This essay kicks off a new monthly Ink Link column, Ink in the Wild. I’ll be profiling books and writers, both current and past, who have contributed to New Hampshire’s rich literary tradition. 

Like Ishmael clinging to his friend Queequeg’s empty and airtight coffin in the vast Pacific as the only survivor of Moby Dick’s wrath, Gloria Norris has also “escaped alone to tell thee.” She’s the author of KooKooLand (Regan Arts, New York; 2016). Set for the most part in Manchester’s early 1960s, the book is a take-no-prisoners memoir told largely through Norris’s highly-observant nine-year-old eyes. She grew up in Elmwood Gardens, Manchester’s public housing off lower Elm Street. She tells us early on that Elmwood Gardens held but a few Charlie Brown elms and no gardens. Getting out of public housing was the least of her hurdles, however. The high brick wall Gloria, her sister Virginia, cat Sylvester and mother Shirley were forced to scale was Jimmy Norris, father of the two girls and Shirley’s husband. Gloria writes: “He could charm a bird off a tree and if not, he could shoot it down.”

Simon & Schuster, which distributed Regan Arts at the time of KooKooLand’s publication, said in its publicity: “Gloria Norris’s KooKooLand is a memoir written on the edge of a knife blade,” and “The story that unfolds is a profound portrait of how violence echoes through a family and through a community.” National Public Radio tabbed the book as a Best Book of the Year,

 Life with Jimmy was a goal-line stand with no rules other than Jimmy was always right. KooKooLand is told through traumatic tears, laughter and hurriedly-learned survival skills. Gloria learned to work Jimmy like a sudoku puzzle. Silently solve the numeric mystery and then enthusiastically convince Jimmy that he’s the real winner. Twenty-three skidoo to the relative safety of upstairs and let Jimmy’s unfiltered victory cries of “dum-dum” or “Meep meep, dummkopf” land elsewhere. 

 Jimmy called Gloria “Dracula” because of her then-crooked teeth, wiggling two fingers in front of his mouth for cruel effect. President Kennedy was a “bleeding heart” to Jimmy. Martin Luther King peddled “utopian baloney.” The Beatles were a “bunch of fairies” and he turned off the family TV during their iconic first Ed Sullivan appearance. He hated Shirley’s family’s farm in Tusket, Nova Scotia. No running water. No indoor plumbing. He called his in-laws a bunch of “stump- jumpers who don’t know what a trifecta was.”  

Jimmy had an intimate knowledge of trifectas. Consistently bad Norris luck didn’t mean a thing when he parked the Pontiac Chieftain outside a Manchester bookie joint, leaving Gloria in the car while he chased the ponies. She had trouble reading his success or lack of when he finally returned one afternoon. He’d won a measly five bucks after studying the Daily Racing Form for hours. “He was as quiet as my Chatty Cathy doll after the string broke,” she tells us. 

“I grew up in JimmyWorld,” Norris told an audience while promoting her book. “He was harsh, aggressive, insulting and violent. Not to mention sexist, racist and anti-Semitic. I faced down a bully.”

Jimmy loved horror and slasher movies and took his young daughter to see Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds as well as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? While cruising Boston’s Combat Zone, a place Jimmy deemed perfect for family road trips, Gloria noticed the made-up “eyes like sleepy raccoons” of the hookers. When walking the streets a few minutes later, Jimmy spotted a sign for a slice-and-dice titled Blood Feast. Trouble was the “teen-rager” in the ticket booth pointed to a misspelled sign taped to the window: “ADDULTS ONLY.” Jimmy went into blood-pressure gymnastics and tore into the kid: “It was a free country,” Gloria recalls Jimmy as saying, “…and no little pip-squeak in some rinky-dink booth was gonna tell him where to go.” 

In NorrisSpeak, the ticket seller was lucky Jimmy hadn’t landed a left jab to his breadbasket, knocking him on his keister.

The memoir turns on a double murder on Friday the 13th two weeks before Christmas in 1963.  Gloria’s older friend Susan’s mother Doris and an acquaintance her mother had just met, were stabbed to death (Jimmy preferred the term “ventilated”) at Doris and Susan’s home after Doris and some friends had socialized at Manchester’s Venice Room. The acquaintance, a much- decorated WWII veteran, had wanted to go home after the club closed at one a.m., but Doris’s friends convinced him to go to her house for just one more drink. The drink lasted until the wee hours. Doris’s ex-husband Hank, a good friend of Jimmy’s, had broken into a house no longer his and had been lying in wait for hours.

 The police were familiar with Hank’s regular violations of restraining orders. Phone call. Catch and release. Good night and don’t let it happen again. There will be no full spoiler alert. You’ll have to read the book to place all the participants and to learn the troubling details, much discussed in a 1978 New Yorker article by Calvin Trillin titled Family Problems. I will tell you the double murder and its aftermath ended three lives and ruined another. Gloria didn’t know what to make of Jimmy’s lies and accidentally on purpose omissions in ranting about the murders, but she knew she didn’t like it. “Jimmy never censored himself with me the way parents do and should,” the author told NHPR.

Susan’s father was released in two years. The same bull goose Harvard “headshrinker” who’d convinced a grand jury Hank was temporarily insane the night of the murders, now judged him harmlessly sane. The whole thing was a case of “a long stress.” Some in Manchester said Doris had made him do it. Others said Hank had gotten away with murder.

 Jimmy had his own bizarre take on the fatal events: “To Catholics, divorce is a goddam sin,” Jimmy told his daughter. “Once you marry somebody, even if she’s a whore like Doris, you’re stuck with her.” Even Jimmy the Agnostic knew the sanctity of the church’s ground rules, though his interpretation came through a fuzzy and bent kaleidoscope.  Remarriage in the church without an annulment, a paid-for church ruling that the marriage never existed, meant ex-communication, don’t let the cathedral door hit you on the way out.

Many in Manchester want to permanently bury this dark episode. “I was stonewalled every step of the way from the criminal justice system and even from a local librarian who wanted to deny me use of the microfiche,” Norris said of her local research.

Shirley brought home the paycheck in the family, working full time at the Foster Grant sunglass factory on Queen City Avenue. A full menu of Jimmy’s half-baked money-making schemes resembles Ralph Kramden’s financial pipe dreams on The Honeymooners. He sold reel-to-reel porno movies, known to Gloria as “pancakes.” Summer vacation at Old Orchard Beach once found a late-night roomful of lobsters jockeying for position in the kitchen. They’d been illegally liberated from various lobster pots on a moonless night by Bruce, a glue-sniffing and iffy racetrack connection. Air conditioners, thanks to “Uncle” Barney, were stacked in piles at the Elmwood Gardens house one October. Hot television sets came and went. Illegal fireworks were a Fourth of July chaser. A “shipment” of Chanel No. 5 once landed. Shirley’s family’s antique Christmas ornaments went missing. Said to be stolen but actually pawned by Jimmy. Later, Percocets and weed were sold out of the house, a “business” discovered by Gloria on a visit home from college. A pair of bullet holes in the ceiling from Jimmy’s .38 special didn’t escape her notice either. She began to fear for Shirley’s life.

To Jimmy’s chagrin from the land beyond, Gloria has carved out a full life for herself, first in New York City and subsequently in KooKooLand, Jimmy’s all-purpose description for California, the despised land of “surfing ding-dongs.” The screenplay writer and independent producer now lives in Santa Monica, California with her writer/editor husband James Greenberg.

 Norris graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, with a focus on filmmaking and creative writing. Her big break came as a co-writer of Brian De Palma’s 1979 low-budget comedy Home Movies (cost approx. $900,000; US gross $24.7 million), filmed at both her and De Palma’s alma mater. In the school’s tradition, De Palma used each step of the film’s production as a hands-on experience worth credits for Sarah Lawrence’s film students. 

“After the shoot, Brian ran into (Robert) De Niro on the street near his apartment and recommended me for the job on Raging Bull,” Norris explained. “I was on my way…To quote Jimmy’s lingo, I was ‘a lucky so-and-so.’”

As a researcher for the classic 1980 film, Norris brought considerable knowledge of the Sweet Science to the task. Her Greek American Papou Nick had managed boxers and been a fight promoter while Jimmy worked the ring as a six-year-old cut man. Nick and his wife ran Nick’s Ringside Café on Central Street. Sawdust on the floor. A cloudy jar of pickled pigs’ feet on the bar taunting a seated and stooped-over Murderers’ Row of “half-lit alkies.” Just another slice of JimmyWorld ambiance. Both De Niro and director Martin Scorsese were obsessed with accuracy in Raging Bull. Gloria confidently “threw the baloney” with the cigar-chomping boxing experts at Ring Magazine. She’d become a “nosy little buttinsky” but in a good way. De Niro had makeup construct a pricey run-over-by-a-taxi crooked nose to play retired middleweight Jake LaMotta. He gained 60 pounds for added realism. Norris was proud of her long search to unearth a single photo of the notoriously camera-shy owner of the Copacabana. It was immediately sent to casting. The film, criticized by some for its violence, received eight Academy Award nominations with De Niro winning Best Actor. Many film buffs consider Raging Bull the pinnacle of both De Niro’s and Scorsese’s impressive careers.

“I already knew the (boxing) lingo,” Norris explained. “I had already heard of many of the boxers. I could always consult Jimmy if I had a question. I think it gave me a bit more credibility which I kind of needed as a young woman traversing that world.”

“Being a director’s assistant on films encompasses a multitude of tasks,” Norris said. “For example, during preproduction for Zelig (1983), I tracked down and viewed several documentaries with Woody Allen as research for making the film. And, as with Stardust Memories (1980), another Woody Allen film I worked on, I was always on the lookout for people on the street who had interesting faces, people who might end up being featured extras.”

  Zelig was a “comedic mockumentary” a decade before Forrest Gump. Using1920s film and newsreel footage were mandatory as title character Leonard Zelig shape-shifted in both body and spirit through the decade in order to fit in with Jack Dempsey, Enrico Caruso and Lou Gehrig, among many others.  Bruno Bettelheim and Susan Sontag had cameos, mock-seriously attempting to diagnose the “chameleon man.” Zelig’s complete sublimation of his personality and physical features while out in public gave new meaning to the Buddhist concept of “no-self.”

Norris moved to Los Angeles when Woody Allen’s producers optioned The Uncle Bob Show, her first screenplay. She produced Jane Weinstock’s Easy (2003), a romantic comedy starring Marguerite Moreau as a confused lover having to decide whether to canoodle with a poet or a TV game show host. The film premiered at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival and was in the Dramatic competition at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. Norris co-wrote the screenplay and was a co-producer with Weinstock on the latter’s second film The Moment (2013), a psychological thriller starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as a war photographer suffering from PTSD. The film, which also featured Alia Shawkat from the-long-running cable show Arrested Development, premiered at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Norris has faced down the demons of her youth through the self-care of therapy, meditation, 12-step meetings and a love of nature. A friend recently moving away gave her an impressive ice cream maker with a compressor. She has a sweet tooth for tariff-free black raspberry, a preferred treat she claims is a mere afterthought in California.

 Jimmy had at least one positive merit. They showed Charlie Chaplin movies in the Combat Zone and Gloria remembers laughing over Modern Times with him. “He was a big fan of movies,” she said. “He gave me a great film education.” 

“I wanted to make movies,” Norris later realized. “Film was a risky racket compared to medicine but I was from a family of gamblers. I wanted to roll the dice.”

Jimmy’s foray into thoroughbred ownership was a one-horse stable featuring Victory Bound, a low-level claimer not above receiving serious pep talks from his owner. “Black and Gold,” named for the color of the stable’s jockey silks, is the author’s favorite KooKooLand chapter. The horse was entered in a race at the now defunct Scarborough Downs Race Track near Old Orchard Beach. Jimmy paid for the annual getaway and for his pari-mutuel gamble on Victory Bound by tapping a loan shark after Nick refused to lend his son money. Jimmy was always secretive about his pari-mutuel play (“Chicken one day, feathers the next”) but he took Gloria aside before the race and told her, “I’m betting it all on the goddam nose.” He gave Gloria a two-dollar win ticket, a kryptonite-laden talisman to keep Norris luck back at the barn with the road apples.

When the call of “Riders up!” came, “I felt tears rush to my eyes,” Norris writes. “It was all so beautiful. The horse was beautiful and the jockey on him was beautiful and everything around us was beautiful. I saw tears in Jimmy’s eyes too.” His sentiment possibly came from the joy of putting one over on the “ding-dong tourists” and the hard-core racetrackers. The owner told anyone who would listen, aside from his inner circle of cronies, the fake news that the horse hadn’t eaten all his oats the previous night. “The racetrackers looked concerned about the oats,” Gloria tells us. “Jimmy looked concerned too…I did my part and looked concerned too, even though I knew that Victory Bound had gobbled down all of his oats and practically eaten the bucket they were in.” 

 Victory Bound trailed early in the race with Gloria ready to take on all the blame for the horse’s failure, but surprisingly Virginia grabbed Gloria’s arm when Victory Bound burst out of the pack in the homestretch to what young Gloria heard from the excited announcer as a “six furlong” winning margin, easily confused with “six lengths” by a screaming child. To Gloria, it must have felt that Victory Bound had magically sprouted wings like Pegasus and flown down the stretch to win by almost a mile. “Ain’t this the life?” Jimmy crowed on the way to the winner’s circle. 

“Among other things KooKooLand is a love letter to my mother Shirley,” Gloria said. The book’s infrequent roses echo the descriptive words of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo: “I paint flowers so they will not die.”

“She endured a great deal to keep me from experiencing a tragedy like my idol Susan did,” Norris wrote of her mother. “Without her constant love, I don’t know where I’d be today.” Shirley paid a heavy price for her mandatory loyalty. She once told her daughter, “If I divorce your father, I won’t end up in Disneyland, I’ll end up six feet under like Doris.” 

Shirley was forbidden by her husband to both drive to Fenway or to watch the Boston Red Sox on TV. She lived long enough after Jimmy’s death to see Fenway Park in person and to celebrate the team’s improbable 2004 championship.

When asked what favorite memories the author had of Manchester, she quickly answered Perillo’s, which she could walk to as a child. Perillo’s Italian Sandwiches was next to Feretti’s Super Market at 1415 Elm Street. Blake’s was another favorite stop for the ice-cream junkie. Temple Market, re-opened in 2017 as Temple Food Mart, is described in the chapter “Candy Land” as the only walking-distance source for the highly-prized food group of Chuckles and Milky Ways. Back in the day, however, the sweet treats came with a heavy dose of suspicion. The dour Horrible Heddy, who manned the counter and security mirrors, believed all nine year olds were thieves out on weekend parole from Sing Sing. 

“I’m currently working on a novel with autobiographical elements,” the screenwriter /independent  producer said. “It’s set in the Seventies. I’d been going like gangbusters, but…” Distractions happen. A six to eight episode TV limited-series, what we used to call a mini-series, of KooKooLand is still in the pipeline.

Norris is both surprised and honored by the praise KooKooLand has received locally. She’s given  a number of presentations in the area, making new friends along the way. You can’t help but root for her. Get the pom-poms out with big hugs all the way around.

“I’m a pretty resilient gal,” author Gloria Norris has said of overcoming a childhood she describes as “Dickensian.”

I can think of only four books over the checkered course of my life that I’ve read more than two times: 1. The Baltimore Catechism (1885; Third Plenary Council of Baltimore). Force-fed for eight years. Contains 421 Q&A. I can only remember two. 2. Slaughter-House Five or The Children’s Crusade (1969; Delacorte Press).  Kurt Vonnegut’s classic anti-war novel. And so it goes… 3.The Van Gogh Assignment (1978; Paddington Press, London). Author Kenneth Wilkie traces the painter’s life across Europe, surprisingly finding many people who were the last living direct links to Van Gogh. They’re now all lost to history. 4. KooKooLand.