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The Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Dito Montiel
Thunder's Mouth Press
September 2006
On Sale: August 28, 2006
208 pages
ISBN: 1560259604
EAN: 9781560259602
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"As far back as i can remember ... i can remember
manhattan." Orlandito "Dito" Montiel, son of Orlando, a
Nicaraguan immigrant, and an Irish mother, grew wild in the
streets of Astoria, Queens, pulling pranks for Greek and
Italian gangsters and confessing at the church of the
Immaculate Conception, gobbling hits of purple mescaline and
Old English, sneaking into Times Square whore houses—"Kids
from nowhere going nowhere." At 14 Dito watched as his best
friend and surrogate older brother, Antonio, beat another
kid to death with a baseball bat during a gang fight. A
Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is the quintessentially
American story of a young man’s hunger for experience, his
dawning awareness of the bigger world across the bridge, and
of the loyalties that bind him to a violent past and to the
flawed and desperate Saints that have guided him—a
streetwise Meetings With Remarkable Men with echoes of
Whitman and Kerouac , Saturday Night Fever and Dion and the
Belmonts. Dito tasted short-lived notoriety as a model for
Versace and Calvin Klein, and as the leader of "the most
successful unsuccessful band in history," Gutterboy, a
15-minute darling signed to Geffen for a then unprecedented
million-dollar advance. But this book is about the Saints:
Dito’s father, Antonio "our insane warrior hero," Bob Semen,
Frank the dog walker, Jimmy Mullen, Cherry Vanilla, Allen
Ginsberg and all the others, the drunks, coke-heads,
junkies, the insaniacs like Santos Antonios who said, "Now
Dito remember, in life you gotta be crazy." Photographs by
Bruce Weber, Lance Staedler and Allen Ginsberg are featured.
A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is soon to be a major
motion picture directed by Robert Downey, Jr.
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