Four Feet Tall and Rising (13 page)

Sometimes, on a Sunday night, a group of guys would grab a table and cover it with Saran Wrap. We’d use our stingers to cook noodles and chili, then crush bags of potato chips and dump everything onto the table, cover it with mayonnaise and mustard, and mix that slop together. That was a community dinner with your friends. It was called the spread.

We’d all gather around and watch
Unsolved Mysteries
. Every so often, we’d see one of our guys profiled. One night, we were watching, and this old dude, a white guy, comes up on the screen. He had chopped up his girlfriend and put her in an ice chest. That guy lived six cells away from me. He’d been locked up so long, none of us knew why he was even there. He was a model inmate, and ’cause he was housed in Four Building, we all assumed he couldn’t be that bad a guy. But cutting up a woman and putting her into an ice chest and storing her in a freezer for five years … that seemed pretty bad to me. The next time I walked past his cell, I looked at him very differently. “You still got that freezer?” He didn’t even flinch, but said, “They aired it again, huh?” I guess he’d seen his story on
Unsolved Mysteries
before. Despite what he’d done, he struck
me as a guy who would never do nothing wrong again. Of course, he’d never get that chance. He was in for life.

With nothing
but time on my hands, I was devouring books. I checked out a copy of
My Autobiography
by Charlie Chaplin, and I became his biggest fan. Reading about his rough childhood, his alcoholic dad, his crazy mother, how broke he’d been as a kid. That he went on to become such a huge, international superstar only to be exiled. Man, Charlie had lived. He brought entertainment and laughter to everyone, all over the world.

I was so impressed by the fact that he’d cofounded United Artists, a film distribution company, with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith. They were actors, and they wanted more control over their careers and their projects. They took the power away from the old Hollywood system. Charlie even built his own studio. He was totally independent at a time when all the other actors were owned. That took some balls.

I was blown away when I read that he was accused of “un-American activities” and was labeled a communist. And that J. Edgar Hoover instructed the FBI to keep extensive secret files on him, and eventually kicked him out of America. Well, kept him from reentering the country after he went to his own damn film premiere in London. This man, who was so loved and had basically been an ambassador for America ’cause of
his movies, ended up exiled to Switzerland. It was so insulting it seemed unbelievable.

I’d never really looked up to anyone in my life, especially not an actor or celebrity, but I truly admired Chaplin. I respected that Charlie was a determined man. He was gonna get his way, no matter what. He had opinions that were controversial and he was punished for holding his views. His views started some shit. He was ostracized. He never listened to anyone else about how to be successful. I was inspired by his life. I did my best to get ahold of his movies if they made their way behind bars.

His book stuck with me. It changed my whole attitude, and reminded me how productive and useful I’d felt at the Youth Authority. I knew I had more to offer to the world, and I didn’t have to sit behind bars, twiddling my thumbs for five years, just biding my time.

It didn’t cross my mind to become an entertainer. Entertainment was Chaplin’s business, but it wouldn’t be mine. I just wanted to be successful. I was still determined to be a lawyer or a corporate guy, but I knew, if I actually wanted to accomplish something in life, I had to start making those changes now.

To plan who I was gonna become, I needed to know where I’d come from. My friend Tony and I were interested in our Italian heritage, in learning more about our culture, even the language. Tony was one of my few white friends in Folsom. He wasn’t an Aryan or a Nazi—I never would have tolerated
a racist—but it was still hard for us to be friends, since he had to run with the white guys, and I was technically still a Blood. I found out we could register for an independent study class and use it to research our family trees. What was my bloodline, and could it explain how I’d ended up where I was?

In order to even start a family tree, I needed to talk to family. Janet didn’t know much. Linda and I weren’t in touch anymore, and to complicate matters further, Dad had told all our relatives on both sides of the family that I was away on a secret mission for the CIA. He was so embarrassed by my imprisonment that he made up a covert midget operation for the USA. Like I was a fucking spy. Seemed to me, the most noticeable thing in a foreign country would be a midget running around wreaking havoc, but Dad’s side of the family seemed to believe it. I’d never spent much time with them in the first place, and I was gone for so long. They had no way of knowing anything I was doing, except what they heard out of Dad’s mouth. Truth wasn’t his specialty.

Then Janet called the prison and had them notify me that Nonnie died. I was devastated to hear about Nonnie. I loved her. Not being able to go to her funeral was a crushing loss. She was my family. I was still resentful about Mom and Dad putting her in a home. She’d been so good to me. I had to write about how wonderful this Little woman was to me. So I typed up her eulogy and Fed-Exed it to my great-aunt Wanda, who was handling the funeral arrangements. In prison, when you send something by Federal Express, you can’t fill nothing out
on the address label. You just give the mailroom a voucher, and they fill it out with a return shipping label from Folsom Prison. Needless to say, my aunt figured out I wasn’t working for the CIA, but she kept her mouth shut. When the priest read the part of my letter that said, “Things are out of my hands, and I’m sorry I cannot be there,” I imagine she made sure not to look at Dad.

Aunt Wanda was another woman I dearly loved, so now that she knew the truth, I reached out to her and asked questions I wasn’t supposed to ask. I wrote to other long-lost relatives, and the letters that came back … they let some things slip. It was Wanda who first leaked the truth. She told me about my paternal granddad. That he hadn’t been dead for my entire childhood. That he had, in fact, only died recently. She also told me he’d been locked up for domestic abuse. He must have been a brutal, vicious, violent man, ’cause back then, no Texas husband ever got locked away for beating his wife. Wife-beating was basically considered a privilege of marriage in those days. Then a cousin told me that my great-grandfather had been arrested in New York more than once. He didn’t know the charges. Then, the big bomb dropped. I got a letter back that said, “Well, your dad was arrested too.”

Wait? What? Dad was arrested? For what? When? Did he serve time? What jail? Nobody seemed to know the details, and I sure as hell couldn’t call Mom up and ask her. I thought back and realized that Dad’s arrest may have had something to do with his trouble at Lockheed. Something so bad had
happened that he was fired. He had to go to court, and he’d done that community service in the park, but after that, we’d moved to Texas and I’d run away and never found out what had really happened. Linda and Janet were already out of the house, so they didn’t know, and Mom and Dad never said nothing about Lockheed again.

So there it was. Turns out, I was a fourth-generation jailbird. All the men in Dad’s family had been arrested. Me, Dad, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather. Had I heard a word about this when I was a kid? Hell, no. Had Dad bothered to mention it when I was arrested? No, again. Another family secret. This was my history. I was just carrying on the family fucking tradition. My cousin laughed when I told him what I’d discovered. He said, “It may have been a tradition but you’re the one who made it huge.” My ancestors may have been in jail, but none of them had done ten years behind bars. I’d taken it to the next level. Unfortunately, the legacy didn’t end with me. My nephews landed in jail too. For a night or two, nothing major, but still, it made me think about what it would take to stop the cycle. Maybe there’s a Rossi temper, and we all just inherit it. Maybe it’s the Rossi legacy to land in jail. Maybe it’s a curse.

Researching Dad’s side of the family and the history of beatings, abuse, and arrests was disheartening. It felt like fate had been in charge the whole time and I was just along for the ride. At least on Mom’s branch of the tree there were entertainers, and nobody landed in jail. It gave me some hope that
at least fifty percent of me had her genes. I didn’t have to succumb to fate or genetics. I could choose another way.

It was as if by thinking those new thoughts, life shifted to test my resolve. Fate, the fickle bitch, presented me with an opportunity. She made me the Slumlord of Folsom.

y the time I got to Folsom, there were
guys wearing “J” numbers and by wearing, I mean literally wearing. Physically, we wore our numbers on our clothes. These were numbers that were ours for the rest of our lives. They’d never be reassigned. If we ever ended up back in prison, we’d wear the same number. It was like having a Social Security card painted on your chest.

You could tell a lot about a guy by the letter in front of his numbers. The earlier his letter was in the alphabet, the longer he’d been behind bars, and the more respect that earned him. The letter was part of your street cred. The lower your letter, the higher the status. If a guy was wearing a “B” number, we could tell that he’d been in prison for at least twenty years. In all my years in the system, I only ever saw an “A” once. I wasn’t sure whether to bow in front of the guy or feel sad for him.

I had some amount of cred ’cause I had an “E,” and because of that—combined with the Legend of Shorty, and the nerve
and the heart and the balls I had to put my life in jeopardy to live among the Bloods—the threats on my life began to subside. The Crips ignored me entirely. I’d managed to survive as a white Blood at Nickerson, at County, and at DeWitt, so they decided just to let me be. Outside the prison, they would’ve been my enemies, but inside they became my allies. The only guys still holding a grudge against me were the Aryans, and after a few more failed stabbing attempts, they finally just gave up. Guys weren’t friendly, but they weren’t hostile anymore, and after six months, the warden felt like it was safe enough to put me in the desk clerk job, answering phones. It was mindless work, nothing like getting to TA for the classes at DeWitt, and not even close to running the cat rescue program, but it was good to have some place to be for eight hours a day.

Once I had more freedom to move around, go to work, and meet people, I started making friends across all the color lines. Everybody got to know me ’cause I’m a pretty likable person, which I know is hard to believe ’cause of my TV persona, but it’s true. I will have a conversation with anybody. I get along with all kinds of different people. I respect everybody until they give me a good reason not to. In prison, I changed guys’ minds. “That son of a bitch who came in here was supposed to be the most evil bastard, but he turned out to be a likable little fuck.”

I got along with my cellie, J.D., okay. When you shove two people into a tiny room, you are bound to get on each other’s nerves, but we managed. Then J.D. was released, and I had to
get a new cellie. I had a friend in another building who wanted to move to Four Building, but he wasn’t allowed to come over because of his job. I was worried they were gonna stick me with some idiot, and I knew for sure they weren’t gonna leave me the space to myself. I wanted to be able to control who moved in.

I’d become friends with a guy named Ray, even though he was from San Francisco and he wasn’t a Blood. He was Fillmore Street Mob. In San Francisco, at that time, there weren’t big gangs like the Bloods and Crips. It was divided up by smaller territories of where people were from. Guys identified themselves as Potrero Hill Projects or Hunters Point or Fillmore. They weren’t into the gang signs and colors the way the gangs in L.A. were. All those guys ran with the Bay Area crew. That group included guys from San Francisco, San Mateo, Valeo, Oakland … Within that group, there were the smaller divisions of neighborhoods. We called them the 415 Guys. The 415 Guys were friends of the Bloods if something happened, and some guys mingled, but mostly the 415 Guys stayed on their side of the yard and we stayed on ours.