was cement sidewalks, subways, and switchblades. But somehow I still found a way to be a country boy, so even in the city I could be Mother Nature’s son—but with attitude.
Kids would ask me, “Where’d you go?” I’d tell them, “Sunapee!” Sunapee was a great mysterious Indian name. It was like coming from a different planet. When I got back to the city I would invent fantastic adventures for myself: escaping from a grizzly bear, attacked by Indians. “You’ve got a .22?” “You what?” And then I started the bullshit: “I got bit by a rattlesnake . . . ,” showing them a scar I got falling into the fireplace that summer. It was kind of like believing your own lie; you tell a lie and it grows. “The thing came at me, it was drooling, it had blood on its fangs from the camper it’d recently killed.” “You’re kidding me?” “No, seriously, it was rabid, but I nailed it right between the eyes with my .22.” Well, I didn’t want to say I was mowing lawns and taking garbage to the dump. That didn’t cut it with the girls, or the guys who wanted to beat you up if you didn’t represent a Bronx-type attitude. I wanted to talk about how I killed a grizzly with my bare hands—I was Huck Finn from Hell’s Kitchen. City people have bizarre ideas about the country anyway, so I could make up anything I liked and they’d believe me. Remember, this was 1956. And Ward Cleaver actually had a son, not a wife, named . . . Beaver.
I was about nine when we moved from the Bronx to Yonkers. I hated being called Steve. I was known as Little Stevie to my family and that’s cool because that’s my family. But being called Steve by anyone other than my family sucked. Getting moved from the Bronx to a place called Yonkers (a name almost as bad as Steve) took a little adjusting to. It was too white and Republican for a skinny-ass punk from the Bronx. My best friend’s name was Ignacio and he told me to use my middle name, which is Victor, a-lika my poppa! This suggestion, coming from a kid whose name sounds like an Italian sausage, was perfect. So for a year everyone called me Victor and that’s just how long that lasted.
At twelve, my first band . . . me, Ignacio, and Dennis Dunn. (Ernie Tallarico)
Moving from the Bronx to Yonkers was okay because we lived in a private house with a huge backyard and woods everywhere. There was a lake used as a reservoir two blocks from my house, where my friends and I fished our teenage years off. It was filled with frogs, salmon, perch, and every other kind of fish. There were skunks, snakes, rabbits, and deer in my backyard. There was so much wildlife in those woods that we all started trapping animals, skinning them, and selling their fur for pocket money, a kind of backwoods hobby I learned from the 4-H friends I grew up with in New Hampshire. When I was fifteen I found a toy store that sold wading pools for toddlers in the shape of a boat. I bought one and humped it down to the lake, paddled out and picked up all the lures that were caught in the weeds. I wound up selling them to the same people who had lost them to begin with. I was a reservoir dog before it was a movie.
At fourteen I found this pamphlet in the back of Boy’s Life or some other wildlife magazine, with an ad for Thompson’s Wild Animal Farm in Florida. You could buy anything from a panther to a cobra to a tarantula to a raccoon. A baby raccoon? Wow, I gotta have one! I sent away and it arrived in a wooden crate looking up at me with eyes like a Keane painting or a Japanese anime schoolgirl. I gave him a bath, threw him over my shoulder, and headed down to the lake. It was there that he taught me how to fish all over again. I named him Bandit because when you turned your back he would either pick your pockets or steal all the food out of the refrigerator. After a year of his ripping the house apart, I realized that a wild animal kept in the house is not the same as having a domestic animal as a pet, so I had to keep him in the backyard. You’ve got to just feed them and let them be wild. If you take them in, they adopt your personality—and at age sixteen, I was full of piss ’n’ vinegar, which is not what you want a wild animal to be. He ripped down every curtain my mom put up in the house. I loved Bandit and he changed my mind about killing animals. I wound up giving him away to a farmer in Maine where he grew to a ripe old age, huge and fat. Eventually chewing his way to freedom, he bit through an electric wire and burned down the barn. You can still see his face in Maine’s Most Wanted. Way to go, Bandit!
Back in the Bronx, the kids would assemble in the courtyard every morning at good ’ol P.S. 81. “All right, class, line up!” at 8:15 A.M. sharp. One morning when I was in third grade, there was a girl in the courtyard and I must have grabbed a broken lightbulb and chased her around—like any smart (ass) little boy looking for affection would do. This was my way of proving that there was more to adolescent courtship than snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.
Her mother went to the principal’s office. “If Steven Tallarico’s not thrown out of this school, I’m taking my daughter out! He chased my daughter with a LETHAL WEAPON (blah blah blah). He’s an animal!” I was already Peck’s Bad Boy, and this didn’t help. They brought my mom in. They wanted to send me to a school for wayward lads and lassies, who are known today as ADHD kids.
“What? Are you kidding?” my mother said to the principal. My mom was soooo for me. “You know what? I’m takin’ him out of this school. Fuck you!” She didn’t say that, but her EYES did. And she DID take me out. I moved on to the Hoffmann School, which was a private school in Riverdale hidden in the woods, oddly enough, by Carly Simon’s house. Unbeknownst to me, Carly also lived nearby in Riverdale. Thirty years later, when we did a concert toether on Martha’s Vineyard, she told me that she also went to the Hoffmann School.
I was excited about the Hoffmann School, but I get to the place and find out it’s full of “spaycial kids.” Kids that go “Fuck YOU!” in the middle of class, who have some Tourette-type syndrome and scream their lungs out. A little wilder than public school, I would say: kids sniffing the glue during art class and writing graffiti in the hallways . . . kids eating finger paint and everyone shooting spitballs with rubber bands at each other. WOW, my kind of place!
These were kids like me, hyper, acting-out kids—real brats! Not that I was that exactly. I just had too much Italian in me, the kind of Italian who, you know, is loud, opinionated, in-your-face, with no brakes. But I knew that if I totally let go, there was going to be fucking cause and effect and it would end with a ruler across my knuckles. Still, I’d do anything I could think of. I remember once combing my hair in the lunchroom with a fork! That time I got off easy; setting a fire in a trash can was a different story.
So that was the Bronx, still somewhat wild. On my way to the Hoffmann School I cut through a field, jumping over a stone wall. Over the river and through the woods. There was a cherry tree that was so thick and fat, the size of an elm tree, and when it bloomed it was like an explosion of pink and white petals, like a snowstorm. In summer it was loaded with cherries.
I’d go around behind the apartment buildings looking for stuff to get into. I found this big, beautiful pile of dirt, which later I realized was landfill from all the apartment buildings in that area. A ten-story mountain of dirt you had to climb as if you were scaling Mount Everest. A kid’s dream! To me that pile of dirt was a mountain—Mount Tallarico. “Let’s go climb the mountain,” I’d tell my friends. When you got to the top of it there was a whole acre of land with weeds and saplings—and praying mantis nests and all sorts of things that no one could get to. Of course I had to bring a praying mantis nest home. It looked like something from between my legs—all round, tight, wrinkly, and kinda figlike. I hid it in my top drawer because I thought it was so cool. I woke up two weeks later and my room was full of little baby praying mantises—thousands of them! They’d just infested the place, all over our bunk beds, blankets, pillows, on the walls, and . . . “Mom!”
We opened the windows, ran out, and closed the door. Needless to say, I slept on the living room couch for almost a week. When we finally went back in they were all gone.
On the top of that mountain was a small tunnel that I’d seen but never explored. One day I crawled in a few feet, but it was dark and musty so I didn’t go too far. The older I got, the farther I’d go. Finally one day I was crawling back in there and I said to my friend, “Hold my feet!” Because as a kid all you’ve got in your mind is that it’s the rabbit hole, which I didn’t want to know anything about at that age.