In 1969, aged 20, Nick Tosches moved to New York and got a job doing paste-up for the Lovable Underwear company. At the same time he started writing for Fusion magazine, a remarkable Boston rock mag that also included Lou Reed and Jonathan Richman amongst its contributors. He started writing pieces for Rolling Stone and "one day in January 1972 I just went out to lunch and decided to be a writer full-time. And that's what I've been doing ever since"
His career has moved form journalism to non-fiction books to, at last, a novel. Cut Numbers, published nearly twenty years after The Godfather, deals with the end of Italian-America as a closed community, the end of the Mafia years maybe. Little Italy is no longer what it was, the numbers racket has been taken over by the Government and called Lotto, new waves of immigrants are leaner and meaner, and for Louie Brunellesches, at the age of 35, getting ahead means Wall St and and an uptown girl named Donna Lou. I asked Nick Tosches whether he intended the story to have a general resonance for Italian-Americans, "I hope it does. A lot of people have misconstrued it as simply a thriller, but to me it's the slow parts that are important. The background to the story - the whole thing about the numbers racket and all - I'd never read anything that sort of handled that well. What things I did read seemed to be on the fantasy level, say the Godfather, raher than the way I'd known it to operate all my life which is basically on a street level with characters who were not necessarily the smartest people in the world. Or the most romantic or the best dressed."
Cut Numbers has now been bought for the movies and, just as the book provides a contrast to the Godfather image of the Mafia, so should the film. The director is set to be the maverick horror auteur George Romero, who Tosches thinks could be he right man to keep intact the combination of downbeat mood with a hard edge. Though Tosches accepts that realism ay not be the way to blockbuster success; "One interesting thing about Cut Numbers, translating it to the screen everybody says the amounts of money aren't large enough. People who go to the movies want to hear about things in the millions, even though its not their money. I had actual amounts, 50,000 dollars, 100,000, but people like to dream big. So I guess to a certain extent the fantasy will always be more popular than the fact of things."
Meanwhile he's busy on a couple of other projects. One has been in the pipeline for years and should mark Tosches' last foray into non-fiction, a biography of Dean Martin, Italian -American icon and enigma; "The question at the heart of it will be who is this guy and why am I interested in him? It will also deal with the nature of showbiz, the recording industry, the movie industry and connections between organised crime and those industries. Also AMerican culture in general. He's one of the few entertainers who's had an interesting life. Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin were the only two entertainers I ever really wanted to write about."
Also on the go is a second novel: "It's called Scratch and it's the story of a rather dull, rather unsympathetic, mediocre accountant who somehow becomes interesting in the course of his own downfall amd demise. The background of the book is counterfeiting and pornography; everything takes place against those two worlds. This mild inconsequential accountant gets involved in things far greater than he is. No one knows what's at the centre till the final hand is dealt, no one knows what's real or what isn't, so the counterfeiting thing goes right through it. The pornography is just a sideline because that's the counterfeiter's legitimate activity. And, uh, a little sex never hurt a book. And that's that one. It has either the promise or the danger of being far darker than Cut Numbers but we'll see..."
We get to talking about other writers a little, and it emerges that Tosches has a somewhat unusual set of influences for a man with a lowlife fascination; "Most of what I have read and continue to read predates this century. I'm pretty much back in antiquity, I read the classics and ancient history, mediaeval history, and dabble in modern things. Most of the contemporary fiction I read doesn't grab me enough to want to consume very much. In terms of influence, most of them are back in antiquity. I don't know if that makes any sense considering the way I write. I like Thucydides, Homer, Pindar, Herodotus, Hesiod... I've always enjoyed seeing who said what first, and if the same thing has been said in 400bc and in 1964, why bother with 1964. Very rarely does a contemporary writer strike me as doing something new; that's what struck me years ago about George V.Higgins - to me that seemed so new and so good. I still don't think his importance as a writer is acknowledged."
So, turning it back round on him, I wonder why such a classical kind of guy should write about such a bunch of low-rent hoodlums: "It's like Faulkner said, you write about what you know best in settings you know best. That's pretty much the only way to go about it. You can call it crime fiction but basically, no matter if they are a priest or whatever, everybody has the same criminal elements in them. It doesn't interest people to read something they don't intuit to be part of themselves, that's why people don't really read the Lives Of The Saints."
Nick Tosches suggests a third round of cappuccinos at this point and, fearing a total caffeine overload, I wonder if it would be possible to get a beer some place instead. He pauses briefly and says sure, there's a place we could go. We head back over towards his apartment. On the way Tosches dives into a newsstand to put some money on a Lotto number. Lotto is the scheme New York State came up with to finally kill the numbers racket; basically just a legalised version. "Even though gambling is illegal, New York State is now New York's biggest bookmaker, if you can figure that out", comments Tosches.
@mrjyn
November 7, 2010
Tosches Jerry Lee Pussy via Dogmeat Whole Lotta CSE
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