Four Feet Tall and Rising: A Memoir by Shorty Rossi

Author:Shorty Rossi [Rossi, Shorty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Entertainment & Performing Arts
ISBN: 0307985881
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Published: 2012-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Chipmunk

ebbie gave me a big hug and welcomed me back to the world. I climbed into the passenger side of her truck and looked back as we drove away. It wasn’t a sense of relief I felt. I wouldn’t call it that. I was prepared to leave. I’d had ten years of knowing the exact day I’d go home. But leaving Folsom, what I felt was … hungry. “Debbie! Take me to a good fucking Italian restaurant!” Debbie just laughed. We had a meal. A big, traditional, delicious Italian feast, then Debbie drove me over to see Ray’s parents on Haight Street. Ray wasn’t there. He was already back in jail. He wasn’t robbing people anymore, but he just couldn’t stay off drugs, a violation of his parole.

I purposely booked the last flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I wanted to spend as much time as I could as a free man, ’cause the next morning, I had to report to my parole officer and move in with Heather. When I landed in Burbank, she and her friend Lena were there to pick me up. I’d barely had a day to stretch my legs, and now I was moving in with a girlfriend I barely knew.

I made the conscious decision to stay away from the projects. I didn’t want to go see my old homeboys or even Mama Myrt, Little Al, or Cerisse. In the years that I’d been locked up, we’d lost touch. Mama Myrt had her hands full with other family members in jail, namely, Little Al, who couldn’t stay out of prison. Cerisse was popping out babies every year. She was on her sixth, and her family life was her priority now. And as for Coco, my first pit bull, he had died while I was in Folsom. There was no reason for me to go back to Nickerson, so I went on the lam from my friends and family.

Unbeknownst to Heather, I kept trying to get my parole transferred to San Francisco. She thought I was applying for jobs and going to interviews, but really I was dealing with the transfer paperwork and registering for general relief. I’d left prison with $200 in gate money. That’s all I had to my name, so I applied for welfare and food stamps until I could either transfer to San Francisco and start my job, or find employment in Los Angeles. I had to have some way to eat. They approved me for $400 a month of relief and $100 of food stamps. How in the hell I was supposed to live on that, I didn’t know. In all the time I’d lived in the projects, I’d never been on welfare. In prison, my top hourly pay rate was twenty cents an hour, but I’d never been strapped, ’cause I had a monopoly on cigarettes. Applying for welfare was humiliating. The lady who processed my form didn’t even believe I’d actually been in prison. She kept fighting me about my application.

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