Hey Now, What Now

"I did know that I could make a living; I didn’t know if I could continue to live. There was too much bullshit to everything, everyone, every place that I knew. There was no expert judgment on anything, at least anything that I cared about." Thus begins the adventures and misadventures of the young Anthony Broy as he scrapes, fights, loves, and screws his way through adulthood, from an adolescence spent under the thumb of his violent stepfather among the Ukrainian communities of Long Island and Brooklyn to his reinventions of himself as Orthodox priest, sailor, small-time Indiana farmer, pizza shop owner, and eventual Wall Street mogul. Diagnosed after a bad acid trip with “compulsive personality disorder” by Navy doctors in “Nuts” and later in life, succumbing to another breakdown after his wife’s death in “Silver Hills,” Broy’s portrayals are brutally candid, touching, often hilarious and always outrageous. Like Charles Bukowski’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, Broy’s voice is that of an older man eager to tell all about sex, revenge, and quiet murders taking place from rural turkey farms to the soap factories of Depression-era Jersey City. Throughout these interconnected tales, he emphatically claims to confess “no bullshit,” leaving the delighted reader to wonder how much is fact, and how much fiction? Who’s the real Anthony Broy?