The Rogue of Five Points

As for the painted cross, he plans on adding some clouds and a sun to finish the scene, but he's nervous about the clouds because he doesn't want to get them wrong. He watches the sky outside. "I don't know how to start," he says. "Blue, white, gray, maybe a little silver...I don't want to mess it up."

Many years ago, before his family started dying off, Donna says, her dad seemed to be mellowing out. "He changed when his father died," Donna says. "It bothered him terribly that he wasn't there when his dad died. He was in denial." The Count sounds like it when he tries to explain how he's mastered the faucet-like ability to turn himself off to death. "I've got a powerful brain that I can divert from feeling," he insists. The only time he cried, he says, was at the death of his father. That was in 1959. He remembers kneeling before his father's casket, disbelieving: "'Daddy, get your ass out of that casket. You ain't dead. You're just bullshitting these people.' I cried like a baby, but that was six months later."

Much of the death in his family has a rude quality to it. His two sisters died of breast cancer. Alcohol helped lead to the death of his mom, in the late Seventies, and his brother, Charles, a few years ago. ("Wine killed him," the Count says.)

Son Jay committed suicide in 1993 by leaping off an eighteen-story building in Las Vegas. "That's what they say," the Count says. "I don't think I could have produced such an animal to jump off a building. He was on his way to being a dentist. He had no reason to kill himself."

The Count believes someone may have pushed him out, or, he says, "they were probably having a crack party, and he fell out."

As for himself, he says he quit drinking several years ago (the neighbors confirm it) at the behest of his mom, who he believes still communicates to him from the beyond. "She looked me dead in the eye," he says. "'You're a stupid motherfucker,' she said, and I quit that day."

He hasn't quit being ornery, though. Looking at the cross, he says, "My family better be in heaven, or I'll blow the place up.