Former monster back at Thanksgiving table
Ralph Gagliardo’s family never stopped loving him — and they never stopped trying to understand him, though he made that difficult.
There were years when his family did not want him around for Thanksgiving, and if you have a family that doesn’t have at least one member like that, count yourself blessed. During those years, Gagliardo would go to Hands On Hartford’s holiday meal. It is an amazing spread, with everything you’d get at a family gathering, except for the blood kin.
Gagliardo loved those meals. But he was a small-town pot dealer, and then he became a monster. That line is from the memoir he’s working on. It’s a story with multiple dramatic arcs and surprise endings.
He grew up in a three-bedroom cape in South Windsor when that town was mostly woods and fields. His father, who died young of cancer, was the kind of neighborhood saint who wouldn’t so much as nip a potato from a nearby field because stealing is wrong.
Gagliardo suffered under no such moral burden, though he managed to avoid arrest until age 38. (Truth to tell, he says he should have been cuffed and stuffed by age 10, but that may be hyperbole.)
Maybe it was growing up without a father figure, though a lot of people do that and turn out fine. Maybe it was boredom, but it was obvious early on that Gagliardo didn’t fit in well. His siblings seemed to know how to act — three good apples and one bad one, he said.
He rattled around town. He promoted concerts. He restored classic cars and ran what amounted to a flea market. With a mean left hook, he toyed with boxing until his mother talked him out of it, but that did not stop him from throwing the occasional punch as an amateur. He fancied himself a real, live Billy Jack, the lead of his favorite movie, a tough man who stood for the downtrodden. He threw parties that got shut down by the police, but he could write his research papers on the bus on the way to class and still get good grades.
Gagliardo careened through adulthood, and then came the monster part. He got addicted to pills, and then to heroin. Heroin is not cheap, dirty money is easier money, and he was eventually convicted and sent to jail for stealing $3 million worth of metal.
Gagliardo could learn new illegal skills in prison, or he could change.
He decided to treat prison as therapy, and he came out of jail a different man — not a new one, he didn’t lose his swagger — but a different one. He signed up for classes at Charter Oak Cultural Centers BOTS Center for Creative Learning, followed classes at Goodwin College, where he got his associate’s in 2017. Earlier this year, he graduated from there magna cum laude with a degree in human services and a minor in psychology. He was chosen to give the graduation speech, and he talked for 16 minutes — twice as long as he was supposed to. He got choked up at the podium, partly because the details of his life are stunning, and partly because he was up onstage in the heady company of the commencement speaker, the actor Danny Glover, and Anne Stanback, founding executive director of Love Makes a Family.
These days, he works for the Hartford street newspaper, Beat of the Street. He’s six chapters into writing his memoir, from which all the best lines in this column are boosted. He’s studying for the LSATs. Imagine him as a public defender.
He’s also toying with the idea of doing stand-up comedy. In a few weeks, you may catch him at Hartford Funny Bone Comedy Club and Restaurant in Manchester.
On Thanksgiving, you can catch him at his sister’s, in Vernon. His mother, who long ago talked him out of a boxing career, is gone, but his siblings will gather him back into the fold — three apples and one not-so-bad one. They didn’t want to abandon him, says Gagliardo. They just wanted him to get better.
Susan Campbell teaches at the University of New Haven. She is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories From an American Neighborhood,” “Dating Jesus: Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl” and “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker.” Her email address is slcampbell417@gmail.com.