Santo: The Demented Dwarf
Our title today comes from Gerry Scott: when I would mention to Gerry that I had seen Santo, he would usually ask “How is the demented dwarf?”
Gerry had met Santo when Santo and two other fellows accosted him, threatening violence. Gerry knocked Santo out with a single punch, and the other two fellows ran away. But now Gerry was faced with an unconscious man on the ground below him, so he called a car, and when it came, hauled Santo into it, and asked the driver to take them to the hospital. Santo came to during the car ride and asked where he was. When Gerry explained the situation to him, Santo asked, “So you knocked me out, and now you’re bringing me to the hospital?” From that point on, Santo regarded Gerry as a true friend. I think if Gerry had only done one of those things… knocked him out, or brought him to the hospital… Santo would not have been so impressed. It was one person doing both that got him hooked.
At that time, Santo was trim and fit. But by the time I met him, he weighed almost 300 lbs., most of it in his enormous belly. And note: he was only 5’5” tall. As opposed to most men with a belly that large, Santo’s didn’t droop down, and it looked hard: more like he had swallowed a largish wrecking ball than that he was obese.
He also had the largest naval hernia I have ever seen. It looked like someone had copied his belly again, just at a smaller scale. One day Gerry got a phone call from Santo saying, “My hernia has turned green. What should I do?”
Gerry told him, “Well Santo, if some part of my body is turning green, generally I would go to the hospital.”
Was Santo my friend? Kind of: it was sort of like being friends with a wild honey badger. He had, for instance, been banned from most of the bars in the neighborhood for fighting. He finally got banned from Moonshine, after about his twentieth fight there.
One day, he asked me, “Professor, when is your new book coming out?” (I wasn’t actually a professor yet, but from the day he met me, that’s what he called me.)
I told him, “Next month.”
He asked, “Can I get an autographed copy?”
“Of course.”
He got a big smile on his face. “Good, that way I can off you, and drive the price way up. Nothing makes an author famous like being murdered.”
After that, I would regularly complain to other patrons at the bar, “This guy here claims he’s my friend, and he promised to kill me to make me more famous. But it turns out it was all just empty words.”
Santo also had the lovely habit of occasionally, in the middle of talking, simply grabbing your balls and squeezing real hard. After a couple times, I told him he better cut it out. He took offense at this, gave me a glare, and said, “What are you going to do about it?”
I told him I was going to stop him physically, and unless he was prepared to kill me, he’d have to accept that. He stopped.
A few years later, Santo had a stroke. After his stroke, Santo took it easy. And by “took it easy,” I mean he sat around his house with a couple of young followers, smoking crack and drinking.
Surprisingly, given this health regimen, he died about a year later from a heart attack.
RIP you demented dwarf.