Thick as Thieves Steve Geng Books Review

"When they asked me why I lied, I lied," confesses Steve Geng, small-time crook, sometime actor, drug addict and drunk. (Or is he lying and was he, in fact, telling the truth?) At the time, Geng was living at the Daytop Village rehab facility on Staten Island, wearing a "Pinocchio nose" and a can labeled "A Can of Lies" to remind him of his predilection. You've gotta love the literalness of recovery programs.

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THICK AS THIEVES A Brother, a Sister - a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives.

By Steve Geng.

292 pp. Henry Holt & Company. .

Related First Chapter: ‘Thick as Thieves' (May 6, 2007)

For anyone who still hasn't reached personal closure with James "I am an Alcoholic and I am a Drug Addict and I am a Criminal" Frey and his self-aggrandizement, Geng's memoir, "Thick as Thieves," is here as a reminder: addicts lie as often as they need a fix. What was so disturbing about the Frey debacle was not his deceit, but that the entire world, and Oprah Winfrey, were so surprised at his mendacity. I bet no friends of Bill's were surprised.

Geng's memoir, his first book, is a welcome antidote to Freysian cynicism and does much to restore integrity to the genre of the addict memoir as presented in classics by William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson and Jerry Stahl - all true tales, no doubt. Geng's story is tamer, to be sure, but he has earned his misery honestly: arriving in his mid-60s having been arrested some 30 times; spending, cumulatively, years in jail, less time in rehab; going head to head with a claw hammer; and being set on fire by a girlfriend.

Geng's story carries no dedication, but the book is clearly an elegy - and a confession - for his sister, Veronica Geng, the brilliant New Yorker writer and editor who died in 1997 at the age of 56. This memoir could have been called "Steve Loves Ron." "Ron," two years older than Steve, was the hero of his life. She was a fragile, sad, mercurial, difficult creature, but "her laugh was the clearest manifestation of love, and I learned early how to get it."

At their childhood home in Philadelphia, they are sitting one day at the breakfast table with bowls of steaming oatmeal in front of them. After their mother, Rosina, leaves the room, Ron suddenly rubs her hands in her hair and whispers: "Hey, Stevie. Shampoo!" "I was no dummy," Geng writes. "I scooped up handfuls of porridge and plopped them on my head."

The glimpses of young Veronica are one of the chief delights of Geng's story. Ron was a wit from the start, defending herself against her father, Charlie, a career Army officer whose inane, often drunken remarks - his "kiddin' around" - "would reduce Ron to tears." When she proudly displays her Easter shoes, her father comments, "Christ, you could land a plane on those skis." The torture called teasing is an underreported form of insidious soul murder for many earnest little girls. To see just how far Ron took revenge, read her collection "Love Trouble," a compendium of such militant satire and wicked irony that it will disinhibit your serotonin without a prescription.

When Steve asks his big sister if they are ever going to grow up "like Mom and Daddy," Ron replies: "Like Daddy? Jeez, I hope not." She goes on to explain that "what Daddy did is more like ... photosynthesis."

"Charlie," Rosina says one day to her husband, "did you see this beautiful new vacuum cleaner, the Hoover?"

"The Hoover?" he responds. "We got Commies taking over the railroads and you're telling me about a goddamned vacuum cleaner?"

"We should definitely get the vacuum," Ron adds, "before Commies take over the Hoover." Charlie remained unimpressed with his daughter's talent and intelligence her whole life. He was that kind of dad.

Young Steve engages in cruder forms of subversion, like pulling his mother aside one day and pointing to one of his frequent adolescent erections, saying: "Hey, Mom. What's this all about?" Ron gets A's, Steve gets D's and F's. He has his first beer at the age of 8, and likes it plenty. His goal is simple: "Get out of the house." Before long he is stealing and setting fires just for "the exquisite thrill of getting away with it." Soon Charlie is making his "On the Waterfront" proclamation: "That kid's a bum and he's always gonna be a bum!" That kind of dad.

"Although resentment isn't quite the same thing as having a direction in life," Geng writes in his lucid prose, "it revved me up and gave me some torque." He is now ready for a life of sex, crime, drugs and rock 'n' roll. His role models: "the hipster, the hophead and the hustler." The locales change as Geng's capers proceed. In Paris he enjoys the whores of Rue Pigalle: "She exuded a certain confidence now that I was a repeat customer. It was as close as I'd come at that point to having my own girlfriend."

Back in the States, Geng is soon on the lam in San Francisco for hot-wiring and crashing a car with a friend while high on methedrine. After a chase by the cops, who open fire, he is arrested and spends a few months in San Bruno County Jail. Out of prison he repairs to his parents' house in Clearwater, Fla., for a little R & R, and works at Kentucky Fried Chicken. When he's saved enough money, he heads to New York to resume his pursuit of "serious drugs." He has his first taste of heroin and "finally found what I was looking for ... better than sex." Did I mention that Chet Baker is one of Geng's idols?

Now that he's found his métier, he develops his skills in "boosting" to support his habit. He becomes famous as "Record Steve," stealing records under his coat, as many as 20 to 30 at a time, and selling them out of shopping bags on Eighth Street. His career trajectory is regularly interrupted by jail time - three months on Rikers Island, 30 days on Hart Island, almost a year in Pinellas County Jail, nine months in Nassau County Jail. Eat your heart out, James Frey.

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Toni Bentley, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet, is the author, most recently, of "The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir."