Once in a while I invent someone whom I wouldn’t want any known actor to play. Day after day I search the shelves of my mind for just the right actor, but they’re all wrong. I think the only thing to celebrate about this is a momentary triumph over stereotype.

On the other hand, some of my characters reach out from their stories, shove me aside and claim the actors born to play them. I’m always rather glum about that. Billy Salviati, the hit-man protagonist of my little novel, Saraceno, keeps confiding to me that if anybody ever makes a movie of his story the only man who could possibly play him is the Liverpool boxer-turned-actor Gary Stretch.

Who? I asked. You know, Billy said, the guy who almost stole Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great from Colin Farrell. Oh yeah, he played Cleitus, the cavalry commander who saved Alexander’s life at Gaugamela and was less than enamored by Alexander’s globalization theories. Definitely, Gary Stretch could glower his way through Saraceno in high style and everyone else would bend themselves out of shape to deal with that beautifully enigmatic face.

Some critics have complained that Billy’s creator never guides the tourist through Billy’s head (guilty, as charged), but ask yourself where Stone’s Alexander would be without the imponderable Cleitus. He and Billy are catalysts: without them the others fail to reveal themselves.

I like to cast stories in my head. Not just my own, but those of writers I admire. I prefer actors who aren’t household words, at least not yet. The actors who obsess the tabloids have outsized auras. Their heads are too big. They’re too big for their roles. Their roles are just cosmetics. I prefer actors who thrill you for an hour or two and then go home, and I don’t care where their homes are any more than they care where mine is. I don’t want them to bump into me in supermarkets or bore me with their complaints about their lack of privacy.

Mr. Stretch, who was as good a boxer as Billy’s prototype was a thug, would make as fine a Billy Salviati as the actress Maria Bello would make a Connie Larimer, the battered but indomitable barmaid at Mina’s in The Village.

I grew up in a movie world. No television, not yet. The first movie I ever saw was Captains Courageous. I’ve seen it twice. I liked it better the first time. The second movie I ever saw was Beau Geste, the 1939 one with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston and Brian Donlevy, the most hateful sergeant in film history. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and I liked it best the last time I saw it.

So maybe it wasn’t an accident that when I dropped out of Columbia the dean suggested I join the Foreign Legion. I joined the U.S. Navy, and I’ve always thanked God I disliked the dean. In fairness to him, I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual, if he thought about me at all. In case you’re wondering, I did think his advice was amusing, so you see I wasn’t a dour little puke.

Writers and the characters who people their stories have always been influenced by actors. But that side of the equation hasn’t gotten much attention. We’re always talking about whether an actor has interpreted a part well, but we should keep in mind that the parts themselves have probably been influenced by the writer’s having seen actors playing other parts. The fact is, whether we’re in the bedroom or the boardroom, we never know who we’re emulating or whether we get away with it.

A writer remembers a certain look or body language. Who could forget Gloria Grahame walking away from someone, anyone? It might have been the face of a bit player, an extra. And yet it emerges years later as an unforgettable character in a book. It could have been a bad movie or a face that vanished from public view, but it lived on in some writer’s mind and finally took on a life of its own.

The glances of waitresses and old shipmates have come alive in my stories, and those glances weren’t always for me. In public places, gatherings, on screen, the fleeting interactions we arrest take up residence in us. They go on living the lives we glimpsed. Every once in a while we encounter them face to face in a book, and it feels like deja vu.

Whatever the writer writes he has seen before—faces, words, gestures. Who can hitch himself up for a hard task without remembering John Wayne’s distinctive hitch when walking? All the actors the writer has enjoyed and all their observations of the human condition play a role in his work. His redheads may not look or act like Nicole Kidman, his antiheroes like Lee Van Cleef, or his blondes like Charlize Theron, but his brain is mobbed with indispensable faces and demeanors, and so are ours. We’re haunted by the people we’ve enjoyed and despised, and our responses to people and situations come from these earlier encounters.

This confronts the writer with a dilemma. If he’s a hack he has a vast storehouse of stock characters and situations. But if he writes for posterity and not the best-seller list he worries about merely reproducing some memorable portrayal that he has internalized. He must worry about reconstituting somebody else’s work. This doesn’t mean he can’t revisit a scene that moved him, or even a theme, or an actor who opened his eyes to a recognition, but while revisiting he must not loot. Instead he must create an alembic in which his pleasurable memories mingle to create something new.

My barber says we have lopsided faces. One ear droops longer than the other; one eyebrow arches while the other flat-lines; one corner of the mouth turns down—one marvels at the asymmetry of life. To say nothing of the fact that quite a few of us (some would say all of us) are cock-eyed.

I’ve always had a keen appreciation of the lopsidedness of things. I love heresies. They’re so much more interesting than orthodoxies. Doris Lessing once wrote a book, Briefing for a Descent Into Hell, about a man who hears people think. It’s such a dangerous idea we put people in asylums for indulging it. It certainly is a kind of hell. But I think some of us can live with one foot in my reality and another in yours: one foot in the magical lopsidedness of things, and the other in that no-man’s land between the faces we wear and the thoughts we think.

My fate in life has been to spend a lot of time in that country. It’s full of sinkholes and vipers. You have to watch your step. But if you live there long enough you’ll have no fear of hell.

Micro-expressions flash across our faces continuously. And we’re not as good at reading them as we think we are. A contemptuous half-smile, for example, may be read as approval, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see where that can lead. Cops like to think they’re good at reading micro-expressions, but who knows if the statistics bear them out? We all know what it feels like to be misread. The notion persists that people who look you straight in the eye are telling you the truth, but I can’t begin to tell you how many liars I’ve known who looked me straight in the eye, or, for that matter, how many truthsayers sent their gazes crawling up walls while telling me the truth.

We may find out truth has a certain odor, like pheromones. I don’t know if I’ve ever smelled the truth, but I sure as hell have smelled some lies in my time. Maybe I can’t describe their odor. It’s not exactly mouldy. It’s certainly not rank. But I wouldn’t want to sleep with it, and I’m sure it doesn’t wash out as easily as blood, and we all know, don’t we, that you have to wash out blood fast? If you let lies set, anything can happen. They can even get you into a war.

Oscar Wilde remarked that by the time we’re forty we pretty much have the faces we deserve. I love the observation, but my experience suggests it’s a half-truth. I’ve known many people who’ve sneaked into their middle and old ages without deserving their faces. I think we like to think we’re good at reading faces because we dread a world where we can’t. We have skills we can’t cop to without being marked down as loonies or pretenders. Children struggle with these hidden skills, and adults try to talk them into believing they don’t have them, which I’ve never thought a particularly adult thing to do. But what do I know? I’m still trying to grow up. I think it’s a task at which most of us fail, otherwise why would we be borrowing money from China to make war in Iraq? Can this be cast in an adult light?

My mother tried to inhabit that no-man’s land back in 1953 when she made a painting called She Had Many Faces. A big faceless tattooed lady sits on a stool holding a clutch of masks on strings. She can wear any one of these faces, but underneath will always be the enigma of the faceless
lady wearing a black heart around her neck and sitting under an eclipsed moon. I knew the women who posed for those faces. Some of them rest with my mother in Artists’ Cemetery, Woodstock, New York. I think only one of them would have approved of her own mask. But an artist has prerogatives, as do we all when we look each other in the face and strain to hear each other’s thoughts and don’t always see the face we’re supposed to see.

What I’m contending here is that some of us don’t have to strain too much, because some of us know we were born in the loony bin.

I don’t know how many people suffer from something-must-happenness, but I suspect it’s a fairly large number. It’s a feeling that someone or something just around the next corner is going to change your life. For the better, of course. It takes a lot out of the life you’re living, because it makes it seem cobbled together.

Something-must-happenness imposes intolerable burdens on everyone you meet and everything that happens. They can’t just happen; they have to be fraught with consequence. Eventually you just break down under the weight of all this anticipation, and this is probably just as well, because you’ve become pretty intolerable yourself.

I wouldn’t write a thing about this malady, which has been one of my greater follies, except that it occurs to me that the Internet has exacerbated it. The Internet is so rich it just naturally prompts us to try to mine diamonds and rubies and emeralds from it. Hour after hour, our fingers numbing and vision blurring, we search for that one thing that’s going to change everything.

Maybe even our terminal celebrity worship stems from the same illness. We think those beautiful, marvelous people, all of them living fabulous lives, are going to change ours. And they do, for an hour or two, but we expect much more, which is why the paparazzi beseige celebrities. In our behalf. We want to consume them like pills. We’re hooked on them.

It doesn’t occur to us that we’re beautiful, marvelous people. If we are, why aren’t we celebrated? Why aren’t we rich and famous, quadruply divorced, knighted? No, we’re just benighted. We think nothing’s happening, but with a little bit of luck something will happen: we’ll win the lottery, marry somebody rich, inherit a fortune from an unknown uncle, find the one true love who will make everything better.

And the Internet is there to help us, at least until the greedy bastards snatch it from us and put it in their pockets, as they’re trying to do in Washington right now.

We don’t have social skills to begin with, or we wouldn’t be killing each other with such discouraging regularity, and the instantaneity of the Internet is not helping us develop any. We don’t have to petition it, we don’t have to say please and excuse me; we just break in and loot it. I’m not sure this augurs well, but the Internet is like certain unforgettable faces: once you’ve seen them the entire balance of the cosmos seems to depend on them. For all we know, maybe it does. After all, one of the benefits of the Internet is to remind us how much we don’t know, and that always helps us get our heads into our T-shirts.

I’ve thought a great deal about how I contracted the something-must-happen virus. I’m sure it was in the womb. Things could have been worse: I could have been nursed on cocaine and weaned on heroin. As it is, I was born hooked on soap opera. My theory is that I spent nine months listening to the messy lovers’ triangle in which I was unhappily conceived. I probably said to myself, Listen, whatever your name is, you’re not going to like these people, but something better will come along. It did. Hook or crook, I got a life. But it took me most of this one. If there’s going to be another one, I hope I smarten up faster.

There was a moment in boot camp when I almost laughed myself out of the Navy. It might have been a first. One of the guys in our company at Bainbridge, Maryland, was there because his father thought it would make a man out of him. Some of us were macho jerks and some of us were pretty decent. This kid had me figured for one of the latter and he sort of attached himself to me, hoping maybe I could help him get through that summer alive. Most of us had our doubts about whether he’d make it.

“How come this doesn’t seem to bother you?” he asked me one night after taps. I was thinking about how to answer him when I fell into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I couldn’t stop laughing. I was coming apart and they were going to cart me out of there in a wheelbarrow. My best efforts to get a grip failed. Now what was unusual about that was that I hardly ever laughed. I didn’t think anyone was funny. Well, maybe Frank Gorshin mimicking John Wayne. Or that vaudeville guy who couldn’t get his wonder dog to do a damned thing.

My friend, the one the good guys were worried about, started slapping me on the back. I finally calmed down because a curious notion seized me. “It doesn’t bother me because it’s a goddam piece of cake,” I said. It had reached 110 on the grinder that day, so you can understand why the kid looked at me incredulously. “I thought you went to private schools,” he said. I saw my reflection in a moonlit windowpane at that moment. I looked like a rabid wolf. My teeth were bared. “Oh yeah, I had a great time,” I said.

But it took me almost thirty more years to continue that thought, to say I’d been sexually abused in boarding school, to say some bigger kids tried to hang me from a hay loft, to say a lot of other like things.

My survival instincts were so well honed by then that the military never fazed me. The first big crisis we had that summer was when some of the guys tacked up the Confederate battle flag in our barracks. It was sort of like firing on Fort Sumter. Maybe about fifty-five or sixty percent of the guys were from the South. The rest of us were from New York and New Jersey. Things were heading for a showdown when Seaman Recruit Survivor Marbrook doped out that the Southerners were divided between flatlanders and mountaineers, and the mountain kids didn’t share all that second-hand chauvinism. They just wanted something better than where they came from, and they weren’t about to screw it up fighting “the war” all over again. For that little insight I got voted Company Honor Man when we graduated.

The next little problem came from the North. Some truculent guys from Joisey decided to shape up the unfit, like the fellow I mentioned earlier, by making their lives even more miserable than they already were. Having grown up in New York, I was used to clods like that. They were the kind of creepy bullies who idolized Adolph Hitler. So I mobilized the most decent Yanks and mountaineers among us and we “tuned up” the bullies one night. It was great fun. I knew I was going to like the Navy after that.

But the real reason I liked it so much was that I always knew what the name of the game was, and for a guy who’d never known the name of the game, that was sort of like dying and going to heaven first class.

Boot camp was full of revelations. I mean, I took the bus out of Manhattan with Nat King Cole and Ole Blue Eyes in my head, and within hours I was hearing that High Lonesome for the first time in my life, and I was a goner. You could call it country, but I called it pure damned exciting. Where had Hank Williams been all my pathetic little life?

We were always asking each other to repeat things so we could savor our foreignness. We all talked funny, and I was endlessly curious about Southern speech. For starters, I discovered Southerners spoke as many dialects as we Yankees did, and none of them sounded like Gone With the Wind. They were always telling me, You don’t sound like a New Yorker, by which they meant I didn’t sound like a kid from Greenpernt, nor could I convince them that Manhattan kids didn’t say Toid Avenoo ‘n Toidy-Toid Street, Brooklyn kids did.

I think maybe the strangest thing that happened to me in boot camp, the most memorable thing, was some of the mountain kids asking me to write letters home for them, to their girlfriends, their mothers. Didn’t they know it wouldn’t sound like them? Yeah, they did, but they wanted me to do it anyway, and so I left boot camp knowing a lot more about them than I should have. And it’s stuck with me all my life. I keep wondering about those letters, those relationships. How did they turn out? Sometimes when I can’t sleep I make up lives for these guys and the people they left behind. Some of them became frog men, a few even career officers. I never knew a better bunch.

About the kid who wasn’t making it. He didn’t. He slept above me, and one night when I thought maybe another of his problems was bed-wetting I found he’d cut his wrists. We rushed him to the infirmary.

In a day or two his mother came from Richmond—not his father—and she embraced some of us for taking care of him as much as we could, and I think his pluckiness in trying to make it made better sailors out of all of us. I think most of us would have been happy to punch out his dad.

—DM

I have Attention Defection Disorder. Don’t look for it in the books, but it should be there. Invite me to a posh dinner and I’m interested in the servers. Take me to a rally and I listen to the crickets or the cops or the caterer. Drag me to a wedding and I’ll find that one disapproving face. Show me a lush lawn and I’ll cherish the dandelions. Ask me to listen to somebody famous and I’ll study his panderers.

I just don’t like to be focused unless I’m doing the focusing. This is not a formula for success. I don’t commend it to you. It’s just one of my many disorders, but I like it better than most. My ADD made me the kind of reporter who liked sidebars better than the main story. I like life’s sidebars. I’m drawn to the people who observe the people who want to be observed.

Defecting from the main subject, that’s what I do. You tell me what’s important or who’s important, and I’ll study the cracks in the floor.
I could never be a paparazzo. Exhibitionists make me retch, especially the ones who thrive on calling attention to themselves by complaining about their lack of privacy. How creepy is that?

I’m taking liberties with the word exhibitionism. The textbooks say it’s an obsession with exuding your sexuality. My definition is broader. I‘m talking about all those loud-mouthed look-at-me’s who assail us in restaurants and almost everywhere else with their obscene craze to be noticed. On the other hand, the look-at-me game can be played with great subtlety and refinement, and most of us are willing to pay to see that.

Early in my life—I think it was in Sunday school in Bayshore, Long Island—I noticed that certain people are psychic blimps. When they enter a room there’s no room for anyone else. We all know who they are. We vote for them, we stand in lines to see them. Sometimes we marry them.
My ADD isn’t the kind that minutely examines the walls when someone’s talking to me. I usually give the person in front of me my full attention, but I get a little antsy if he or she likes it too much.

It’s probably a protective device, this ADD of mine. When I was in high school I had one of those epiphanies that change your life. I was wondering more or less idly why I liked vampire movies so much, and then it dawned on me we’ve all had run-ins with vampires. I mean, how many times have you felt like a blood donor after dealing with certain people? Now please don’t jump to the conclusion I’m talking about mothers-in-law, because I’m talking about husbands, wives, parents, bosses, politicians, the whole global gamut of blood suckers.

I was one of those eerily perceptive kids people are always trying to distract for fear the kid knows what’s up. I usually did know what was up, and I noticed that a lot of adults in my life weren’t crazy about it.

Well, I think my ADD has saved me from being hypnotized by vampires. The lady next to me may choose to think I’m just another lech checking out the waitress, and I’m not going to swear I don’t do that, but it’s just as possible I’ve noticed the lady next to me checking out my jugular.

Wynkin deWorde Publishers of Galway, Ireland, and Frank Press of France have published Jean Lamore’s AKA, a daring novel that has been causing a stir in critical circles. The European edition of the book features my mother’s painting, She Had Many Faces, on its cover. This oil painting was executed by Juanita Guccione, my mother, in 1953. Lithographic copies of it are well known in the psychotherapy community where it’s often perceived as a portrayal of psychosis. I remember her painting it in her studio on East 19th Street in Manhattan. The faces are from sketches my mother made of women who had played various roles in her life.

—DM

I often pass a certain dirty-water hot dog stand in midtown Manhattan. Two nice-looking young Arab men usually preside. Their speech and body language never fails to remind me how New York pokes fun at adversity.

One day a cop strides up to the corner stand and says, “Hey, Abdul, don’t blow anybody up today, okay?” The vendor hands the cop a hot dog stringy with sauerkraut and says, “I don’t blow people up, I feed them. Be a nice cop, this is America.” The two men chuckle, the cop pats the vendor fondly on his arm and moves on.

Another day at the same corner I see a haggard young man staring at the hot dog stand. The vendor, in a time-honored Noo Yawk gesture, opens both his palms and shrugs his shoulders. “I’m hungry,” the young man says. The vendor spins away and makes up a sloppy dog and bun. He hands it to the young man and says, “So you shouldn’t be hungry, awright?”

This is my hometown, the melting pot. I doubt the Arab vendor realized he’d adopted a Yiddish-American expression. Maybe he’d seen some elderly lady sit down next to a stanger in a park and say, “So you shouldn’t be lonely a little.” The vendor probably has a good ear and a good eye, too. His stand assures us that his food is Kosher and Halal.

It’s my great pleasure and privilege in my old age to overhear New York, to see it with its eccentricities hanging out. I’m too old to have to wear a uniform—a suit, a briefcase, a well-trimmed head, a spitshine. I go about in mufti, aided by the fact that nobody sees the elderly except the elderly. Well, that isn’t quite true, because once in a great while I see a young man or woman studying the elderly with the care of an actor. I like such young people.

Spying on the hot dog man prompts me to think about language. There’s a bias in the publishing industry against fancy-schmancy writing, not that most editors or agents know fancy from schmancy. What they mean is they don’t like pretentious writing, self-conscious writing. I don’t have such biases. I like what I like and don’t like what I don’t like. But more and more I realize we’re all listening for beautiful language, whatever pigeonhole we happen to stuff it in.

I’m hungry. So you shouldn’t be hungry. I’m hungry, stated in a matter-of-fact, even rather plummy English. So you shouldn’t be hungry, said in a sing-song cadence borrowed from Yiddish. Beautiful language. Fancy but not schmancy.

I often listen to the score of the movie The Sheltering Sky. It helps me write. Two tracks arrest my attention every time. In the first an Arab sings, or is it talk perhaps, without music, rapidfire. It’s rap, straight from North Africa. In the second track an Algerian woman sings all too briefly. Her voice is so sexual it shatters you in seconds.

Everywhere we’re listening for beauty, and hearing it. But the way
we categorize things, that old Aristotelian way, gets in the way of the pure joy of listening, of reading. We think that when we can put a sound or a line in a box with a label something has transpired, but in fact all we’ve done is insulate ourselves from the experience.

A case in point is the James Joyce industry with its 33,000 websites and God knows how many symposia. Its very existence suggests that his work is impenetrable and requires expert guidance. My own take on Joyce is that he loves language the way Cockney rhymers do, and when reading him it’s best to relax and go along for the ride.

So we look for gangsta rap CDs, or thriller books, or memoirs, and we avoid poetry because it has all that fancy-schmancy stuff. We don’t realize we’re trapped in the commercialization of everything. It’s the marketers who need to label stuff, who need to tell us which shelf to go to. But when we’re out on the street we’re not as bugged and jerked around by the marketers, and so we hear the pure sound of people turning lemons into lemonade, the way New Yorkers always do.

For a nation with a grand obsession for amassing belongings you’d think we wouldn’t have a belonging problem. It’s not that the old melting pot is cracked, but maybe we have to think a bit more about what we’re stirring in it.

Who belongs here? The EZ-pass answer is whoever lives here legally and law-abidingly, right? But we all know there are people who don’t think other people belong here, not because they’re here illegally, but because they’re not the right kind of people.

That’s one reason I’ve never been much of a joiner. I figure whatever you have to join leaves somebody out, maybe even shut out. So I start to worry about the people who’re left out. It’s silly, I know. But we’re all entitled to a certain amount of daffiness. It’s one of the spices of life.

I have this weird condition that prompts me to follow logic out the window. I mean, it can’t be a club or a religion or a society if everybody’s a member, can it? Sure, I know most religions would, in theory, like to represent the earth’s entire population, but we all know, don’t we, that they kind of dine out on all those beknighted fools and knaves who don’t belong.

So here we are globalizing the living daylights out of our lives in the name of corporate health while at the same time—in places like Bosnia, Iraq, Darfur, Sri Lanka, France, The Netherlands—we’re gathering around our ethnic campfires and acting like we’re the only ones who belong.

What’s wrong with this picture? Is it just that we like cheap labor but dislike all the ethnic baggage that comes with it? Or is it that a mere handful of fat cats like the cheap labor and leave us struggling with all the larger issues, like behaving decently towards one another when the fat cats have no such commitment? In fact, they don’t even have a commitment to be patriotic, not to the Stars and Stripes, not to the Union Jack, not to the Maple Leaf, not to the Tricoleur, not to any flag.

The population of the southern hemisphere is moving north in search of jobs, in search of hope, a reason to go on living. The ice is melting and the oceans are rising, and the fat cats are getting fatter. Immigrants, legal and illegal, demonstrate here peacefully. In France, Maghrebi immigrants, legal and illegal, burn cars. They want to belong. They’re being exploited, and they don’t feel welcome.

But they’re not the only ones being exploited. They’re paid dirt so that the rest of us won’t have to be hired and paid decently.

What’s wrong with this picture? Could it be we’re debating the wrong thing? Could it be we’re debating just what the exploiters want us to debate so that we won’t notice we’re all being exploited?

Most of us don’t want to make other human beings feel unwelcome. Most of us are willing to make room for newcomers, to give them a chance to prosper, as our forebears did. But we’re being hustled and bullied by problems created by greed. So the next time you hear somebody inveighing about—well, whatever—ask them how they feel about pure unadulterated greed.

—DM

Some people live their lives so vividly you can’t imagine a world without them. I’m not talking about faces—there are faces like that—I’m talking about people whose responses to challenges are written so large in our minds that we can’t even imagine our own lives without them.

Dominick John Guccione (you can see him working in his studio inside this website) was such a man. I met him when I was seven. “So whose kid are you?” he asked. I was sitting in front of an apartment building on Second Avenue in Manhattan. “My mother’s,” I said. “Yeah, who’s your mother?” “She lives upstairs, she’s an artist,” I told him. “Oh yeah,” he said. She owed him three months’ rent.

And that’s how I met him, my stepfather. My mother hadn’t met him yet. I made the introductions. His influence on my life is incalculable. That’s why I dedicated my short novel, Saraceno, to him.

Dominick was born in 1888 in Misilmeri, a market town south of Palermo in Sicily. He arrived on Ellis Island with his mother, father, two sisters and two brothers when he was fourteen. None of them spoke English. The Irish customs officer told him he couldn’t be Domenico Giovanni anymore, he had to be Dominick John.

They took up residence, like so many Sicilians, in a tenement on Elizabeth Street. His father, a sculptor who had made marionettes for the Opera dei Pupi in Palermo, was overwhelmed by life in America. He soon returned to Sicily, leaving behind his family. Dominick’s mother called him into her bedroom and said, “Domenico, now you’re the head of the family. Do the right thing.” He did it with a vengeance for the rest of his life. He wasn’t the oldest child, a brother and a sister being older, but he was the strongest and the smartest, and his mother knew it.

Dominick not only began supporting his family as a teen-ager, he eventually employed both his brothers and put his sisters’ husbands in business. He didn’t find the streets of New York paved with gold, but he loved them anyway. He recognized from the start that English would be the key to his success, so he began learning it with his usual focus and ferocity. By the time he was twenty he was quoting Shakespeare without an accent, except of course his New York accent.

One of his closest friends in Little Italy was a handsome, taciturn fellow named Salvatore Lucana, who became the notorious Lucky Luciano. They followed different paths, but they remained friends. Both of them were scarred by smallpox. Both of them were scarred by the racism they encountered. But they had no doubt that they would make their own marks in New York City and that it wouldn’t remain foreign to them.

For Dominick the beginning of this process came in front of Luchow’s
one cold wintry night. Dominick was selling newspapers in front of this famous eatery on east Fourteenth Street. The street was then New York’s theater and literary district. He was eighteen. He worked days as an apprentice to Frank Storck, taxidermist for the big-game hunter Frank Buck. He was singing opera arias that night to keep warm. He’d sing a little, then he’d call out the headlines, then he’d sing some more. People usually gathered to hear him. They called him the Street Caruso. One of these people was Stanford White, the most renowned architect of the Gilded Age.

White used to arrive in a glittering carriage with the most beautiful girl Dominick had ever seen, the showgirl Evelyn Nesbitt. They always bought a Herald Tribune from Dominick and tipped him extravagantly. They were fond of him. He was part of their romantic idyl. But on the night that changed everything for Dominick, Stanford White said, “Listen, Domenico, I want you to come to my place Friday night. You get someone else to do this and you come see me, all right?” Dominick scribbled down the splendid swell’s address and nodded. When he showed up at White’s home the architect had laid out a tuxedo, patent shoes, gray gloves and other accouterments for Dominick. And they fit. White was, after all, a man used to sizing things up. He took Dominick to the John Hay Whitney mansion on Fifth Avenue where he introduced the young immigrant to partygoers as Caruso’s rival.

Dominick sang his heart out that night for all the WASP “swells,” as he called them. He knew they were the establishment, not the Irish
politicians running the city. But he never sang for anybody he didn’t like, not ever. So we can assume he liked Stanford White and wanted to do this patron a service.

It was the first of many such nights. That same year Stanford White put up the money for Dominick to buy Frank Storck’s business. Storck had proposed that Dominick gradually buy him out with deductions from his meager salary, but White convinced Dominick this was a bad idea. “How am I gonna pay you back?” Dominick wanted to know. “I don’t know, Domenico, but I know you will,” said White. And he did. And soon other business deals came Dominick’s way, deals that made him rich. And soon the swells on Fifth Avenue were asking him to find “those lovely artisans” he knew to work on their estates in Dutchess County and out on the North Shore. Dominick had become their immigrant. Here was an element of patronization, of course. But the swells recognized Dominick’s integrity and his indomitability. They admired him. If the country needed immigrants, this was the kind of immigrant it needed.

I think about this story often as we debate the immigation issue. Dominick’s is a rich story, and maybe I’ll live long enough to tell it, but I’ll end this little part of it with an anecdote that will tell you the kind of citizen he became.

I used to sit beside him at his desk in his office on east Nineteenth Street doing my homework. By that time he’d served in World War I as a sharpshooter with the Fighting Irish, the 69th Regiment, fathered two daughters and a son, married my mother and started raising me. The doorbell rang and I answered it. It was the Gramercy Park landlords’ association—they had a snooty name, which I forget—and they had a very important matter to discuss with Mr. Guccione. He told me to show them up. They were worried. They’d heard through the grapevine that he was about to rent an apartment on the park to a Puerto Rican doctor and his family. Surely Mr. Guccione realized that this would simply not do. I buried myself in my books because I knew what was coming. He listened politely and then he spoke. “You guys crack me up,” he said, “first it was the Irish, then it was the Jews, then it was the Italians, now it’s the Puerto Ricans. Let me tell you something, it’s my building, it’s my money, I made it, and I’ll do what I damned well please. Have you got that? Good. Have a nice day.”

I looked up and he was smiling at me. “So?” he asked. I hugged him.

Why don’t men part their hair anymore, the way they did in the Vitalis era? This question may turn up in one of my poems or novels, because I’m a plagiarist. I pilfer my wife Marilyn’s best ideas and remarks on an obscenely regular basis. Perhaps it’s because two people, when they know each well enough, tend to put on each other’s identity. You’ve seen dogs that look like their owners, right? But I like to think it’s because I prize Marilyn’s odd-angle way of looking at the world. I’m fairly observant, a bit too fast on the uptake for my own good, but Marilyn sees all those things that go unseen under our noses.

Her funny filter is so fine that the observations that plop me into the trough of despair elicit in her a chuckle, and if this trait weren’t just a little bit contagious I’d have wound up in a back ward of an asylum long ago.

I hardly ever sit down to write without a twinge of regret that it isn’t Marilyn doing the writing. Suffice it to say she inhabits the lines of what I do write.

Someone who has read most of my work, published and unpublished, once asked me which character most resembles Marilyn. It doesn’t work that way, I said. There’s hardly a character who doesn’t benefit from Marilyn’s wit, and God knows the omniscient narrator would be a boor without her. Do I have anything acute to say about plagiarism, the subject that keeps piling onto the woes of the publishing industry? Not really, except to say that a writer is influenced by everyone and everything.

Once I read writers like Mark Helprin or A.S. Byatt or Juan Goytisolo or William Butler Yeats or Jose Saramago to name a handful, I didn’t write the same. They emboldened me to experiment. But I trust in myself that I haven’t slavishly imitated them. There will be lines reminiscent of them—but never as good, I fear—and yet that’s not plagiarism. That’s life.

I think writing is about listening and seeing, as long and hard as we can bear. For me that has been hard, because I lack filters. Situations and people rush at me with the velocity of a night train. Put me in a crowded room and I start to go crazy with the impressions I’m unable to process. That’s why Marilyn’s wit has saved my life so often.

I’m okay in the street. I like crowded streets. I just pick out the faces that interest me and enjoy them. Often they show up in my work. But in a coffee hour at church, in that closed caffeinated space, my mind wobbles in orbit. And at parties, where booze makes things a bit unpredictable, the very thing many people most enjoy, I’d prefer to be wallpaper. I’d rather face the insurgents than work a room, as they say.

I like people. I can’t imagine writing about people I don’t like, and some people have told me that’s my fatal flaw as a writer: I’m not especially interested in the problem of evil, although I know it exists. Sure it does. I’ve encountered it. I can’t butter people up because I keep wondering who’d want to be buttered up? Such a person would be revolting, right? And yet I do marvel at the way I see butter used in society. I love to hear and see schmooze, but as much as it bemuses me I don’t recall ever having portrayed it in a novel.

And that’s another thing I admire about Marilyn. She makes contact with people without butter and schmooze. She just sees something she likes and mentions it to people. I wait until I can write about it, which is too late. My notebooks are sociable, but I’m not. If I have an enigma—writers are supposed to have them, I think—it’s that there’s very much I like about the world and its inhabitants, and that makes it challenging to imbue my writing with tension. So I find the tension in the challenges people take up, the way they rise to opportunities other people don’t even see.