A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

Orlandito “Dito” Montiel grew up 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, and at times getting near much graver trouble. Entering adulthood in the eighties, he escapes into the underground and punk cultures of Manhattan.

This is the story of a young man’s hunger for experience, his dawning awareness of the bigger world across the bridge, and the loyalties that bind him to the flawed and desperate “Saints” that have guided his life: Bob Semen, Frank the dog walker, Jimmy Mullen, Cherry Vanilla, Allen Ginsberg, and all the junkies and insaniacs like Santos Antonios who said, “Now, Dito, remember, in life you gotta be crazy.”