At the tender age of seven, Johnny Allina was traumatized by not only bad parenting but an over consumption of sweets, his father being a high-ranking executive of an esteemed candy corporation based in the tri-state area. He was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth on Park Avenue, and raised by partially suicidal European eccentrics. Once the money was gone, the lot of them became unglued in different ways. He dabbled in a wide array of drugs, which he parlayed into a scholarship at coveted Bennington College, where he went on to associate with more upper class, anxiety-ridden, somewhat suicidal, vicious eccentrics. Having navigated all aspects of bad behavior from Park Avenue, a small village in rural Vermont, a series of low- to medium-level odd jobs, an unnamed, major hotel corporate office and ultimately to an apartment building in Glendale, California, he’s turned the most recent example into the novel The Dryden Arms (House of Despair, a Comedy).