A sister's heartbreaking memoir of her youngest brother, with whom she shared a special bond from the time he was born. Joseph was dyslexic and unable to adapt to the workaday world and turned to drugs in the 1960's. Ironically he met the love of his life in a methadone clinic but just when he thought he was headed, at last, for a "normal life" his lover Sandi contracted AIDS and within a short period of time, they were both afflicted. This is the story of Joseph and of Joseph and Sandi but also of the residual effect of their wayward lives on their extended Italian-American families. It is a story of legacy vs inheritance, of children growing up in a family of drug addicts, of Joseph's devoted sister Rose and Sandi's sister Mare( she was Doris Day to Sandi's Janis Joplin), of how the survivors cope and still struggle to understand what they barely lived through.