Four Feet Tall and Rising (27 page)

Those factory workers were blown away, and on my next visit, everything was different. The managers put American satellite TV in the work breakrooms to show the workers
Pit Boss
episodes.
Pit Boss
posters were all over the walls, and as soon as I walked in, a girl came up to me and said in Spanish, “I just finished rolling one of your own cigars. It’s an honor for you to smoke this one.”

Minds had changed in Nicaragua.

Meanwhile
, what was supposed to be a three-month program of classes to rectify my DUI dragged on and on, as I had to keep taking leave to shoot episodes, to rescue a dog, or to travel for personal appearances. It didn’t help that I got kicked out of class twice for running my big mouth. The first teacher and I couldn’t get along. She was of the mentality that anyone in her class was going to hell for drinking. She made us raise our hands if we’d had a drink in the last twenty-four hours. I raised my hand. She looked at me. “What are you gonna do about your problem?” I yelled, “Problem? I had a glass of wine. I deal with goddamn Little People all day!” … You may leave the class.

Her next session, I got tossed out ’cause she put on an
Intervention
video about a girl who was cutting herself. Even after being in prison, and seeing all that horrifying stuff, blood made me squeamish. Homies used to tease me about it, but I’d rather be freaked by blood than numb. I yelled out in the
middle of class, “Why are we watching this suicidal blood shit when we’re a bunch of drunks?” … You may leave the class, part two.

Fortunately, for my third class, I had a new teacher. He’d been a former addict, a gang member, and he’d done time, so I could relate. He recognized me from
Pit Boss
, so like anyone else who’d ever watched the show, he knew my backstory, knew I’d done time at Folsom. We reminisced about the CDC, shot the shit about our numbers, the Level 4’s, and things only guys from prison would understand. His name was Robert and he was a good guy, clean and sober, determined to stay out of jail.

What struck me most about his class was all the people in those seats. There were old people, young people, three-time offenders, and first-timers. Every ethnicity, every gender, every race, size, color, and type. So many people. The size and scope of the problem seemed enormous, and the secrecy and the shame surrounding it only made matters worse. Instead of fessing up and admitting, “Yeah, I blew it. I won’t ever do that again,” people kind of retreated into themselves, ashamed and feeling even worse about their lives. Which just seemed like a recipe for more of the same. Robert’s honesty about his own criminal past helped get people talking. Hearing their stories was … well, sobering.

When I finished my last class, Robert pulled me aside and said, “You’re smarter than this, Shorty. I know I won’t see you again.” He was right. I had a lot to lose, and I wasn’t gonna lose it over a drink. I wasn’t proud of what I’d done, but I took it as
another lesson of my life. Was I an alcoholic? Maybe. If I was, I was a high-functioning one. Would I have another drink? Definitely. Would I drive after that drink? Definitely not.

There were bigger battles I needed to fight, and just like I wouldn’t allow my father, my childhood, the projects, my arrest, prison, financial struggles, or Ray struggling with crack or losing Jerry or being fired from jobs or having back pain to get in my way, I wasn’t gonna allow this DUI to sidetrack me from my larger mission. To this day, I have no regrets about any of my mistakes. I wouldn’t change a thing, which must seem crazy to most people, but is true for me. It’s not that I don’t regret some of my actions. I do. But if I hadn’t run away, if I hadn’t gotten in trouble, if I hadn’t been arrested, I’d definitely be dead. Being in prison made me the man I am today. Most men don’t come through those years and improve their lives, but I did. It made a difference to me. I was reformed. I’m a better, bigger man ’cause of those years. I knew that the DUI was another part of forging me into a stronger, more determined warrior.

The problem with me was still when I heard the word “no” I wouldn’t listen. If someone said, “You shouldn’t do that” then that was exactly what I was gonna do. It made me arrogant and cocky, but it also made me the Pit Boss. It made me Shorty Rossi. It was exactly that combination of arrogance and cockiness and sometimes idiocy that caused people to tune in to
Pit Boss
. By having Hercules and Geisha and Bebi and the rest of my pits on the show, we were changing people’s minds about the breed. By traveling from city to city with Hercules by my side, working as my service animal, we were changing airline,
airport, restaurant, and hotel policies. Celebrity allowed me to bend the rules, setting a new precedent for other disabled people who might consider adopting a pit bull, for other Little People who had faced discrimination or assumptions, for the dogs themselves. But there was still tons of work to be done, and I sure as hell couldn’t do it behind bars ’cause I’d been stupid enough to drink and drive.

I had to be strong. I had to be a warrior. There was a wolf in the woods, and he was hungry. He was being blamed for terrorizing not just the city, but the entire world. In France and in the UK, they were banning “bully” breeds in their entirety. President Bush signed legislation forbidding military personnel and their families from having pit bulls as pets on any military base, national or international. Someone had to stand up, like St. Francis did for the wolf. Someone had to do something. It was me. I was the one who had to do something.

I had to convince Animal Planet to let me go global. We needed to march on Denver, then shoot in Mexico, protest the pit bull bans in France, draw attention to the bully breed ban in the American military by traveling to Afghanistan or Iraq with the USO. I’d heard from soldiers that in Afghanistan they were hawking pirated copies of
Pit Boss
with Arabic subtitles. We had guys that were putting their lives on the line for our country. Guys that had lost a leg or an eye, and they had to give away their dogs? There were stories to share from every far-flung corner of the universe. I had to get out there and tell them.

Animal Planet had a different idea.

started to receive a flood of mail from
fans wanting to know more about my personal life. The show was focused primarily on the business and the dogs, but I had talked about Dad on the show a lot. People wanted to see this man. Letters came in saying, “We know you’re an ex-con, we know you had a rough childhood, we know you can be a fucking ass, we know you love pit bulls, but we want you to go home.” And by “go home” they meant they wanted
Pit Boss
to film a reunion episode with my family, specifically with my father.

Animal Planet and Intuitive knew about the letters and encouraged me to think about a visit, but I wasn’t talking to my dad at all. My sister Janet still held hatred for him. I told her, “Come on, Janet, give it up and just let it go. We can’t change nothing about our past, nothing about who he is, nothing about their marriage. We just have to accept who he is.” That was my position. There was no outright hatred on my part,
but there was no energy to make things better either, and I certainly had no interest in shooting a reunion episode! I was convinced that would be a fiasco!

Now, a good son is supposed to honor his parents, but it’s hard to do that when you don’t have a relationship. I hadn’t seen my parents in well over two years. I had tried to connect with Mom a few times. I’d e-mailed her a bunch of questions, and I got back a response that largely ignored my e-mail and just said, “Glad you’re doing good. Dad just did this and Dad just did that …” Clearly, he was still standing behind her telling her what to write. It got to the point that when I’d call, Dad would stand over her and monitor the call ’cause Mom had the tendency to blab, like mothers do. I’d hear him whisper in the background. “Don’t tell him I fell in the kitchen. I’ll feel like a dumbass.” Shit, I ran into things all the time. I didn’t care if he fell. Why couldn’t we just talk like normal people? So e-mailing and calling didn’t work. Visits didn’t either. Dad would offer to buy me a ticket to come out on the condition that I had to spend a week with them. I didn’t have a week to give up to being locked up in the middle of nowhere. I was running two businesses and shooting a TV show. Dad had no sense of my reality at all. I just gave up trying to connect.

I knew Dad had seen a few episodes of the show. He knew what I had said about him. Janet told me he was upset about it. Linda apparently couldn’t wait to break the news that my life was part of the show. She told them that I was talking about my time in prison, about my childhood. Dad’s comment was, “How can he do that to us?” To them! I was the little fucker
that spent ten years in prison. It wasn’t his story to tell, but he took it personally and he certainly never understood how I could see being in prison as a positive thing. There was just no way either one of us was going to agree to shoot a show. I didn’t wanna put Mom and Dad on the air and pretend that everything was okay between us just because people were curious. It would have been a lie.

But the letters kept coming in. Intuitive and Animal Planet really wanted to acknowledge and honor the fan requests. We went back and forth for six months about it, and my resolve began to waver. Didn’t I owe it to my fans to listen to their letters? Finally, I called Janet to see what she thought, and she kind of talked me into making the trip just to check up on Mom. I decided to go to Texas.

But I couldn’t tell Animal Planet and Intuitive that! Sneaky me, I had a bargaining chip and I was going to use it. I said, “Okay, if I get on a plane to Texas then I wanna do a segment in Mexico. If people want to know more about me, they need to see why I’ve chosen to live part-time down there, to see what we do there.” It only made sense to film in Mexico. Mexico was a home for me. It was my sanctuary. In Mexico, I wasn’t the Pit Boss. I was just some crazy gringo with a bunch of dogs. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in the projects and being in prison … just ’cause people have money and almost everything they want, it doesn’t mean they are happy. It’s the people that don’t have shit that learn to make themselves happy. I see this repeated over and over again. Our country doesn’t realize how good we got it. I can be in lower-income
neighborhoods, or in the poverty-stricken areas of Mexico, and at every meal, people eat together as a family. When they sit down for either lunch or dinner, it’s an occasion. Every fucking day. They celebrate life. Everybody’s happy, everybody’s enjoying the moment. They have a drink. They eat. They beat the shit out of each other, then shake hands and forget it.

I wanted to show Americans that Mexico was not the horrible, blood-soaked battle zone that the constant negativity of the national news would have you believe. As I traveled around for pit bull awareness events, I was shocked at people’s reaction to me living there part-time. They’d stand up and ask, “Why would you put yourself and your dogs in danger by living in Mexico?” These were pit bull advocates and owners and lovers. I’d respond, “Where do you get that information, that it’s dangerous?” They’d reply, “You hear about it all the time on TV.” And this is when I’d get angry. “You mean, how like you hear all the time on TV that pit bulls are dangerous?”

It was hypocritical. These people who were so clear that the media was waging a war against pit bulls would turn right around and believe them about Mexico. No, Mexico is not the safest country in the world. But neither is America. I leave my doors unlocked in Mexico. I don’t do that in L.A. You are more likely to get hit by a random shot in America than you are by a random gunshot in Mexico. Yes, there are serious things going on in Mexico in serious areas, just like there are in the United States. Would you go wandering around the Nickerson projects at three o’clock in the morning? No. You’d probably be
robbed. So, in Mexico, you stay away from the border towns. You stay away from the cities and places that are having problems. It’s a big country. If there’s a shooting in Chicago, you don’t cancel your trip to Miami.