Montiel, Dito 1970(?)-

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MONTIEL, Dito 1970(?)-

PERSONAL: Born c. 1970.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710.

CAREER: Author and director. Worked as a male model and as the lead singer of the underground punk band Gutterboy.

WRITINGS:

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: A Memoir, Thunder Mouth Press (Berkeley, CA), 2003.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints was adapted by the author into a feature film of the same name, directed by the author and released by Xingu Films, c. 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Dito Montiel grew up in the tough Queens neighborhood of Astoria in the 1970s and 1980s. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: A Memoir is the author's account of his turbulent youth and later days in New York, where sex, drugs, and rock & roll ruled his life as a successful model for Calvin Klein and lead singer for a punk bank. The son of a Nicaraguan immigrant and Irish mother, Montiel describes in his book how he and his young cohorts would roam the streets of Astoria getting into the kind of trouble that would keep any parent up late worrying. He is chased by the local Mafia when he urinates in the window of their hangout, takes psychedelic drugs, steals the poor box from the local church, and gets into gang fights. When he is fourteen, he sees a good friend beat another boy to death with a baseball bat. The friend ends up serving six years in prison.

Eventually Montiel gravitates to the bright lights of New York and ends up as a successful model for Calvin Klein and others. In addition, his band, Gutterboy, garners a $1 million record deal. Nevertheless, success did not harness Montiel's wild ways, and he writes about his nights of debauchery with women and drugs. But Montiel describes the "Saints" in his life, including his mother and father, poet Allen Ginsberg, and his loyal friends.

A Kirkus Reviews contributor found that A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints became "tedious" and called it "a scattershot, unmulled memoir—startling in its casual violence and voracious intoxication—from a New York City badboy who doesn't seem terribly concerned about the trouble he left in his wake." A reviewer writing in Publishers Weekly called the memoir "rambling" but also said, "Montiel tells his entertaining, sad tales with a combination of affection, glee and nostalgia."