Homey Through the Ivy

I'm about to relate Rosita's weekend. It's definitely worth wading through the background material. So here goes:

Rosita is the middle of three children. She was a daddy's girl and the only show of sadness I've seen in her was in talking about how the f****** priest refused to come to Queens to give her dad Last Rites. Rosita does not, most emphatically not, get along with her mother. Still, there are Rosita's two kids to consider and she will not deprive them of their abuela.

Abuela has since moved in with Clark the Mountain Man, who likes to take Rosita's kids fishing, which is where they were this weekend.

Rosita is best pals with Ziggy, the father of her children. She says, "We should work together, but we don't. I mean, within a month, we'd be killing each other."

Rosita has done serious, serious anger management therapy. Her calmness astounds me. Granted, I'm getting all of this first hand, so for all I know, she could have been a screaming harpy, although that would be a complete contradiction of the person I've seen for 8+ hours a day for the last two months.

Ziggy is 6'4" and the offspring of two Jamaicans - Miss Etta and John Thomas. John Thomas is an albino black man. (I am not making this up. I don't have this much imagination any more.) Ziggy is considered the runt of the litter. He has five brothers and two sisters. The Campbells are a force to be reckoned with, including and most especially Miss Etta, who has so many grandchildren now that she is reduced to calling them all "boy!" or "girl!" As in, "Come over here, boy, and let me scrub your neck. What's your mama thinking about, letting you go off looking like a radish patch?"

Ziggy and Rosita are the parents of two wonderful boys, John and Ian. She says Ian looks like a little Spanish boy and every time a teacher calls out the name, "Ian Campbell?", she never believes it when the little Spanish boy says, "I'm Ian!"

Not long after Ian came along, Ziggy and Rosita parted ways, but not really. Ziggy takes the kids every weekend and had them all last summer. There's never an issue of money - whatever the kids need is taken care of and there's no need for bluster or fight over cash. The boys are well taken care of.

Okay. So Rosita met up with this guy, Tony the Guinea. Tony has two sons, Sal who was 19 and Leo who was 13. Sal is a harmless fan boy who needed some pushing to get a job, which he has finally managed to do.

Leo. Oy. Leo is the cause of much, much grief.

We're getting to the middle

Last summer, when Leo was 20, he lost his mind. He had been violent before, but last summer, he caused so much damage to the house - putting his fists through walls, ripping doors off their hinges, slamming things around and breaking them - that Rosy and Tony spent most of the summer repairing and then re-repairing the damage he did. Rosy called the police out a number of times. Each time, the cop was some young wimp or an older guy who just didn't want to go through the trouble of taking Leo to jail. The one time he did get hauled off, Rosy dropped the charges, with the promise that Leo would go to rehab and anger management classes.

He took the anger management classes, but never did the rehab.

Meanwhile, during all of Leo's fits, Rosy's two boys were with Miss Etta during the day and Ziggy at night.

It was summer, the boys were out of school and spending time with their grandma, grandpa, and hordes of cousins ("Girl! Come here and let me grease your head!"). And Rosy didn't have to expose them to any of Leo's drama.

Getting Closer

On Good Friday, Rosy was watching TV with Tony and her boys. John fell asleep on the couch and Ian was asleep on the floor.

Leo had been raging all night, trying to pick a fight with Rosy. "Give me my money!"

"Leo, you get unemployment. You don't need money from me," Rosy answered.

"I do, too! How am I going to take Alexa out tonight? I promised her! You're keeping this from me." At some point, he ran outside and despite the balmy night, Rosy closed and locked all the windows and all the doors.

Oh - where was Tony in all this? Sitting on his ass in front of the TV.

This was when Leo ripped the screens off all the ground floor windows and punched holes in the screens, jimmied the sliders off their tracks, and then kicked down the front door. But he kicked it down in a way so that no one could get in. And no one could get out.

Now Leo backed into the street. Rosy watched him, thought he was going away, and sat down next to Tony. The boys, miraculously, had slept through this.

Then a brick came crashing through the front window and landed next to Ian on the floor. Both kids were covered in broken glass, but miraculously, none of them had been hurt.

Rosy called the cops.

Tony tried to placate her - while she was brushing broken glass off her first born.

Over that weekend, Rosy decided it was time to move out. She wouldn't have her boys exposed to any of this any more.

An Aside

If you think Rosy is being a submissive little thing, keep in mind a couple of things. Last summer when Leo was acting up, he lunged for her, she lunged for him, and she sent both of them sailing into the dining room table. The dining room table broke and then she really went to work on him. She is one tough cookie and don't doubt that for a minute.

Also keep in mind that at one time, she considered Leo and Sal her sons. She bought clothes for them, cooked for them, did laundry, made sure they had whatever they needed for school or for work. And whenever anyone said, "Oh, who are those four boys over there?", Rosy said, "Those are my sons."

Rosy Knows When to Fold
Although the house that Leo was destroying was half hers, Rosy decided over Easter weekend that the time had come to move on. Tony's spinelessness had reached the point where Leo was totally out of control. Rosy had to get herself and her boys someplace safe. She went out one morning and within two hours, had signed the lease on the upper story of a two family house.

When the time came to move out, Ziggy showed up. So did the mysterious Flex, who always has a truck - somebody's truck - at his disposal. So did Rosy's brother. They moved her into the new apartment in one day. She took with her everything that she wanted because she doubted she would ever be able to go back to the house.

Rosy Plans a Peaceful Weekend
When she bailed out of work on Friday, Rosy's plans were vague. However, her chief joys in life, when allowed time on her own, is to read the Daily News, to do the crossword puzzle, and drink a cup of coffee. If outside on a warm day, all the better.

Friday started out the weekend on a promising note. She sat in the backyard and cracked open a Corona. Her downstairs neighbors, who've been great throughout the Gathering of the Campbell Clan, came outside on the patio. "We must have gone through two six packs. And there were three of us drinking." And so to bed, happily buzzed.

Saturday, she did some errands. In the evening, she got a call from a friend to meet them in the city and go play some pool. She got back home during the wee hours on Sunday.

Once again on Sunday, she got to enjoy her peaceful ritual - coffee, Daily News, crossword puzzle. She turned on her iPod and probably sighed.

Then she heard - THUMP. She shrugged it off.

Then she heard it again - THUMP. Hm. Weird. Maybe Ron the neighbor is doing something inside.

Then Leo's face was in hers. She took out the ear buds and looked calmly at him while he screamed. She said at first, she couldn't even understand the words, but after awhile, she noticed that he was screaming about his car, something about tints or tents? And his gear shift. And how it was all Rosy's fault that he didn't have any money and he didn't have any food. Last week, he'd been texting her that there was no food in the house. She looked at me. "Really? Really? Because I haven't lived there for a month."

Rosy said something along the lines of, you're not welcome here, I did not invite you, please leave.

Ron the neighbor popped out. "Everything okay, Rose?"

"Fine. I can deal with this."

She gathered up her iPod, her paper and pen and her coffee, went around the front so she could get to the stairs to her apartment. She locked and bolted the door behind her.

Meanwhile, remember that during all of this, Leo is purple in the face and screaming directly at her while making threatening gestures. Ron the neighbor watched through a downstairs window. When Rosy got inside the common hall, Ron pulled her into the apartment he shares with his wife and daughter. Luckily, the daughter was gone for the day.

Rosy got on the phone. Leo ripped the screen door down. She said to Tony, "You have two and a half minutes to come get Leo. Then I'm calling the cops."

Tony arrived, managed to distract Leo long enough to get him into the car, and drove off.

I say, call de po-po on the cray-cray
Two hours later, Leo was back again and even crazier than before. The minute she saw him, she dialed 911 and said that there was domestic violence going on in the house, that the man had a history of violence.

Homey At Last!
By this point, Leo had ripped the screen door off its hinges and had kicked in the front door. The cop car pulled up and Rosy said she didn't know how he did it, but it seemed, she said, "Like he had just launched himself from his ass." There's a steep, ivy-covered hill on the apartment's front lawn and she said, "The most unbelievable sight I've ever seen is Homey coming through the ivy. He flew. And he'd seen Leo kicking the door down. And then, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, he had Leo down on the ground, knee in his back, and Leo was cuffed."

And he was still screaming.

He saw Rosy clamber through the bent door and screamed, "You f****** b****, I'm going to f****** KILL YOU! I'm going to kill you. The minute I get out of these cuffs, I'm going to kill you."

Rosy was ecstatic. She beamed at Leo and said, "Thank you."

Because among the many, many, many charges against Leo, there is now attempted murder.

The cop, Our Beloved Homey, kept his knee on Leo's back and started shouting at him.

There was some sorting out of roles and issues. Meanwhile, Tony arrived and started begging Rosy to not file any charges.

OBH said, "I can't let him out of these cuffs now, no matter what she'd want me to do. Not after what he said."

And then OBH started giving everyone but Rosy and the neighbors a piece of his mind.

To Leo, he said, "I know this is not your mother, but she saw you grow up, right?"

Leo was still ranting.

"Did you ever go hungry when she was in the house? Did she cook dinner for you?"

"Every night," Leo muttered.

"Did she make sure you had clean clothes, that you had a place to live, that you were safe? Huh? How can you even think for one minute of doing harm to her?"

Leo started off about how it was Rosy's fault that he didn't have his wheels and his tints and whatever else he wanted.

OBH: How old are you?
Leo: 21.
OBH: Then get yourself a f****** job and buy these things for yourself! You're a man! Act like one.

And then OBH caught sight of Tony.

OBH: You're his father? And you never told him to get his ass out of the house to get a job? To be a man? To treat this woman with respect?

Tony looked at the ground. Leo was still screaming.

Did I mention that Rosy has a thing about Tazers? I asked her what she wanted for her birthday and she said, "A Tazer. I want to see Leo flopping all around on the ground like a fish." And we both went wobbly and Tazered-y.

OBH kneeled down to Leo and said, "You keep it up, boy. I'd love to have an excuse to Tazer you."

Rosy actually clapped her hands when she told me this.

OBH told Leo he'd better get up and right quick, too. Otherwise, he had no compunctions in hauling Leo's ass down the hill by the scruff of his neck. Leo scampered to his feet.

And now?

Leo is in the pokey. He will likely be there for some time. So far, what Rosy can remember of the list of citations, is vandalism, destruction of property, and, oh yes, attempted murder.

She is ignoring all plaints from Tony's relatives not to press charges. Tony had the nerve to call her and say, "Please don't press charges! I don't have the money for a lawyer!"

Rosey said, "Public defender" and hung up.

And me? This weekend?

I did laundry.