Dom Perruccio was a popular, outgoing, athletic, generous, and handsome guy raised in the winding, narrow streets of Manhattan's Greenwich Village.

He had many choices growing up in the neighborhood: stay on the street, stay in school, do nothing with your life, or do something. The choices involved strict rules and learned codes to keep from getting killed or arrested in a world of gang culture and hoodlum mentality.

In this blisteringly honest coming-of-age narrative of how he and co-writer Charles Messina survived and ripened, Perruccio introduces the reader to the darker side of Greenwich Village generally depicted as a bohemia for artists, non-conformists, and vagabonds.

But Perruccio exposes the darker side of this free-spirited Shangri-Lai-recalling the 1969 anti-gay Stonewall Uprising, The 1961 Washington Square Riot, and recurring, clandestine Mafia hits.

Finally, Perruccio describes his adult restoration after it all. At the end when his mother died in 1993, Dom says, "That was the toughest time of my life. Losing my mother tore me apart. The one thing that gave me the strength to survive losing her was the birth of my daughter, Vanessa. I had to keep it together. I had to be a father."