There is a man who believes his life was saved by Chicago author Eugene Izzi. It wasn’t anything dramatic: Izzi didn’t pull him out of a blazing apartment, or take a bullet for him. “Rick” was a drug addict and an alcoholic, a working burglar and a repeat criminal offender who had been in trouble with the law since he was a little boy. Nobody could help Rick, not even the local detox centers. He’d been barred from them. He couldn’t stay sober, couldn’t stay out of trouble, couldn’t stay away from cocaine. He tried a geographic cure, relocating to Chicago, but he brought his problems with him.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood . . . who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself at a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and . . . if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. –John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“I am in no way anyone’s idea of a tough guy, and no one who knows me at all well would ever say that I am. I personally don’t like the so-called “tough guys’ I’ve met. They often seem to confuse “tough’ with “rude.”‘ Rude is something Izzi very rarely is; his unfailing courtesy toward strangers could in fact be seen as a part of his defense against them, a way he keeps his distance. “I have walked far out of my way in order to avoid some stupid street confrontation; I have nothing to prove to anyone but myself and my family.” He smiles. “Besides, I’m getting a little old to be getting into gutter brawls.” But the media have built up a tough-guy image of Izzi over the years, and that’s one of the reasons he rarely speaks to them anymore.
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Izzi has a near-compulsive need to keep a low profile. In effect he has turned his back on civilized society. He has snubbed every socialite he’s ever met, refused every party invitation. He tells anyone who asks that he’s unemployed. He prefers listening to being listened to, watching to being watched. Observation and anonymity are the tools of his work. And he doesn’t like what “celebrity” has done to others.
“It’s seductive, I think, at least it was for me. Theresa and I had never had anything before, and then there were suddenly stretch limos taking me to the airport, first-class flights with drivers waiting on the other end to take me to meetings with movie producers. It’s a strange life-style, the Rolls-Royce syndrome. But if you fall into it, money becomes more important to you than your talent. And I’d rather die than to see the day dawn where money meant that much to my life, where you’d sell out all you hold dear in order to get a nice paycheck.” So he turned his back on it; he doesn’t even have an LA agent anymore. The Town Car is gone, as are his two suburban homes. Izzi and his family moved back into the city about a year and a half ago.
It was for one of the book’s subplots that Izzi spoke to the skinhead, whom he ended up making a character in the book. His mistake, he says today, was in sending the manuscript pages that depicted the fictional character to the real skinhead; they were not, to say the least, flattering. He has doubts that the man was actually a member of Romantic Violence, and believes that he sent the letter under their imprimatur to throw suspicion away from himself in the unlikely event that Izzi sent the letter to the FBI.
