Nah no poetic license invoked. Born 1951 in Weirton WV where Main Street ran through the middle of a thriving Steel Mill, now defunct and razed. Every boys ambition was to work his way out the Labor Gang and into organized crime, ultimately lnto a Chain Gang. My dad however, as rumor had it, turned tables to cast his fate with law enforcement, which explained his overnight disappearance, when i was 3 months old, as the basis of life long anonymity while living the next 50 years in Witness Protection, til news of his death 3000 miles away arrived to my mom (and she lived a life never once mentioning him to me, and I never asked, nor cared. So i grew up a hooligan in a leather jacket carrying brass knuckles, which was a great way to conceal my severe abandonment trauma, til i took a hunting knife deep into my belly--on my 1st day of college, at WVU where as my mother once said, that all i learned was how to make cocktails!!! [[Next: starting life over in New Orleans, at 38, where I completed culinary school while working in the restaurant business...while polishing my neer do well reputation by going 5 years, 7 days a week, without ever once arriving home from the 24/7 nightlife, before dawn...]]