My parents were dishonest people. If it was my birthday, I knew my mother took me to the K-Mart and she stole my toy. She’d put it in the shopping cart and we’d walk out. I was raised with that.

In this recollection, Gallo frames childhood not as a protected space but as an early apprenticeship in transgression. The birthday—normally a ritual of care and legitimate gift-giving—becomes a scene of petty theft, suggesting that affection and wrongdoing were intertwined in his upbringing. The blunt, matter-of-fact tone (“I was raised with that”) implies normalization: dishonesty is presented less as a shocking exception than as a household practice absorbed through repetition. Read as self-mythologizing, the quote also functions as an origin story for a persona associated with provocation and outsider status, locating later attitudes toward rules, property, and morality in formative family experience.