A Character By Any Other Name – Monty Crocetti

As I mentioned previously, Denton and Monty got their start on a warm summer’s day, the waves crashing on the beach - wait.
No.
That’s not right.

They got their start as a writing assignment for Jerry Williamson’s Writer’s Digest Correspondence course in short story writing.
Denton was a difficult child, but Monty pretty much appeared to me as if in a vision.
Okay, so it wasn’t religious, but she was a good character when first created, and then as time passed, she became even more well-rounded and flesh began to appear on the skeleton.

She was such a great character, a wonderful archetype, that I lifted her, wholesale and made a simpler version of her the love interest in my firs completed novel that was called Significant Others. 

Significant Others began in 1990, several years after the cyberpunk short story that brought Denton and Monty together.  I was a student at San Francisco State University, in their Creative Writing program (one of the best in the country) and I was doing Graduate level novel writing work with my first mentor, Phyllis Burke, who had just published her novel, Atomic Candy.

Being new to San Francisco, I was reading a steady diet of San Francisco authors, and got caught up in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City series.  Significant Others was my own version of Tales of the City.  Bookish protagonist, punk rock love interest, and the gay bookseller who brought them together on Haight Street.

Yeah, there’s a reason this book will never see the light of day.
Well, actually two.  The first one is that it’s crap, and the second is that I’m too lazy to actually type it into a Word document and format it for publishing with Lulu.  But the first reason is the one that is important.

Monty was given a different name in Significant Others, but her spunky, punk rock exterior remained.
We now go forward to 1997 and I’m working on the first draft of Resurrection Angel and it’s time to give Monty a full name.

I knew that Montgomery would be her first and I knew that Elaine would be her middle name.  Elaine was the name of my birth mother, who died when I was six years old.  It was Elaine Mize who taught me to read at such an early age, and I’d like to think that her passion and love for books and reading was part of the puzzle that has brought me to where I am today.  Her love and passion for books and stories are my passion for books and stories, and perhaps even my love and talent for writing.

When it came to Montgomery Elaine’s last name, I was stuck.  I knew that she’d grown up in San Francisco.  I knew that she was of Italian descent.  I knew that I wanted her name to reflect that and I knew that I wanted it to be somehow old school Italian.  Something out of Good Fellas or The Godfather.

The answer came from not from a piece of literature, but from a singer.

As many of you know, I’m a big Frank Sinatra fan.  I love his music, his life story, his swagger, his machismo.  I love the fact that no matter how imperfect he was, his voice was quite perfect.  And part of the Sinatra mythos is the Rat Pack.  His friendship with Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford and their exploits in Las Vegas and Los Angeles are legendary.

One lazy day, while wandering around Al Gore’s collection of tubes and wires, I decided to explore the Rat Pack and in particular one member: Dean Martin. I think I was looking for a good “Greatest Hits” collection and Wikipedia usually has a good discography, so off I went.

Upon opening his Wikipedia page, the first thing that stunned me into silence was that Dean Martin was not his real name.

Say what?

His real name was Dino Paul Crocetti, and he reflected everything that was good and classic and perhaps even stereotypical about Italians and Italian-Americans and I knew that my girl was home and she had a name.

Montgomery Elaine Crocetti.