Four Feet Tall and Rising (19 page)

The producer Dan Kolsrud noticed I was a hard worker and eager to learn, so he called me over. He offered me the seat next to him. “Hang out here, Shorty. You’ll have a front-row look.” It was the equivalent of going to film school. Dan would explain to me all the politics and maneuvering that happened, and basically trained me as an apprentice producer for the remainder of my time on set. I ate it up. Producing was much more interesting to me than acting. It fed into my need to be in charge. To be an executive. To be the boss. The best part was, it was still related to the entertainment business, which I’d grown to love. I’d never had any intention of playing a bunch of stereotypical elves or Oompa Loompas or chipmunks. I’d never seen myself as that kind of guy. Yet, somehow, I’d fallen in love with Hollywood, with performing and entertaining people. Maybe producing was a way to be involved with the business and still be a businessman. Getting to know Dan better allowed me to see an entirely new side of the industry, and I was honored when at the end of the shoot, his production team sent me a crew jacket, unheard of for a lowly stand-in.

Work in the
movies may have been educational and fun, but it wasn’t steady, so when the offer to tour again with the Radio City Christmas Spectacular came up, I gave notice on my apartment in Long Beach, put all my stuff into storage containers, and loaded up the car for my trip to Cincinnati and Indianapolis, where the tour was “sitting down” in split cities. Four months of steady work was a good thing, even if it meant I had to dress up like a tutu-wearing bear and dance around.

Ray didn’t wanna go back to San Francisco. He knew if he headed home, he’d use again and end up back in jail. He’d done pretty well staying clean since we’d been living together. We both drank and smoked cigars, but Ray’d been able to stay off the pipe, so I got him a job as a stagehand’s assistant.

You should have seen us trying to pack my Mercury Capri convertible. There was me and Ray and all our suitcases and crap we’d need to live for the rest of the year. On top of that, we had Geisha and two adopted cats, Shitty and Hood Rat. Shitty was a terrible farter. On the days it rained, and we had to keep the windows up, she nearly killed us. We were quite a band of travelers. Two ex-cons, two shelter cats, and a pit bull in a Mercury Capri.

We didn’t have to start rehearsals for three or four weeks, so we stopped by Vegas to hang with Tony’s wife, Debbie, the lovely lady who’d picked me up from prison and fed me my first real Italian meal in ten years. She was still married to Tony, but Tony was a lifer. He wasn’t getting out anytime
soon, if at all, so Debbie moved to Las Vegas and took a job as a nurse at one of the local hospitals. Tony was petitioning the courts to be moved out of state, to be closer to her. They hoped her move would help his case. Every prisoner knew that if you could get out of the California system, you had a better shot at early parole, but so far, no luck. Tony was still back at Folsom in Five Building. Debbie was moving on with her life in Vegas. She loved the heat.

We spent a week with Debbie, then drove to Kansas City to stay with my sister Linda. I hadn’t seen Linda for years, and we weren’t much in touch, but it seemed stupid to be driving through her city and not stop to say hello. Plus, it was a free place to crash for a few nights. It didn’t take long to remember why we hadn’t been in touch. Linda was the family gossip. Anything I said to her would be repeated to Mom and Dad within a few hours or days. The three of them would gang up on me about improving my life, getting a real job, and settling down. They sat in judgment of me, and I didn’t need the lecture. I told them all, straight out, “If I get a wife, I can’t travel no more! I can’t get a last-minute call and have to turn around and cancel a family vacation ’cause I got a gig. Or face those constant ‘When you coming home?’ questions. Trust me, I’ve been in relationships like that. I’m better off alone!”

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.