First published 2010
Set in 1973 with the advent of the designated hitter in baseball and, more importantly for this novel’s purposes, the explosion of the underground movie Deep Throat starring Linda Lovelace across movie screens, generally by means of bootleg copies funneled by the mafia to showing locations. As told in the introduction, Deep Throat was a movie idea pitched by a Queens hairdresser to a couple of New York wiseguys who fronted $25,000 to make it and would go on to earn more than $600 million, much of it a windfall to the mafia. Apparently, Lovelace only got $1,500 to $2,500 and lifelong notoriety for her part. It provides the backdrop for this ferocious crime novel set in Queens and Long Island of all places where the title-figure of John Albano, a two-time loser, who lost his five-hundred-dollar a week construction gig when he punched out the foreman and now earns some bucks counting heads at underground showings of the movie so as to match the take. When his predecessor nicknamed “Tommy Porno” disappears (and is later found in a dumpster), John is promoted to film distributor and money collector from head counter. Of course, to his everlasting regret, John is now nicknamed Johnny Porno, which he hates. And now John has a job bringing the money to the wiseguys after the filmings, armed though with the knowledge that the last guy who was caught skimming from the wiseguys ended up drinking the rest of his meals through a straw and there is of course the disappearance of Tommy Deluca (“Tommy Porno”) who was eventually found with his hands cut off.
The way he got this job though was when he walked into a bar bemoaning his inability to make his child support payments to Nancy (who is now about to end her third marriage to Nathan and still banging his first husband Louis, a compulsive gambler always on the hook to some shark or another). Thing was undercover officer Billy and his wife Kathleen would get their kicks when she came on to other guys and then left them hanging and John did not know she was married when he started hitting her up. When Billy came out of the backroom of the wiseguys’ bar and interfered, John let Billy have it. John’s payment for causing the ruckus was to work it off counting heads at the porno showings. Billy got busted from the force and now has it bad for John, so bad in fact he is ready to take John off the board forever. John, though, has apparently got a temper problem and also gets into it with another Italian in the same bar, one who won’t forget getting knocked down in front of his bosses, particularly Eddie Vento.
There are a lot of names at work in this novel and they all cross paths at one point or another with the focal point being the movie Deep Throat, John and the money he is collecting for the tough guys, John’s ex-wife and the trouble she causes, Nancy’s first ex, her current husband, crooked cops on the take, Vento’s girlfriend who unbeknownst to him is working off a bust and recording him….. The point is that for John you know if you have read any of these kind of crime novels no matter how hard he works it is all going to go wrong and he is always going to be owing big money to the wiseguys and always on the run and always being betrayed.
Stella captures so clearly and decisively the spirit of the early Seventies and the manic world John is swept up in.
Pulp, Crime, & Mystery Books 