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"There's a corner of Italian background in me," Marta continues, "that was ready to be activated. The first day I laid eyes on Joey, it was like being with my father. Joey sensed it, and my family sensed it. After that we were with him almost every day. And if we didn't see him, he'd call up and ask where the hell we were. He called my boy Christopher 'Dynamite.' He called me 'Momma,' or sometimes 'the Big Job.' The people we introduced him to were the best people we know. It was very difficult for him to say thank you. He might hug you or smile. But he wouldn't say much. When we had his wedding at our house, we got the minister who married Tiny Tim—no judge would touch the marriage with a ten-foot pole. Joey said in the car afterward, 'Nobody ever gave me a day like that. I'll always be grateful.'
"He had an idea for a play, a comedy about prison life, like M*A*S*H was about war. We worked on it, and I began observing him, and the book came out of it. Joey absolutely wouldn't talk about his past. I hope that is understood. The book is only about the relationship between my family and his.
"Joey was a terribly sexy person. He always made you feel he would run away with you—if there weren't 1,000 other factors to consider. He talked about prisons a lot, too. He thought that the Attica uprising was inevitable, and that Rockefeller handled it right. 'The hacks [guards] had to get their thing off, too,' he said. They would have shot someone sooner or later.' "