James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano by Dan Bischoff Read Free Book Online Page B

“Frankly, I didn’t recognize his talent at the time. He seemed like just a regular Jersey guy.… He was like a lot of us, like I wanted to be a writer. You know, college freshmen in the middle of New Jersey, how the fuck you gonna get there?”
    Di Ionno recognized Gandolfini’s natural leadership, and that he was often up and down—ebullient, but occasionally moody, like any teenager. Selfish, undisciplined.
    But he also saw the beginnings of Gandolfini’s first adult crew, the group of guys who would wind up hanging out together all through college and beyond: Jim’s roommate, Stewart Lowell, now an accountant for a New York firm, and Di Ionno’s roommate, Tony Foster, another Bergen County kid, were among the first. Tom Richardson, who would later work at Gandolfini’s production company, Vito Bellino, now an account executive at the Ledger, and Mark Ohlstein, a chiropractor, would soon join the group and remain good friends with Gandolfini until his death.
    The friendships developed as you might expect, over beer and games; the guys would sometimes engage in a sort of half-comic “fight club” in the halls, whaling on each other. (This is something of a New Jersey tradition—my ten-year-old son did the same thing with his pals in the garage behind our house in South Orange, much to his non-Jersey-born parents’ consternation. Everybody seemed to enjoy it tremendously.) Among the inner core of friends, Gandolfini was known as “Buck.”
    One night, about two or three weeks into freshman year, Di Ionno was awakened by pounding on his door. “Buck got arrested, Buck got arrested!”
    Gandolfini had broken one of the wooden traffic barriers that protect the parking lots at Rutgers. “He didn’t even have a car,” Di Ionno recalls. “The worst thing was that it happened on campus, but somehow he’d been arrested by New Brunswick police, not campus cops.
    “I put my uniform back on, because I know they’re not going to release him to another student,” he continues. “And I go down to the New Brunswick police station and I say, ‘I’m here to get James Gandolfini.’ So they release him, and I think I wound up going to court with him, too … he ended up paying a fine.”
    The year went on like that. A few months later someone bought a bunch of spring-loaded dart guns—novelty toys that shot little plastic sticks with rubber suction cups on one end—and they started having High Noon gun battles throughout the dorm.
    After removing the suction cups, of course, so they’d hurt more when you got hit.
    “So [Gandolfini] runs into his room, he doesn’t see me,” Di Ionno says. “I come up behind him, just outside his door, gun in my hand, and I kick it—Bam!—and the metal doorknob smashes right into his face. I had no idea he’d turned back. I open the door and he’s knocked out, he’s unconscious, blood all over, and I’m like, ‘Oh, shit, what did I do?’ I thought I fucking killed the kid. I ended up taking him to St. Peter’s [hospital].”
    Jim got a few stitches, for which Di Ionno paid the $25 fee. But that scar on Gandolfini’s forehead, the one that became so expressive on The Sopranos when he was angry at another mobster or begging for respite from his wife’s impatience? That was a Rutgers dorm gun battle wound.
    Di Ionno said Gandolfini always had a kind of mutual loyalty bond with his friends, an understood promise that they’d always be there for each other. Even after freshman year, when many of the guys, including Gandolfini, moved off campus, the group hung together, adding members now and then.
    Buck took a job at the campus pub as a bouncer and bartender, at $3.50 an hour. In those days, campus pubs were a much bigger deal than they are today. The Vietnam War had set up the irony that eighteen-year-olds could be drafted and killed or maimed abroad, but could not order a Budweiser at home. So the drinking age was lowered in most states to eighteen in the late 1960s,