Tony Allante grows up in the citys poolrooms, learning the language and behavior that make him cool and one of the guys. Mixing with his friends, he is able to become one of them while hiding the fear of having to fight to protect himself, the fear of knowing hes a chicken. As he completes high school and enters college, his desires for moving up sociallymarrying the right kind of girl, becoming a physician, earning enormous sums of money, moving out of the neighborhoodmake him realize that he must forsake his unsophisticated boyhood friends and blighted neighborhood, without getting hurt in the process. But not before he gets what he wants from them.
Tony and his friends found The Phillipo Athletic and Social Club which is, in reality, an excuse for legally establishing a place to sell liquor and attract women. It is wildly successful, the club being filled every weekend with the loud, driving beat of their music, young women with the easy sexual mores of the late 60s, heavy drinking that seems a part of most young people growing up, and a desire to have a good time while the getting is good. Tony takes full advantage of the situation, drinking with the best of them and making it with as many women as he could during the summer before he goes off to college again to pursue his goal of becoming a physician and, ultimately, breaking his relationships with his past.
But Tonys goals are confused after he meets Jill, a beautiful young woman who, though she doesnt meet his standards for the wife hed planned, tests Tonys blueprint and decisions for his future. Unwillingly and unwittingly, Tony finds himself falling hard and fast for Jill and even throws over Joanne for her, an act which has serious and unanticipated consequencesincluding murder and his being an unwitting causative factor in her own and a friends death.
Tonys life doesnt work out the way hed planned. He doesnt marry the girl of his dreams, doesnt become wealthy, is unhappy in his work, and then, after 17 years, Jill calls him from out of the blue.
What does it all mean for Tony? What should he do? What will he do? Is this a chance to redeem himself and his mediocre life?
This is a story of young men and their women, healthy and full of life and its promises, of youthful sex and dreams, of the excesses committed while growing up and, finally, of how being untrue to yourself and others can ruin lives.
