Four Feet Tall and Rising (20 page)

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 added 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 house 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.

It was my first experience dealing with dog trainers and behaviorists, and it became pretty clear, pretty fucking fast, that any idiot could say they were a dog trainer or a dog behaviorist. Most of them had no idea what they were doing. They’d send people to the pound with dogs that were “unfixable,” “untrainable,” or “hopeless,” which just wasn’t true. Any dog is fixable, unless they have a neurological problem. Just like a human. If one trainer isn’t able to help, it doesn’t mean a dog needs to be euthanized. As far as I’m concerned, I have
a no-kill policy when it comes to all animals. Except tarantulas. I hate tarantulas. You can kill those things if you want.

I was so adamant about my no-kill policy that I even protected a dog that bit me in the face. It happened at the pet resort. I was the one who handled the pit bulls, ’cause they were my favorites, and some of the other staff was scared to handle the breed, regardless of the fact that each dog had an individual personality. We were short-staffed that day and one of the girls asked me to get Duke and Daisy out of their pens. Their owners had arrived and were ready to take them home.

Duke and Daisy were bullmastiffs, big dogs weighing over a hundred pounds each. They stood over two feet tall, so we weren’t exactly eye to eye, but I only had a couple of feet and maybe forty pounds up on them. But think about it. A four-foot-tall, 140-pound guy comes charging at you, you’re probably gonna laugh and take a swing at him. A three-foot-tall, 120-pound dog comes at you, you might have a different reaction. We humans aren’t so efficient at using our muscle mass the way animals are. That’s why I always carry a bat.

It doesn’t mean big dogs are inherently dangerous. Every dog is a product of its environment. A reflection of its owner. Bullmastiffs are generally sweet-tempered, but Daisy had been known to be temperamental. You had to watch out for her. As I took them out of their pens, I figured I’d handle Daisy first and get the tough part over with. She started snarling and showing me her teeth, but I stayed firm and patient with her, and slowly got her collar around her neck.

I never even saw Duke coming. Next thing I knew, Duke had most of my head in his mouth. He was holding tight and squeezing the shit out of me. I knew I’d be in big trouble if he started to shake me. He was big enough to break my neck. Somehow, I stayed calm. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a pipe near my foot. They were doing construction on some of the cages and had left materials lying around. I grabbed that pipe and started whacking the shit out of Duke until he let me go.

Before he could decide to take another taste, I rushed out of the holding area and closed the door behind me. I turned around and my coworker took one look at me. She started screaming like a teenager in a horror movie. I didn’t realize how much damage Duke had done. I had blood streaming down my face and skin hanging off. I thought she was gonna pass out.

The owners were mortified and panicked that I was gonna report their dogs. I had no intention of reporting Duke. If I did, he would at best be quarantined, and at worst be put down. But the wound was deep, and I needed stitches, so I had to go to urgent care. The owners said to send them the bill, and my coworker drove me. The doctors sewed me up with eight stitches, and when they asked what happened, I told them, “I was out cleaning the roof. I slipped and fell and landed on some barbed wire and got messed up.” They knew I’d been bitten by a dog, but I stuck to my story, and Duke and Daisy went safely home.