Henry Bellakoff (his parents never gave him a middle name. Hank always told people his family was too poor to afford one for him) was born on March 18, 1956, in Boston’s West End neighborhood, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. He also always told people that if he was born one day earlier he would have been an Irish Catholic. Only to those who knew him best would he say that he wished he had been born three days earlier, on the Ides of March, because then just one back-stabbing would have done him in, rather than the multiple ones he had already experienced. He got no argument about that from those who knew him well. His back seemed particularly scarred from his relationships with women. There were many, and of those, quite a few had inglorious endings.
Hank, the older of two boys,
