“After attending SUNY Purchase for art school I did something called The Whitney Program that is an exclusive program that the Whitney Museum runs – and that brought me to New York City. I lived in the East Village for six months and after six months it was like ‘Fuck this.’ It was a tiny little hole in the wall on Avenue D and at that time, once you passed Avenue A, you had to sprint home. Then I had a friend who was Polish and who grew up on North 7th street in Williamsburg. He told me about this neighborhood and I got a map and drew a circle around the Bedford Avenue subway stop and I said ‘I’m not going outside of this circle.’ The first day I came out I found like 10 places. It was great. It was literally like my generation’s experience that the older generation had in SoHo or Tribeca - which was to approach a landlord who lived in a factory who says ‘You wanna live in a factory? Sure!”

I paid $150 a month for this whole building when I first moved here in 1980. It was actually a functioning paint factory when I got here. The landlord was just so happy to have someone here at night because I was sort of a night watchman for the place. Now I own the building. I bought it in 1985. It was the only smart thing I ever did with my money in the 80’s.

For the first year’s of my career – 1980 to my first show in 1983 at Artists Space in Manhattan - I had to fix this building up. It was a shell. A wreck. I had to learn plumbing, electricity, heating. So it was like the pioneering spirit. There were a couple of artists in the neighborhood, we would huddle together and have dinner together. We hung out at an old place called the Warsaw Bakery and also this other very informal place that was run by these two tattoo covered guys. They would basically open up their kitchen on North 6th street – which used to be the slaughterhouse street and now it’s got like American Apparel on it. They were literally across the street from hanging carcasses of meat and they would just open at 5A.M. and you would sit at their table in their house eating fried eggs. It was just so cool. And when there are not any distractions you get a lot of work done. If I were in the city it would have been very easy to go to a club or a bar. But there was nothing out here. So in a funny way that really helped me get a body of work together.

There is something about my history in this building that is special to me. I look at these walls and I see the holes that are up there and I think about my pieces that were hanging in 1985. I made all my work here and its all been hanging on these walls or sitting on this floor. I have my own ghosts here. My own memories and history and the imprint of all my work.”

“Brooklyn! There is no place better to get a canoli. And this bowling alley—Maple Lanes—it's where you get the best egg cream ever made.

I love all my Brooklyn memories—like the candy store near the house I grew up in. It was called Tessie's and John's Candy Store and it had a beautiful soda fountain, mountains of jelly fishes and bazooka for three cents.

The best memory of all is my dad—Big Augie—waking up the block I grew up on out of a dead sleep with his bugle the morning of a block party. Kids came running out in their pajamas. Parents would watch from the stoop, barely moving a muscle. The day was always filled with games for the kids and so much food—it was overwhelming.”

I grew up in Marine Park. I was an auto mechanics major at Grady High School. Growing up I did everything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I worked at a delicatessen in Marine Park, I worked at a butcher shop, I was a waiter in a synagogue, and I waxed cars on the weekend. I always hustled but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I moved out of my mom’s house right after high school and after working at a deli I was living in this basement apartment by Kings Plaza. I was 19, it was Christmas of 1980 and I was washed up already. I remember waking up in this basement apartment with this shag carpet and bad paneling and thinking ‘If you don’t get out of this apartment and go and make your way in the world you could theoretically be living here when you are 80 years old.’

The deep dark secret in me was that I really wanted to be a sitcom writer. Once I was able to articulate that to myself it was like the flood gates opened. So I moved to Los Angeles and taught myself how to write television scripts.

I started working on the Sopranos after my agent sent over a pilot of the show. I put the thing in and I’m 20 minutes into it and I’m literally shaking. It’s the greatest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even finish watching it and I called my agent and said you GOT to get me on this show. I KNOW these guys. I grew up in this world. The butcher shop I used to work in as a kid was owned by Paul Castellano—it was called C&S meat market—Castellano and sons. I know this shit. I couldn’t get in there for the first season, but I got hired at the beginning of the second season. That was five years ago. The show has been such a great experience across the board.

I think growing up here, you have an East Coast sense of humor and an East Coast mentality that people out in L.A. don’t have. You have more of a comfort level with violence and finding it funny. Finding the darker, comedic aspects of violence. We are much more in touch with that. I think the writers that have grown up on the East Coast have a slightly skewed sense of humor. It’s like a Three Stooges thing. We all respond to someone getting hit on the head with something. We watch cuts of the show where Tony Soprano will crack someone over the head with a phone and our first reaction is to laugh—whereas most people are horrified. I’m not sure where that comes from but you just find that people from Brooklyn have that thing. One of my favorite things when I worked in Manhattan was to sit at this little luncheonette in the winter, across the street from the main post office on 34th, and watch people slip on the steps and laugh my ass off. It was really horrible, laughing at ladies with lots of bags falling down—that’s somebody’s mother—but I couldn’t help it. It is never not funny. And that’s something you get from growing up in Brooklyn.