The Lone Wolf, Part Two: Cultural Roots — and the Fictional Alchemy of Calvin & Jake
In my last post, I broke down how Calvin McShane fits (and complicates) the idea of the “lone wolf empath”—someone who craves understanding, not attention—and how Jake, by contrast, craves freedom over connection.
But if you stop there, you miss the deeper soil these differences grow out of.
Because Calvin and Jake aren’t just psychological profiles. They’re fictional characters, and like all characters worth their ink, they’re mosaics. Pieces of people I’ve known, bits of myself, cultural currents, even the weight of the towns and ethnicities I imagined them growing up in.
I’ve written before about my friend Cosmo. And it’s important to stress this: Jake is not Cosmo, any more than Calvin is me. But Jake is loosely inspired by Cosmo — by his artistic philosophy, his creative energy, his libertine disposition. He’s an intentionally exaggerated (and simplified) version of Cosmo’s already considerable swagger and volatility.
By transferring those aspects of personality to a fictional character, Jake also reflects Cosmo’s Italian-American ethnic identity and his fascination with Scorsese–De Niro’s damaged male archetypes — Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, Johnny Boy in Mean Streets. So Jake became a character indirectly and accidentally built from cultural narratives about Italian-American masculinity, simply because my friend embodies them to some extent—often ironically—even if I didn’t realize it at the time.
What fascinates me (and still surprises me when I reread my own work) is how these subconscious influences worm their way in. I didn’t set out to make Jake an echo of Scorsese characters. (Sidenote: I actually watched Mean Streets for the first time only recently, at Cosmo’s insistence. He argued that Cal and Jake parallel Charlie and Johnny Boy — though I still maintain Jake is far more charming than Johnny Boy.) I didn’t consciously plot Calvin’s craving for understanding as a reflection of Filipino relational culture. But these elements got caught up in the creative churn — part of the flotsam that inevitably washes into a story written honestly. I only see it clearly when I step back and start to dissect what I made.
Calvin: a subtle inheritance of kapwa
Calvin’s part-Filipino identity isn’t a billboarded trait in the novels, but it hums beneath his relational needs. Filipino culture puts enormous stock in community, extended family, emotional obligation—things summed up in concepts like kapwa, the idea that your self is always intertwined with others. Even if Calvin is fully Americanized, that pull toward wanting to be seen and known within a relationship is almost a cultural inheritance. It’s another layer to why solitude feels necessary for him but never quite comfortable.
He’s not looking for a crowd; he’s looking for someone who gets it. Who says, I see you. I know your heart’s shape. That’s not just pop-psych “empath” stuff. It’s also a quiet echo of Filipino communal belonging.
Jake: a lone wolf forged by neighborhood and myth
Jake, meanwhile, grows up part-Italian (with a de minimis amount of Native American ancestry) in a town with strong Italian roots. Fictional West Fairfield, like much of real-world Southwest Connecticut and the suburban enclaves surrounding NYC, is basically a swirl of spaghetti dinners, parish festivals, and front-porch loudmouths. (It’s more hinted at than explicitly described in the books, but Calvin does mention in A Pleasant Fiction that he grew up around a lot of Italians—girls named Gina and “little tough” Italian guys on the football team—even if his immediate circle of friends was more culturally diverse.) Italian-American masculine culture often prizes independence, toughness, and keeping your vulnerabilities under wraps. The heroes of the neighborhood aren’t empaths; they’re stand-up guys who keep their own counsel and handle their business without whining.
So Jake’s craving isn’t for understanding. It’s for freedom—for space to do what he wants, live by his own cracked code, and never have to explain the emotional debris he leaves in his wake. That’s partly his personality. But it’s also a local cultural inheritance, reinforced by all those Scorsese antiheroes that fascinate fans of the genre (like Cosmo, and honestly, just about everyone I went to high school with). Jake isn’t a direct descendant of De Niro’s LaMotta or Johnny Boy, but the mythos is there, floating in the same ether that helped shape him.
Why it matters for the book — and why it surprises me, too
This is why I find it almost eerie (in the best way) how these nuances reveal themselves only after the fact. I didn’t sit down with a cultural studies blueprint saying: “Ah yes, Calvin will express Filipino relational paradigms, while Jake embodies Italian-American stoic machismo.”
I wrote them from instinct, from bits and pieces of memory, from half-remembered family stories and friends’ confessions and movies we all absorbed growing up. It’s only when I go back—when I really start pulling at the threads—that I see how much of that made it onto the page.
So sure, on the surface it looks like Calvin and Jake are just a sensitive guy and a cynical guy, forever circling each other in mismatched friendship. But underneath, it’s also the collision of two inherited emotional worlds:
Calvin’s world: where belonging and being understood is the secret heart of everything.
Jake’s world: where being free—unencumbered, unimpeached—is the only prize worth guarding.
Closing thought
Maybe that’s why I keep finding new angles on these two, even years after first writing them. They aren’t just pop-psych case studies. They’re personal, they’re cultural, they’re accidents of creation that reveal more about me (and the places I’ve lived and the people I’ve loved) than I ever intended.
And maybe that’s why I trust them to carry the weight of stories. Because even when I’m not fully aware of what I’m putting in, the work knows. The characters know. They carry it all, until I’m finally ready to see it.
Javier
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