A Nostalgic Trip to a Bronx Boy’s Gangster Childhood

BRONX BOY

A Memoir

By Jerome Charyn

Thomas Dunne / St. Martin’s

186 pages, $23.95

In “Bronx Boy,” the final memoir of his coming-of-age trilogy, Jerome Charyn (“The Dark Lady from Belorusse,” “The Black Swan”) offers a nostalgic look at his midcentury boyhood in the Bronx, spent among small-time gangsters. If the book reads more like a novel than a memoir, that’s because, as the author concedes, some of the incidents and people are “the product of imaginative re-creation and these re-creations are not intended to portray actual characters, places, or events.”

Although Charyn offers his disclaimer at the conclusion of the book, it’s fairly clear from the start that he has chosen to heed the famous advice of Emily Dickinson: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” Unlike HBO’s “The Sopranos,” the highly colorful mobsters of Charyn’s adolescence are more lovable than nasty, but their dialogue is just as snappy.

“We were the Bronx Boys,” Charyn writes, “a gang that cut across racial and religious lines because we belonged to the democracy of a candy store.” The young Charyn and his friends idolize Tully Holland, the junkie and ex-con who runs the local candy store, which becomes their primary hangout. Yet the author portrays himself as an ambivalent gang member, too sensitive to commit any acts of real cruelty, and too smart and bookish to align himself wholeheartedly with his crew (his nickname is “Baby”). He hesitates to wear the gang’s signature jacket away from the candy shop, fearing the display will ruin his chances of winning a prestigious academic fellowship in Chicago. “I wanted to get out of the Bronx,” he explains.

Aside from confessing to having forged his father’s signature and skipping school to visit movie theaters in the West Bronx, Charyn isn’t much of a criminal. He knows that he does not really belong with his peers, a fact that leaves him both hopeful and disappointed at what the future will deliver. It’s hilarious to imagine this boy with the mind of a “melancholy volcano,” immersed in Dostoevsky and Flaubert, mixing with the famed gangster Meyer Lansky, but he did--and their encounters provide some of the book’s funniest passages.

When Charyn abruptly falls into disfavor with Lansky, a henchman says, “Kid, what can I tell ya? Meyer’s a moody man. First he likes you and then he doesn’t.” Charyn is a much better storyteller than he is a stylist; his prose often seems dated and awkward: “I danced with Anita, her chest against mine. I was the luckiest lad at junior high. But there wasn’t even a stirring in my pants. I was like a neutered cat.” He is such a good storyteller, though, that his talent makes style (and accuracy) seem slightly less important.

Much of what Charyn claims to have witnessed among thugs calls to mind the material of such mobster-lite films as “Analyze This.” He becomes involved in turf wars, favorite son wars and deals gone wrong, and he constantly battles his own conscience. Yet Charyn’s appealing voice makes his tall tales more entertaining than they might have been in the hands of another author. It’s a voice reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield: “The painter was called Gustav Klimt. I’d never heard of him, but he must have been a genius. Sarah told me about this guy Klimt and the story of Judith, which was from some lost book of the bible.”

Sarah is Tully Holland’s heroin-addicted girlfriend, who also happens to be a prostitute. One day Tully designates Charyn to be her secretary and bodyguard, and with Sarah, Charyn finds the most complex relationship he has ever known: tender and intimate, maternal and sexual. Like Holden Caulfield, Charyn is exceedingly unlucky in love, and his intense, fumbling sexual experiences with Sarah and other women add to the book’s charm.

Family in “Bronx Boy” is defined more by peers and teachers than actual biology, so Charyn’s parents play minor roles in the book. His mother is more central to his life; Charyn relates that because she is going blind during his adolescence, he loves reading and telling stories to her. His Clark Gable-look-alike father--who would “come home with the smell of cheap perfume, lipstick under his chin”--is left mostly in the background. Charyn looks to neighborhood men he admires, not his father, for mentoring and support.

With its vividly drawn characters, ample humor and affectionate recollection of a golden era in the Bronx, Charyn’s memoir is hard to dislike. However, as is true of Dave Egger’s more accomplished and intricate memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” the blurry line between fact and imagination proves occasionally frustrating for the reader. Why not just write a novel? But if one ignores the fact of the truth being told slant, “Bronx Boy” is a pleasurable and breezy read, one destined for a second life on-screen.