CHARACTER BRIEFS

Age: 32

Occupation: Construction

Birthplace: Queens, NY

Ethnicity: Italian-Colombian

Current Location: Brooklyn, NY

Current Year: 1986

JAI SALUZIO

Appearance: 

Tight haircut, tattered old Yankee’s t-shirt, flannel, baggy blue jeans. 32, father from Columbia, mother from southern Italy. Twice-divorced, first time was a 12-day marriage downing shots with a woman he met in Temecula at 19. Second was his bail bondsman when he was 25. Thorn tats around his left bicep, a jackal behind his ear.

Personality: 

Hot-tempered, street-smart, resilient. Collects jackknives. Can speak a bit of Italian with his brother, mostly all the bad words that his parents taught them in dialect.  Charismatic and somewhat social, but with a wild heart that gets him in trouble.  Tough on the outside, but feckless and vulnerable in his core. Ran away once as a teen, which always haunted him.  Impulsive and cynical, a bit guarded about relationships. Has a few years he won’t talk about with anyone. At the end of the day he’s a risk taker. The past year he’s remained tight-lipped about something, but he always tries to stay open.

Relationships:

Only close to his brother Callum more recently. There was a long time where the two fought, with the nexus of their argument being over their father’s death and putting their mother in a home in Bensonhurst. Callum sticks around because Jai gives him construction jobs and Jai knows it. 

His second wife Kara was a spark of fire. He met her out in the Bowery clubs and their romance was fast and furious. Kara had a lot of edges, but ran a knitting club in Brooklyn on Wednesdays to help keep her cool. She was in a goth-punk band call Katt who played mostly metal venues in Jersey on the weekends. He proposed to her on a Sunday and they made plans for months. One day out of the blue she just left, no note, no nothing. No one knew where she left to, but he suspected California. All she left behind was a silver turtle locket she used to wear. 

Backstory:

Jai and Callum grew up in Queens, farther out past Elmhurst. Their first few years the dad wasn’t around. Their mom was busy holding down three jobs during this time and they both started pickpocketing early on. Callum got caught and went to juvenile. Around that time Jai got in with the wrong crowd, dropped out of high school. After a few rough years, he got things together and started up fixing cars in a shop. He developed a name for himself as a swift mechanic and able to fix up any old car into something workable.