Off The Reservation: Stories I Almost Took to the Grave and Probably Should Have

By Michael Rossi

Equal parts shocking and moving, Off the Reservation: Stories I Almost Took to the Grave and Probably Should Have is an absurdist confessional memoir, accurately detailing the reckless hijinks of a bipolar alcoholic with borderline personality disorder. This stranger-than-fiction true story spans over three decades, as Michael recounts his tales with wincing honesty. Eventually, the maniacal nights of booze, drugs, and sex give way to rude awakenings in empty rooms, jail cells, and beds of snow from a failed suicide by Mother Nature. Rossi learns most of his lessons--gradually, reluctantly, painstakingly--without imposing them on anyone. Thankfully for us, these unapologetic, darkly comic tales haven't been taken to the grave just yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Rossi
• Release date: Jan 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310539848

Michael Rossi

Michael Rossi’s new memoir, Off The Reservation: Stories I Almost Took to the Grave and Probably Should Have, is his debut book. Equal parts moving and shocking, these stranger than fiction stories are an honest account of an incredible life—not an incredibly good life, but an extremely unlikely one, and at times an utterly disastrous existence.Michael is the father of two wonderful children, and currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his girlfriend and her animals.

Book preview

What follows is an honest account of an incredible life—not an incredibly good life, but an extremely unlikely one, and at times an utterly disastrous existence. I don’t suspect you will gain any knowledge from me through these stories, as most of the lessons, learned in the hardest of fashions, you will recognize as common sense. This story is meant to entertain, not teach.

Before we move forward, your first step should be to summon up your inner sadist. You don’t have an inner sadist? Bullshit… Everyone wants to witness a train wreck, even if they peek at it through their fingers. Actually, you will need to imagine that the train is full of children and baby pandas as it smashes into a bus teeming with elderly churchgoers on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Too far? Probably… But as you will see, going too far is just something I do.

People like to witness disaster for the same reason they like Jerry Springer; it makes them feel better about their own lives. You have my personal guarantee that this story will make you feel comparatively better about yourself, but I must warn you that if you came looking for redemption you’ve come to the wrong place. There will be no redemption here.

Although this story is in no way clinical, I have been diagnosed with two different mental illnesses. It goes without saying that if a person has a disease, he or she suffers from that particular ailment. From my experience, it would be much more accurate to say that it is the people with whom I am surrounded who suffer from me having them. This story isn’t about mental illness, but I will refer to these diseases from time to time, due the peculiar way they affect me. By no means do I want or expect any sympathy whatsoever; there are plenty of people much crazier than me living perfectly respectable lives.

Due to the varying relationships I have with the many characters in this book, publishing my story is kind of a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may scenario. Let’s just hope those chips aren’t too heavy and they don’t all land on my head. Still, in an effort not to be sued, all of the names, some of the descriptions, and a little of the order has been changed to protect anonymity. If there is one thing I have learned in my just-over-forty years on earth, it is that as a people, we hardly ever remember things the same way. Arguments birthed from differing personal accounts of events stretch from courtrooms to warzones all over the world. To those of you who believe certain details of my story do not jive with the way you saw it, I offer you no quarter. If you are looking for apologies or solace, write your own damned book.

Among these many characters are my two wonderful children. Although they are the most important and influential people in my life, it hardly seemed appropriate to write much about them in this story. Maybe someday I will write a book about being a terrible father, but for now I will resign myself to writing about being a terrible person.

Note: If you do in fact write your own damned book, can my name be Xander Richmond, please? I didn’t have the balls to name myself that in this book, but I really feel like I could be a Xander Richmond.

PROLOGUE

Anne’s blue eyes went wide like those of a wild animal. Her long, tan legs arched over in a backwards somersault as she flung off me. She grabbed her underwear from the bottom of the bed as she rolled—a single, choreographed, fluid motion. She had been a dancer in her youth and still possessed some of the grace. Her shoulder-length blonde hair whisked around her tan face, trying to keep up with her head as she frantically searched for the remainder of her clothes.

I watched stunned, oddly fixated on her tresses, which seemed to defy gravity when she flew through the door. Once out of the room and around the corner, Anne bound up the wooden staircase, leaving me naked on the bed of the first-floor guest bedroom. The bedroom is situated directly in the path from the kitchen to the garage—a path Romano would be walking in seconds.

Lying there naked, I ran the calculations. Was it too late? For what possible reason would my Uncle Romano’s adult nephew, a nephew he had adopted at eight years old and had been the ring bearer at his wedding to Anne, be lying naked in his downstairs guest bedroom at three in the afternoon?

CHAPTER 1

CARS, CATS, AND OTHER LIVING THINGS

The three of us leaned forward in the seat and whispered in unison. Sledgehammer, we said softly but maniacally toward the car’s vents.

After letting the threat of violence sink in for a moment, my father’s girlfriend Heather slowly turned the key in the ignition for a second time. This struggle was commonplace for the old Ford—a perfect mixture of blue and rust, with a white vinyl top so severely cracked as to give it a marble appearance. I had no understanding of cars as status symbols and what this one said about our family. To me, it was a fantastic machine, a giant blue whale of steel and glass. It had great big white pleather bench seats and came complete with a hole in the floor on the passenger side, where rust had eaten all the way to open air. Through this hole, one might watch the asphalt whiz by or drop an errant French fry or piece of candy when nobody was looking. I laughed a villainous chuckle as each victim disappeared through my trap door.

The obstinate Ford failed to start for a second time, and the wind-up was slowing, threatening back at us a dying battery. My sister and I both sat on the bench front seat, our seatbelts completely ignored, listening intently to the cranking of the starter for any proof of life.

I was six, short and thin with a giant mop of unkempt curly blond hair and blue eyes. On my skin I wore my annual coat of poison ivy, covered in dull pink calamine lotion. I was every kid in a movie that takes place in California in the early seventies, but upstate New York was as far from California as you could be.

My sister Amy was ten, much taller, a giant really. Unlike me, Amy was embossed with all of the traits of our Sicilian father: dark hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. She was every girl you ever saw in a movie about New York; she fit in.

I was always jealous of my sister’s familial dark features. Blond-haired, blue-eyed children have a tendency of standing out awkwardly in Italian family photos. I am only half-Italian, as is my sister, but we couldn’t look more different. The sight of us with our father made you wonder if perhaps there was a Swede hiding in the woodpile.

Amy and I are only half-Italian, but we were both mostly raised by whole Italians of different degrees. How Italian you are can be easily determined by how many Italian words you pepper into your everyday speech. My grandparents spoke only Italian when they were alone. Their children knew the words but only spoke it to their parents, and I don’t speak the language at all. I do actually know a little. If you would like to be called lazy and stupid, and then in four different ways be told in no uncertain terms that it would be completely acceptable for you to go and fuck yourself, I’m your guy.

Although our first two attempts to start the car had failed, I was somewhat relieved. All I could think of was the inspection under the hood we always had to do when we visited Heather’s family farm. It was imperative that you examine the motor compartment before leaving, because one cat had already died after crawling into the engine of a parked car in that driveway. Despite all of the farm’s wonders, visits meant being haunted by the idea of an angry car engine turning a cat into burger.

I was traumatized by the thought. The image of a poor, defenseless, bloody cat wrapped around a fan blade preoccupied my thoughts every time a car started. If it took two or three tries to start the car, so much the better. Maybe a trapped feline might use those moments to escape and thus save itself.

Junkyard… Scrap metal… Trash heap.

We all knew that whispering threats to the cantankerous Ford was the only way to get it to start, everybody in the family did. The triple dose of intimidation worked like a charm, and as the vehicle sputtered to life, we pulled from the driveway with all the animals alive and well.

I really don’t know why I was so concerned about the cats. My allergies had already swelled my face, and I was sure to wake the next morning with my eyes sealed shut thanks to our visit to the upstate New York farm and its many creatures.

I am very allergic to cats—so allergic, in fact, that they could literally be weaponized against me. Many years later, I would marry a woman who hated me with such ferocity that I would arrive home from work one day to find she had gone to the pound and adopted a little brown one out of spite. She held it close to her face and smiled at me menacingly over the fur as I came walking through the door, but that is a different story.

The glorious New York farm we were leaving was home to Heather’s parents. They weren’t farmers at all but mechanics, and instead of fixing plows in the barn, they built the best racecars in New York, or so I was told. Heather’s father Bud was a renowned driver and mechanic—famous thanks to his legendary string of wins on the New York stock-car circuit when he was young. Bud was the perfect combination of simple, gruff, and satisfied that you never meet in a city. After he hung up his gloves but before his sons were old enough to race, Bud built fantastical machines in his garage for other drivers.

The men would stand around in the barn all night, every night after dinner, to work on the racecars and drink beer. They drank Miller High Life but often discussed their common grievances about not being able to drink Coors—well, not in New York anyway. Thanks to the movie Smokey and the Bandit, which started the rumor that the beer was illegal east of the Mississippi, as well as poor distribution policies by Coors, New York beer drinkers of the late seventies and early eighties would often create elaborate conspiracy theories as to why the libation was not readily available.

The farm was surrounded by apple orchards, overrun with cats, and home to a pet skunk. It even contained a real hen house. Whenever I spent the night there, I would try to wake up before the rooster and go as close to the coop as I would dare stand so I could hear his first call to rise. Just so you know, in case you have never experienced it, chickens are fucking vicious.

In the summer and fall I would eat green unripe apples from the orchard and blackberries off the stone wall that bordered it until my stomach was in knots and my skin covered in poison ivy. Small but delicious strawberries grew wild on the side of the road; it was a magical place.

This was the summer of my seventh birthday, and I didn’t know much, but I knew that cars had souls, and ours lived in fear of the many possible punishments we threatened it with. I also knew that cats, unripe fruit, and the three-leaved plants they both hid behind were bad for me no matter how much I loved them. I will spend the rest of my life learning that there are a great many so-called cats to be love/hated, and not all cars are fearful.

I lived with my sister Amy, my father Michael, and his girlfriend Heather in the sleepy town of Fairport, New York, a small village along the Erie Canal waterfront. It was kind of a dump when I lived there, but it has become a haven for hip, happy white people since then. As a child, the only thing I liked about Fairport was the lift bridge, which hardly lifted at all.

New York summers exist in such stark contrast to its bleak winters that survival needs to be built into the character of its buildings and people. Both are constructed to be strong enough to endure the cold and snow, but soft enough to enjoy warmth and fruit. Growing up in New York means you have a deep respect for spring and the promise it brings.

My mother, Debbie, had left us a couple of years earlier—or at least it felt like years. Debbie had been raised in the poorest suburbs of St. Louis, and gotten pregnant by my father shortly after they got together. Three years later, after moving to New York, my parents decided to get married because they had accidentally gotten pregnant again, with me. The Supreme Court had ruled abortion constitutional about six months before my mother became expectant with me, so I am sort of happy they decided not to be trailblazers in the matter.

Debbie probably liked the idea of being a stay-at-home mother. She could sit around all day chain-smoking Parliaments and cackling with her friends, the other chain-smoking stay-at-home mothers who lived in our apartment complex. The only downside to motherhood for her was the actual children.

On occasion, my mother would take my sister Amy with her to the local disco in the evening while my father was at work. When she came home, Amy would proudly recount the story of going out on the floor, and the patrons making room for the talented young girl to dance. The story was a source of great pride for us both. These clandestine trips to the disco would come to an abrupt end when one of the drunken patrons tried to kiss and touch my sister. When my father learned what had happened, the secret visits to the bars were over. Only now, as a father, do I understand the truth: despite how much fun it may have been for Amy, my mother took my sister to a bar so that she could party. There was a lot of screaming in those days. It was only a matter of time before my mother would leave us all for the party.

I’m not sure if I’ve blocked out the day my mother left us. Maybe I just didn’t care. It doesn’t matter. One day she was there and the next she wasn’t. I won’t speculate where she went because I don’t know. The people keeping us away from her as I was growing up told me all sorts of fantastical stories: She took off with a random trucker. She became a prostitute drug addict. Or my personal favorite, she ran off with her sister’s husband. None of this was true, but it effectively controlled how I felt about her.

My father was working full-time at a grocery store when Debbie left. He did the best he could for us, but there was never enough money. There was certainly not enough extra to pay for childcare, so in the absence of a mother, Amy and I were left to fend for ourselves after school. We would hang out with the kids from our complex, and we were always the last to stop playing and go inside. When all of the other children had been called in to dinner by their parents, we would finally give up on urging them to stay, and return to our apartment to wait for our dad to come home.

We weren’t afraid of getting hurt, lost in the woods, or even abducted by child molesters, the things we should have been afraid of; we were afraid of our mother. She never physically hurt us, but you could almost hear the terrifying sucking sound that her life generated when she was nearby.

After being gone awhile, Debbie would show up out of the blue and take us to her friend Stacy’s house to wait for my father to come home to an empty apartment. She would tell my father that if he wanted to ever see us again, he needed to give her access to his checking account.

I didn’t really understand the visits; I was just excited to have a chance to play with Stacy’s son Brian. Brian loved cats as much as I did, but that lucky bastard wasn’t allergic. He could bury his face in a cat’s belly for as long as he wanted, without the copious flows of snot that I would have to endure should I dare the same.

On one occasion, Brian carried a neighborhood cat to the top of a three-story stairwell, from which he promptly dropped the animal so that I could catch it. If you are five years old, standing beneath a screaming cat, claws extended, flying toward you at terminal velocity, trying to catch it is the very last thing you do; you move out of the way. That cat hit the ground with a loud thump, jumped up, and shot off like a cheetah. I was convinced for a while that cats and Superman were both indestructible.

My mother’s visits were short but disastrous. Once she had extorted all of my father’s money, she would drop us off and disappear again. I still remember the look of hopelessness and defeat on his face after one of these visits. I see the tears falling from his giant dark eyes, cascading across his lightly tanned skin into his thick, black mustache. Only now, as an adult, do I understand how crushing the loss of what little resources he had must have been, while he was trying to raise two children on his own. We were so poor that I actually slept on a large cardboard box for a long time. I thought it was a fine bed (let’s hope I still feel such an affinity toward sleeping on cardboard when I am an old street bum).

After a while things started getting better. My mother stopped visiting, and my father met Heather. She was a few years younger than him, and she had no experience with children but instinctively knew to be kind and strict but fair. Some people have what it takes to be a mother and some don’t.

Heather was short and pretty, kind of mousey with light-brown shoulder-length hair. She grew up with two rough-and-tumble brothers who turned her into a pretty little tomboy with a strong sense of adventure. I liked her very much from the start, and although some freedoms were lost, I was happy that we were not alone anymore.

My father worked as an assistant manager for a small grocery store chain in Rochester, New York, called Star Markets. He had started as a bagger for the store when he was in his early twenties and worked his way up without an education, back when you could still do that sort of thing.

This was an age long before grocery stores stayed open all night. Heather would often take my sister and me to the store after hours to visit my father. He would hand out hugs and kisses then send us off to the candy aisle to pick out just one thing. The empty grocery store was a wonderland. I had not yet developed my taste for variety, so I always picked the same thing: Circus Peanuts (the squishy orange candy, not the crunchy healthy nuts).

This would also be the year of my first real Christmas. By this time I had an actual bed, a realish mother in Heather, and even a real Christmas tree. Beneath that tree lay a cornucopia of wrapped presents, more than I had ever seen in my life, and it was still days before Christmas, so these didn’t even include the ones Santa was going to bring. To be honest, Santa had never been much of a factor anyway. I assumed that we must be way down on the delivery list, as in years past he didn’t seem to have much left by the time he got to our house. No matter. This year, Heather and my father had it covered.

My sister and I were allowed to open just one gift on Christmas Eve. I chose a small box that I already knew contained a one-foot-long replica of an Imperial Destroyer from Star Wars. I knew it contained the toy because I had shaken the box way too hard in an effort to discern its contents, ripping the wrapping paper off sort of accidentally. Lucky for me, on the night it happened I was being watched by a babysitter, who was kind enough to find the green paper covered in red Christmas trees and rewrap the gift. She didn’t tell on me, and while opening the gift, feigning surprise, I got my first real taste of how sweet getting away with it can be.

After opening our one present and leaving out milk and cookies, Amy and I were sent off to bed. We lay there whispering excitedly for hours, speculating on the gifts that were there, as well as what Santa might bring. After what seemed like an entire night, we could still hear Heather and my father, awake and moving around in the living room. I began to get concerned that they might not have our best interests at heart. Didn’t they realize that Santa doesn’t show up until everyone was sleeping? Jeez, everybody knows that. To a six-year-old, ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas was more a set of guidelines on what not to do on Christmas Eve than a nursery rhyme.

Amy and I decided to go investigate, and we snuck from the bed and through the door at the far end of the apartment hallway. What we saw baffled me, but I think it only confirmed what Amy had already suspected. Looking back now, I can remember how truly happy they both looked, wrapping presents and carefully placing them, constantly hugging, kissing, and most of all smiling.

By the next morning, my toy collection had tripled into something a boy could really be proud of. My favorite gift had been a motorcycle/spaceship that you could sit on and turn the wheel to make yourself spin round and round, hitting buttons that made sounds of lasers and tractor beams, all the while struggling in vain to keep any food in your stomach down as your equilibrium went out the window. Loss of equilibrium is the childhood equivalent of being drunk.

After that Christmas, things seemed to just get better and better. Hope for an even brighter future hung suspended in the air, interwoven with reality, making it seem almost tangible. Soon, the possibility of a big promotion for my father was being discussed, as well as the prospect of an actual house with a yard. This was a time when great things were possible, and it felt OK to dream.

It was my very first foray into hoping and dreaming, and I was unaware as yet to the pitfalls of such foolishness. For my father, the ability to see a better future after being blind to the possibility for so long must have been magical, and it showed. We were way too happy, and had I known life the way I know it now, I might have seen the tragedy that was coming.

CHAPTER 2

LOOSE GRAVEL

Author Henry Hartman once defined success as the moment when preparation meets opportunity. It seems to me the meet-cute (that moment in romcoms when the couple adorably meets for the first time) involved here is luck, and this definition represents good luck. I surmise that bad luck must be the opposite—when unprepared meets a worst-case scenario. We often call these accidents.

The summer of 1981 began by fulfilling all of spring’s promises. My birthday came and went, further adding to my toy collection, making it totally respectable, even worthy of envy by some poorer kids. I had accepted Heather as my new mom, and all was right with my world—well, almost. I was probably the last person to see the new Star Wars movie and I was not at all happy with the way things were left hanging. Vader was Luke’s father and Han Solo was a frozen TV dinner. There was only one black guy living a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, and you weren’t altogether sure if he was good or bad.

My sister Amy wasn’t nearly as happy with all of the improvements as I was; it was going to take more time for her to get on board with our new lives. For the time between Debbie and Heather, Amy had been my de facto mother. She made sure that I was dressed properly, fed, mostly clean and that I made it to and from school. She was probably better than most ten-year-old mothers, but I won’t say that she was totally unselfish. She would occasionally use her power to annex my remaining pile of McDonald’s French fries to hers, or decide it best that she hold a dollar I found on the ground in the apartment building’s laundry room for safe keeping.

Eventually, Amy realized that not caring for me constantly freed her up for more time with her friends, and as she had already programmed me to follow her directions to the letter, she slowly handed the mom role over to Heather. Everybody was now fully on board for the future we all knew was coming—one that was to be our reward for surviving such terrible times.

On the warm June day that we learned our father had been given his promotion, he came home with a brand new car. He had not bought the car; he had rented it. Having finally been made the general manager for the grocery store, he wanted to celebrate the amazing turn our lives were about to take. My father was going to be making a lot more money, and we were finally going to have it all. He rented the car because he wanted to feel that change right away. Probably not the best use for the money we had, but you can’t blame a man who had faced so much adversity, indulging in his first real success.

Later that evening, my father’s friends and co-workers had planned to hold a party for him to celebrate his promotion. Heather was sick with a cold, forcing her to stay home with my sister and me.

At this party, one of my father’s friends asked him to give her a ride to her boyfriend’s house. The story I was told was that she and her boyfriend had been fighting, but the couple had made up over the phone from the party. I say this was the story I was told because I have