ROTTEN FRUIT IN AN UNKEMPT GARDEN

Violence, drugs, and women on the edge heighten the chaos of this memoir.

Nanfito looks back on his picaresque life from 1970 to 1981, encompassing his teens and early 20s, when he left home to escape his father, bounced around California as a journeyman metal worker, and transported drugs up and down the West Coast. His ripe book unfolds in loose-jointed, episodic chapters that read like short stories, most of them centered on pivotal moments and relationships with various people. They include a Roman Catholic priest who spent four years trying to groom the adolescent author for the clergy by cultivating his love of literature and art (Nanfito’s piquant pencil drawings grace the memoir); a youth who tried to rape him at the age of 14; and a Vietnam veteran he befriended who was haunted by his wartime experiences. Many vignettes center on women who walk on the wild side, including a hitchhiker and former Haight Ashbury communard who started riding shotgun on narcotics deliveries; a sex worker whom he rescued from an assault, getting a knife wound in the process; an aging stripper who took a liking to him that she expressed in the ladies’ room; and a woman who was once thrilled to take up with a drug kingpin but then yearned to be free of him. Nanfito’s pieces meditate on themes of escape and self-fulfillment, especially from social strictures that keep people from a more intensive immersion in life. His writing is a blend of philosophical meditation—Plato’s speculations on the soul keep cropping up—and a rapt, evocative attention to gritty impressions, couched in punchy, dynamic prose. (Stopping for gas during an urgent drug run, he writes, he spied “a blonde woman with a backpack at her feet sitting on the table top lounging in the sun, smoking, drinking a beer. All smiles and eyes as I pass by. Plan already running off the rails.”) Sprinkled in are the author’s poems, by turns searing and lyrical, which ambivalently convey pain and the strength that comes from it. (“I hate that you hit me but / I love how you release that venom.”) The result is a captivating account full of stark incidents with shaded, nuanced meanings.

A richly textured vision of life that’s pungent and disorderly but vibrant all the same.