AKA MICHAEL

The killing of one parent by another is just one of many upheavals in a New York boy’s life in this memoir.

When he was in the sixth grade in 1975, Garramone’s mother, Alma, shot and killed his father, John, in the family’s diner in Flushing, Queens. She was sent to a psychiatric hospital and subsequently acquitted on a plea of spousal abuse. That would be enough to traumatize any kid, but the tragedy doesn’t register strongly amid the swirl of untoward events in the author’s story. After the killing, Garramone led an unsettled existence: skipping school; living sometimes with friends and relatives, sometimes at his mother’s house with sketchy boarders; and drifting through a delinquent adolescence marked by auto theft, credit card fraud, minor drug dealing, and major drug taking with his similarly dead-end, working-class friends. He weathered another major blow when he and Alma were arrested on charges—bogus, he insists—of conspiracy to kidnap and attempted murder. He was released after a brief stint in jail, but Alma got five and a half years. He promptly settled back into an aimless picaresque with lots of drugging and drinking with pals, joy riding, occasional hookups, a horrendous motorcycle accident, fitful stints of menial employment, a one-off session of gay sex for hire, a solicitation to become a hitman (declined), and a thousand other random incidents. As the author headed into his 20s, he tried to embark on a career in real estate investment, which he describes in a lengthy section full of fixer-upper procedural and wrangles with banks and brokers. Unfortunately, his dream foundered; he claims his partner cheated him and his tenants failed to pay their rent.

Garramone’s Runyonesque coming-of-age saga has sharply etched characters, from smug school administrators to dirty cops and seen-it-all prostitutes, along with well-crafted, punchy dialogue (recreated, it seems, since he is recalling conversations from 40 years ago). As the protagonist, the author is always a vibrant figure, full of belligerent sarcasm and anti-authoritarian attitude, whether he’s a skeptical tyke facing his first day of school (“Homework…Jeez, don’t I do enough work around here?”), a prisoner confronting a guard (“Well, if you’re so tough, why don’t you take me outside the building, take my cuffs off, and we’ll play a little winner take all?”), or a mangled crash victim annoyed by an X-ray technician’s painful brusqueness (“Stand me up, motherfucker! Stand me up against a wall, and I’ll kill you, motherfucker, even with one hand!”). The author’s feisty prose imparts plenty of sound and fury to the proceedings, but not always much significance. Some of Garramone’s recollections are well drawn and captivating, but many are in an ill-edited narrative that’s overstuffed with seemingly every happenstance he can remember, including the time a chipmunk crawled up his leg, the time his cousin Dino urinated near him in a stream, and innumerable barroom brawls over nothing. There’s a certain lifelike feel to this one-damn-thing-after-another jumble, but readers will find it trying to have to relive every trivial event in the author’s life. They will get little sense of where the arc of Garramone’s experiences is going in a story that expends its considerable horsepower mainly on spinning its wheels.

An energetic, sometimes entertaining but also shapeless and often chaotic account of a misspent youth.