Excerpt from Con/Artist by Tony Tetro, Giampiero Ambrosi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

January 3, 1969, I shoveled my beat-up Austin-Healey 3000 out from under a mountain of snow, kissed my wife and baby girl, and took off for Pomona, where my grandmother lived in a small but well-kept apartment. Before, I had been scared about becoming a father, about being able to earn a living, and about making something of myself; now I only felt excitement at the beginning of a journey and a grand sense of adventure.

An Austin-Healey is not a car you drive three thousand miles across the country. By the time I hit the Will Rogers Turnpike in Miami, Oklahoma, I had lost my right front wheel—the spokes ping-pinging for the last fifty miles until the wobble became too much to control. Nobody in Oklahoma had a replacement, so I had to wait while a local junkyard managed to get one from across the state line. It cost me $200 plus three nights in a motel, and $10 from pumping quarters into the pay TV. My stake was now down to $100, but my enthusiasm was not diminished, and as I pointed the car west toward Las Vegas, I was flush with the certainty that I would win all my money back at the blackjack tables and live to fight another day. After playing for about an hour, I was calling Fulton to see if they could wire me enough gas money to reach LA.

In the morning, I retrieved $75 from Western Union and hit the road. Finally, January 15, 1969, I rolled into the driveway of my grandmother's modest apartment, at night, in a torrential downpour. I had $35 in my pocket and a useless car with a fried clutch and sandblasted exterior. I stayed with my grandmother and tried to find a job while, for a solid month, cold rain fell outside the window. It was the kind of storm you see only every hundred years. Houses were sliding off of hillsides and cars were being swept away by rivers of mud and sand. Everywhere we went was soaking wet and freezing cold. It was like Fulton—only with palm trees.

My oldest brother, Jim—who lived nearby in Claremont—got me a job working with him as a painter. We were contracted by a big company, and after the rain finally let up, we started working from morning until night applying Tex-Cote to modest homes all around Southern California in places like Bell Gardens, Duarte, Downey, La Habra, and Cypress. At night we'd go to bars, and I was surprised to learn that California had country-western places where cowboys danced the two-step.

Soon, I had moved into an apartment with a roommate also from Fulton and scraped together a few dollars to send back home to my wife and daughter. In one of my first expensive toll calls to Marguerite, I complained about the nonstop rain and told her that I would bring her out as soon as I could.

Then my brother and I moved in together. He suggested we live at the beach, but I had stars in my eyes and insisted we should be in Hollywood, which to me meant glamour, excitement, and style. We moved into a high-rise called the Hollywood Mt. Cahuenga Apartments and became close friends with our property manager, Bill, the first openly gay man I had ever met. In Fulton, they did not exist. He would have dinner with us, enjoying my brother's home cooking and our small-town, real-people personalities.

When we weren't working, we would drive around stopping in at dive bars, record stores, and burger stands. It was only a few months before the Manson murders, and there was a strange vibe in the air with freaks and hippies and crowds hanging around the seedy Sunset Strip.

We were like nomads then, chasing work wherever we could find it. One day we got a call to Tex-Cote a big mansion in Fresno, five hours away, up the Central Valley. It was going to be at least a month of work and we were told that Fresno was a nice place that would have plenty of other jobs when we were done. We brought Bill to work with us, and we all went to live in a motel for a couple of weeks. I liked Fresno then, but I missed my family and focused on putting money together so that I could bring them out.

Excerpted from Con/Artist by Tony Tetro and Giampiero Ambrosi. Copyright © 2022 by Tony Tetro and Giampiero Ambrosi. Excerpted by permission of Hachette Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.