I HAD NEVER READ ANY OF THE BOOKS, BUT I GOT A KICK OUT of the old movies. Bela Lugosi was a hoot.

I read a biography of him once. The only thing I remember from it is his craving toward the end of his days for a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that he had longed for since leaving Hungary. I remember this because I’ve been craving a kind of oily peppery paprika bread that a few of the old Italian-Albanian women in my boyhood neighborhood made in their black cast-iron ovens. I’m pretty sure it was called zallia, or something like that. The recipe seems to have died with the last of them, as I haven’t been able to find it again in more than forty years of searching, and I’m beginning to feel that I never will. What they called tarallia, pretzel-shaped anise bread, I’ve found a lackluster echo of in taralli. And what was called—though the final vowels were never pronounced—culliaccia, the rich, buttery egg bread they made in glazed braided rings, I’ve found a more distant approximation of in what has been served to me as a dismal confection called Italian egg bread. But zallia remains a maddeningly tantalizing memory. When I read about the bread the Hungarian actor so longed for, I was sure it was pretty much the same thing; and in time all I retained from the story of his life was the mention of that bread.

In the pictures, they don’t eat. And the mere sight of garlic can bring about a seizure. They react worse than a WASP schoolgirl to it. It’s ridiculous, not only to a wop but probably to Hungarians and Romanians too. Italy isn’t the only place in Europe where they’re big on garlic soup.

And what is this malarkey about the light of day? Are they all supposed to be independently wealthy? No nine-to-five working stiffs? It’s like the nonsense about the cross. And wouldn’t a stake through the heart do in just about anybody? I mean, come on. Think about it. Not at all afraid of rats, mind you; but afraid of garlic, daylight, and crosses. Who came up with this stuff?

I really get a kick out of the fangs. Hell, between Sandrine and the next of the four witches’ Sabbaths, May Eve—yes, I’ve observed only pagan holy days, from Christmas and Easter to the four Sabbaths, for a long, long time—I had nine teeth pulled on a single day, and another had worked itself out of the gum on a day soon thereafter. As I had already lost a bunch of teeth before these ten, I was left practically toothless, with a loose, unsure contraption of plastic and wire to make do in my mouth.

How those guys on Bedford Street, on Sullivan Street, on Thompson Street shook their heads and laughed low and down at those Mafia pictures. A ban on dope dealing, mother love, a code of honor. Same thing. Garlic, light, crosses, and fangs.

It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Nowhere but in truth will you find the truth.