A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: A 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. "I like it a lot..."—Allen Ginsberg "The greatest streetwise healing book ever written. In a world full of put-ons and pretty faces he's the real deal."—Susan Carlucci, In Fashion