Requiem for a Dream

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This book is dedicated, with love, to Bobby, who has found the only pound of pure—Faith in a Loving God

Except the LORD build the house,

they labor in vain that build it…

Psalm 127:1

Trust in the LORD with all thine

heart; and lean not unto thine

own understanding.

In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

Proverbs 3:5,6

When I was in high school, I thought you had to be dead to be a novelist—dead, and from somewhere else: England, the Midwest, France.

One of the more profound, if peripheral, epiphanies hitting me upon reading Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., was that my workingclass Bronx world was valid material for Art; that the voices, the streets, the gestures that I knew so well were as human, as precious, and as honorable as any found through the centuries and civilizations of literature.

Which is to say that I set down Last Exit to Brooklyn with the terrifying realization that if I had the will and the talent to go with the eye and ear, I could grow up to be a writer.

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