall, the dog that had cost me thousands and thousands of dollars fixing the house, was now my nurse. He refused to let me out of his sight. Geisha could have given a rat’s ass. She’d have come in, shit on me, and left, if I’d let her. Mussolini was so big and hyper he would jump onto the bed, not understanding that it caused me pain. Bebi was off in wonderland most of the time, but Hercules had really surprised me. His actions made me think, “There’s a bond here.”

Debbie kept checking in on me. I still had two too many dogs, so Debbie agreed to take Crash, a goofy pit with the odd habit of crashing into walls headfirst, and I was able to find one last home for a huge, lovable pit named Reno. A group of good friends came over and packed all my things into a
U-Haul, while I pretty much lay there like a stone. I wasn’t driving to L.A. yet. I was heading to San Francisco for specialized rehab for my back.

It was
my doctor in San Francisco who first suggested I get a service animal. I believe his direct quote was, “You’ve got all those damn pit bulls. Why not train one of them to help you?” I had no idea where to start. The doctor actually wrote me a prescription for a service animal, and instructed me to go to the animal shelter and get a “service dog in training” tag and kit. I did as he said, then realized I had a lot of reading to do to figure this out.