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I think to better understand Vito Vaselini you would have to know something about his father, Vinnie Vaselini.

Vinnie Vaselini was born and grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a coupla towns over from Lowell. Vinnie's whole life was controlled by sexual satisfaction -- he lived for porno. From his earliest days, he could be found walking along the river, looking for discarded porno magazines. When he was a teenager he used to sneak into the rest area on 110 in Methuen to watch and listen to the couples going at it. He could never control himself and would always be masturbating. Sometimes the people in the car would hear him masturbating, and they would come out and the guy would chase him and kick the shit out of him. His pants would be down -- of course, he'd run a couple of feet before he'd fall. It was impossible to masturbate with his fly down -- he couldn't get a good enough grip.

After years of being too daring, and getting the shit kicked out of him a half a dozen times, Vinnie became a tough fuck. He got a job at a gas station called West Gate Gulf in Haverhill that had a peep-out. (A peep-out is some method to look inside a ladies' bathroom without them knowing.) This one was located between the stall and the sink in an air vent in the ceiling. Wes, the owner, found it years before. It had an old one-gallon oil can on top of the grate so you couldn't look in. Word got around that there was a peep-out in this gas station. That's why Vinnie got the job there. It would be one of the few legitimate jobs he held in his whole life.

The hottest time at the peep-out was when women were changing their bathing suits after coming back from Salisbury beach. Although Vinnie didn't make much money, he'd be slipping the other attendant that was on duty a couple of bucks so he could go an peep the women out.

Now let's get to Vinnie's home life with Vito.

Vinnie was a sexual predator on himself. He could not control his masturbation. He would sometimes masturbate seven times in one day. Whenever he got aroused from a young woman, or sometimes an older woman, or pornography, or even a fantasy popping into his head, he had to masturbate. If he wasn't home, or someplace safe that he knew, he would have to go in a bathroom in some public building. Those were the hard times. He'd be into it, trying to be quiet, and not obvious, and someone would come in, and wash their hands, or worse yet, they would want to use the stall. Any sudden noise would throw him off. If he couldn't finish, it would drive him insane. Sometimes he would have to run in the woods. It was like being Superman. One minute you're mild-mannered, thinking about life -- the next minute you got this sexual urge that had to be satisfied.

Vinnie was a loner all his life. He had been with a number of prostitutes, a couple one-night stands with women he would pick up at a bar called the Tangerine Lounge. But these were bar-sluts -- drunk, some were over forty, but most were over fifty, and they always made him feel like they were doing him a favor. And in a way, they were.

He had a sister named Myrtle who was twenty-six. She worked hard all her life in the shoe shops in Haverhill. Remember, this is going back to the early 1950's. Myrtle got raped and had a baby. His name was Vito. He was five years old when his mother died, and he went to live with his uncle, Vinnie, where he would remain until he moved out on his own approximately ten years later.

Now we're getting a clear picture of Vito's early childhood with his uncle, Vinnie. Only thing is, he never called him "Uncle Vinnie" because he was always told that Vinnie was his father, not his uncle. Around Lawrence, in Methuen, it became a rumor that he had slept with his own sister. He let it grow and let people believe. And although he was a slime-bag, and a chronic masturbator--today you would call it sex addiction--he was preserving the honor of his sister being raped. But it was mostly to make people not think that the only women he could get were drunken women over forty or fifty, or prostitutes.

Vinnie and Vito lived in an apartment in Lawrence above a small variety store named Lafferty's. It was a two-room apartment -- well three, if you include the bathroom. Vinnie was set up in the bedroom. He collected pornography and he wasn't ashamed of it. He would have long counters with issues of his favorite mags, which he bought under the table.

When Myrtle died and Vito moved in with Vinnie, he had a reach a somewhat higher level responsibility. So he started collecting metal and things to sell at the junkyard: copper, aluminum, five-cent coke bottles. He would spend his mornings walking the alleyways of Essex Street, to forge out a living for his son. Some days he would make five dollars, some days he'd make two dollars. On a good day he'd make ten, and him and Vito would have pizza that night. He was Italian, well, at least half, and damn proud of it.

Vinnie finally got a job at the city dump where he would work for the rest of his life, which would only be another ten years. He worked for a time in the incinerator room, but unfortunately he got demoted and had to work in the yard. It happened that the section he was in charge of was full of toxic waste, which he eventually would die from. Then they gave him the job of burning the plastic, and he'd look at that flame, so fascinated with the fire and the melting of the plastic that the fumes didn't even affect him, apparently, until he died of black lung.

Although he made steady pay, Vinnie spent it all on pornography. Now he had an 8mm movie camera, and he used to try to impress some of other guys from the dump who liked to drink beer and watch porno by inviting them over to his pad. He would have to masturbate before they came over so he could at least control himself for an hour while watching the films.

Little Vito grew up in this atmosphere, and wanted it, and hated it at the same time. He saw what this impulse was doing to his father. His father always smoked cigarettes, which made him cough even worse. I'm sure that contributed to his black lung disease. When Vito started to live with Vinnie, he was five and starting elementary school. Vinnie still hadn't gotten his dream job at the city dump, so they were struggling for a couple of years yet. Vinnie was allowed to rummage through the trash, and his apartment was filled with broken things that would never be fixed. Empty dreams, and the only thing that Vinnie would pass on to Vito when he died.

For those first two years, Vito never had nice clothes to wear to school. His father would make him a bologna sandwich or two. Most of the time he have a glass of water with his sandwiches. When his father had money, he'd have milk. When he was seven, almost eight, his father got that steady job, and he no longer had to crawl into Salvation Army boxes to find his clothes. His father took him to the Salvation Army store to buy the clothes. They weren't the greatest -- sometimes he'd have to get shoes that didn't fit, that were maybe a little small. It was an upper gutter existence. To be in the gutter is one thing, but when you reach your hand up on the curb and start to lift yourself up, anything could happen.

Some people, they would develop pride. But Vito developed arrogance instead. The world owed him something and he was going to get it. He never had any friends in school. He never had the opportunity to take a bath at home, cause his uncle, or rather, his father, was always in the bathroom masturbating. At least he had the dignity to take it out of his bedroom.

The last five years of his life, Vinnie became a loner. The porno came out from under the counter, and he became a connoisseur like you wouldn't believe. He got into foreign porn, nudist magazines. He would spend one quarter of his paycheck on his rent, $25, half on porno, $50, and the other $25 for food and Vito.

Vito didn't know anything else. He thought this must be the way everybody lived. But he knew deep down inside that wasn't true, because the other kids in school seemed to have possibilities, and friends, and families who cared about them. The neighborhood his father and him lived in was a den of poverty, porno, prostitution, and a couple of pizza parlors. Oh yeah, and a small variety store on the corner.

When Vito was ten years old, he started smoking pot. He started drinking like the old man, but he didn't like the way he would lose control. He had an anger and a desperation in life. A need to be creative. A need to be somebody, more than the son of a dump-picker.

When Vito was almost fifteen, he and his father started to argue a lot. Vito wanted his independence. The old man would say, "Where the fuck you gonna go? You don't do nothin', you don't know nothin', you ain't nothin', you ain't gonna be anything."

His father would only say this when he was drunk and in a bad mood. Or having a porno shortage. That was the main thing that made him snap. It would happen once or twice a month, usually on a Friday after he'd get paid and be itching to buy new porn. His fascination became an obsession.

This instance was one of the worst his father ever had. He was over six days since his father had a new porno fix. He was into color porno 8mm now. His porno obsession had driven him, as it does with some people, into an addictive situation: to never be satisfied, and always be looking for new material, you might call it virgin material, because they have never seen it before. Vinnie had been promised a film, a Swedish lesbian film, with four lesbians, in color, doing everything. He had never seen anything like this in his life, on film. He had seen two women and one man, and the two women go at it a little bit. But never all women. His dream fantasy would come true. He would be able to pretend to be any one of the participants in the film, and as it would turn out, this image would become embedded in his brain up until the moment he died.

After that fight, Vito left the house, and went to sleep in a Salvation Army box. He knew the ones that had clothes in them and were warm. It was winter time. He didn't have a friend's house to go to. Once in his life he had one person that wanted to be his friend, but Vito didn't want to take a chance. He wanted to make it one his own. Not pride, arrogance.

He slept in that Salvation Army box for a week. The longest he had been out of the house before was two days. By this time, he didn't bother going to school. He lived out of trash cans. He went in restaurants and tried to look inconspicuous -- and for him, that was virtually impossible -- and ate the food left on people's plates. He could've had a job as a dishwasher at a small diner on the other side of town, Lawson's Diner, where he would eat food at night when it was late. The waitress knew he was hard-up after the second night, and let him eat the table scraps. The owner, a good Italian man named Angelo, offered him a job as a dishwasher, but his pride, or rather his arrogance, told Vito that this was beneath him. The world would see him as a prominent figure. He may have been told he was a nothing, but at least he was going to be his own nothing.

On the seventh day after leaving home, he decided to go home and see if his father was still pissed off. When he got home, he walked up the stairs to the two-room apartment, three if you count the bathroom. He was stopped by the landlady across the hall, a Polish lady, who said, "Vito, where you been?" "What do you care?" said Vito. "Didn't you hear what happened to your father?" Vito said, "No, what happened?" Suddenly panic erupted in Vito. He had that queasy feeling in his stomach. "They took your father to the hospital three days ago. He's very sick -- they say he's gonna die."

Vito walked into the apartment. He felt empty. He clenched his fist, wondering what he would do now. The living room was full of all the junk his father had collected, hanging on the walls, stacked up in the corners, lying around everywhere. He walked into his father's bedroom and saw it empty of all his pornographic things -- there was only his father's bed, and a couple of Playboys.

He walked out the apartment door, he knew he had to go see his father, he didn't want to, but he felt he had to. The landlady told him when he came out, that his father's friends at the city dump had come by after his father went to the hospital and taken his pornography.

Vito goes to Lawrence General Hospital. He has never been in a hospital before, and feels even more awkward than he does in life. He doesn't even know who to ask. He walks in an asks a lady in the gift shop where his father is. She tells him to go to the desk. He finds out his father is in the ICU on the fifth floor. He goes there, goes to the nursing station, and asks for his father, room 514.

The nurse asks Vito who he is, and he says, "I'm his kid." Now he is flooded with emotion. The nurse tells him what condition his father is in, it's critical, he has lung cancer in his extemely advanced stages. His father had been looking thin lately, but Vito thought he wasn't eating enough, and masturbating too much, if there was such a thing.

Vito asks if he can see him. The nurse says yes and takes him to the room. His father is lying in bed barely conscious. Vito walks to the bed, and looks at his father's face.

His father's eyes open, and he says, "Vito, I'm glad you came, son. I've got somethin' I gotta tell you. I'm real sick, dead sick. Don't bother coming back to see me again, 'cause I'm not gonna be here, I'm probably gonna be dead. My only regret is, I'm too weak to masturbate one more time.

"But Vito, I got somethin' else I gotta tell you. I ain't your father. I'm your uncle."

Vito says, "Am I a child of incest?"

His uncle says, "No, and don't let anybody ever tell you that you are. Your mother got raped and had you, and then she died. But I want you to know somethin'. I've been calling you a nothing all your life. That's because I didn't want you to become a nothing, like me. You can be something in life, Vito. I don't know what, but you've got some crazy impulses flashing around in your brain, and you might as well use them."

For the first time in Vito's life, he started to cry. Just a little. He said to his uncle, "You'll always be my old man."

Vinnie looked at his son one last time and said, "Vito, get out that door, get out of this town, make something of yourself, and don't look back."

Vito starts to leave, but his father stops him and says two more things. "I had to sell all my porno to the guys at the dump to pay some gambling debts. You never knew about my gambling, Vito, and I hoped you never would. So take my advice, and don't gamble. And the other thing -- you're the sole heir to all my belongings, Vito, all that good stuff I collected all my life. It's yours."

Vito walked out that door at that moment, because he knew it was something that he had to do. He went back to the apartment where his father had lived, took his clothes and his few belongings -- a baseball glove he would someday use -- his father found it at the dump and gave it to him when he was eight years old. He takes one last look at the living room, deciding if there is anything else of his father's he should take -- or rather, his uncle's. He saw a dirty black comb that his father had always prized. It was the first good thing he found at the dump, years before. Vito put it in his pocket, and left that apartment and left Lawrence forever. He migrated to Lowell and got a job at the porno shop, Tower News. A new beginning for Vito.

He bought the Lawrence Tribune for the next week, looking for his father's obituary. He thought maybe they wouldn't even bother to put it in. But on the eighth day, he saw it. It read: "Vinnie Vaselini. Died at Lawrence General Hospital at 2:45 a.m., of cardiac arrest. He was a city worker, employed at the city dump. He is survived by a son, Vito."