A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

“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 fourteen, 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, of 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.