The following are excerpts from A Stranger in the Barrio:

My young teenage years are a time of segregated schools, colored restrooms with white toilets, and colored drinking fountains spewing colorless water. It is a time I live unabashed without newspapers, magazines or books to complicate life.
     I spell words phonetically, phonetically distort them, for the bilingual first generation survives on oral tradition. Most of my relatives are illiterate in English and Italian, so phonetic mistakes go undetected in Italian and English, recycling themselves with each new generation.
     Sicilian is dialect without a written text. I speak incorrectly, fade in and out of one language and another, fade in and out of double negatives, and punctuate sentences with "you know," illiterate America's one two punch, "you know," the sine qua non of-I can't say what I wanna say, so won't you please understand me and say it for me, so I say, "You know" or "don't you know?"
     Mine is a mindset of an ideology embracing "ain't." Ain't got this and ain't got that, but what I ain't got don't matter, for nobody in the neighborhood ain't got nothing neither.
     There are no Kmarts or Wal-Marts broadening my horizons with English- speaking loud speakers, and there are no golden arches. McDonald still lives on a farm. I believe public libraries are for sissies, and restaurants are segregated not just for blacks, but for me, too. Immigrant families are segregated by frugality, defacto segregation of poor whites. But nothing is as rude as "Colored" and "White" signs. There is a difference, a life-size difference, for I don't see a black face in the mirror each morning. I don't go to a Negro school, don't sit in the back of the bus, and I can walk into a restaurant even though I never do. Growing up is comical, a tragic comedy Latin style. I feel like a thesaurus in a bookless home, or a dictionary replete with misspelled words, but that's not accurate either, because I don't know the word "thesaurus"--don't know such a book exists.

 

None of us really change. I'm as Sicilian as scacciata, Sicilian deep-dish pizza. Mashed potatoes and gravy never crossed my lips, and my mother didn't bake apple pies. I learned about the American flag in school, and a high school diploma satisfied my parents' ambitions. I signed my own report cards, and my parents never went to PTA meetings. If teachers came to visit because of disciplinary problems, I shut the door.

So you ask how did I become a physician and now write books. I was lucky. SATs and MCATs weren't around. Any thought of becoming a physician in my home was ludicrous or blasphemous, like praying to God to be God.

Like a dreamless genome I was never taught to dream. Mama said dreaming was a form of masochism. Dreams didn't come true. It wasn't a birthday wish either. Birthday candles were not lit in my home.

The barrio muzzled my mind, making me believe what I didn't know wasn't worth knowing. That's called a defense mechanism in psychiatry, allowing me to think I had self worth.

I lived in a cold-water duplex without heat or air-conditioning. Until the age of fourteen I shared a bedroom with my grandmother and peed in a chamber pot I kept under my bed. From her I learned about prayer, God and Sicily.

At age twenty-three, I left the barrio, but it never left me. I use ABC spell check a lot, and if you look closely at what I write, you'll see tinges of the ghetto punctuating each page.

Mine was a mindset where it's okay to kill in the name of honor, and vendetta was good for the soul. I'm politically unorthodox and the women in my life all want to wear my pants. When I don't let them, they scream male chauvinist. Read A Stranger in the Barrio and learn how I got to be this way.

I was told by high school counselors not to attempt college. It was a time before affirmative action, which never applied to wops anyhow. I enrolled at the University of Tampa. It was hard to have the right attitude without the basics, yet I survived my first two years. I worked fulltime in a box factory, earning 75 cents an hour. My junior year I took chemistry and biology, expecting to flunk out, instead I set the curve. An Anglo professor suggested I try to get accepted into medical school.

I didn't know Meharry and Howard Universities were Negro schools or Harvard existed. Out of 30 medical schools I applied to, only the University of Miami gave me a chance. I graduated with honors, Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society in '62 and did my medical specialty training primarily at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. So I made it to Harvard, ass backwards.

I am board certified in Pathology and Internal Medicine, practicing pathology until I retired in the '90s. I served as Director of Pathology and Laboratories at Akron City Hospital, a major teaching institution for Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine where I was appointed Professor of Pathology and was voted "Lecturer of the Year" two consecutive years by medical students. I directed the laboratory at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

My liberal arts exposure was meager, so in retirement I enrolled in a junior college to pursue the classics. I fell in love with writing, so I write fulltime. A sequel to A Stranger in the Barrio, about a ghetto boy in medical school, will be published later this year as well as a medical novel.

So there you have it. I live in Naples, Florida, and you might think it's a story of "rags to riches," and maybe it is, but the barrio I left in Tampa will always be home. It's a black ghetto now, but I still plan to be entombed at the Italian Club Cemetery next door to "colored town" where the story of A Stranger in the Barrio took place.

Why did I write A Stranger in the Barrio? Because it was an untold story.

You ask what do I read? Well, at my age, the choice is to read or write, so I write. Occasionally I read Hemingway, Hesse, Orwell, Fitzgerald or Toni Morrison. I enjoy Gabriel Marquez, another Nobel Prize winner.

Who's my favorite writer of all time? That's easy "William Shakespeare." His work is about language, and each time I read it, it's virgin.

In many ways writing is like learning medicine. It takes time and consuming commitment. It's not merely storytelling, but telling it with the right words at the right place, in the right sequence, and then revision again and again until you can't stand to read or write another line. Hemingway was right when he said, "It's about that one true sentence."