Twenty-odd years ago, I moonlighted as a cab driver in Toronto. I still remember how easy it was to glance in the rearview mirror and peg visitors from the American city of Buffalo, N.Y. They were generally polite and well-dressed, but in the affected manner of a child done up in his Sunday best, squirming a little on the sofa in grandma's parlor. Gazing out the windows at the unlittered boulevards of Canada's most sanitized metropolis, the weekenders would often initiate conversation with a line like, "It's so clean and safe here in Toronto." "Yes, I suppose it is," I would reply. I felt like offering them a bowl of big white peppermints.

The streets of Buffalo, by comparison, were black with oil, leaked from the cars with odd-colored door panels that trailed along. The nearly deserted downtown was made up of storefront check-cashing enterprises, distressed diners, lonely bars hawking cheap booze and, in flickering neon, the city's favorite finger food: (buzz) "Chicken wings!" (buzz) "Chicken wings!"

It was from that environment that a 16-year-old Vincent Gallo fled in 1978. He also left behind his hairdresser parents -- a mother he has described as a thief, and a father who reportedly beat him almost every day. Poor and depressed, Gallo landed in New York City, where he worked to express himself creatively, in the 20th-century arte povera style, which developed in Italy and treated found objects as art material. Gallo used metal sheets and trashcan lids as his canvases, scrawling upon them and scratching them with the few comforting images -- mostly, of cut flowers -- that he had salvaged from his Buffalo childhood.