In 1991, Buffalo-born actor Vincent Gallo was starting to generate buzz on both coasts.

Hot new actor. Sexy. Intense. Twitchy.

In less than 24 months, he had turned down a Quentin Tarentino role (the tip-stingy Mr. Pink in "Reservoir Dogs"), finished one movie with Johnny Depp and Faye Dunaway, and was about to begin another with Meryl Streep and Winona Ryder.

But upon wrapping up a shoot and leaving Las Vegas, Gallo found that he didn't care.

During the drive back to New York, he finally realized what he really wanted.

Pegasus cassettes.

"Out of the blue, I get a letter from Vince," recalls Gallo's longtime friend Kent Weber, bassist for the seminal progressive-rock group from the 1970's. "He's driving through the desert, and he actually stops to write to ask if I could please send him tapes of the band."

Small wonder. Watching Pegasus play at McVan's, forming his own group and hanging out at Home of the Hits are virtually the only good memories Gallo has of life here.

How unhappy was he growing up? Gallo left Buffalo in 1979 at age 17 and never came back. And in interviews with publications that have little chance of showing up in town, he tells tales of family life that border on the horrific.

Given that, one would think that Gallo's life now would make him ecstatic. Last year alone, he modeled for Calvin Klein and made movies with Keifer Sutherland and Patricia Arquette; to boot, his critically acclaimed movie "Palookaville" opens here this month.

Yet only when he plays the tapes Weber eventually sent, or hears from friends back home, does Gallo seem truly happy.

"I called him up a while ago, and he had this Pegasus blasting in the background," says Mark Freeland, a longtime friend. "All he wanted to talk about was this one Gentle Giant album."

Adds another former bandmate: "Vince loves to talk about these girls we knew in the '70s, or these songs we did. It's amazing, how the opinion of anyone he really cared about, back then, still carries the most weight with him."

Confusing? Gallo may explain when he gets here in February. He's making a film about it.

Looks wild in print? Try talking to him in person.

Gallo, 34, picks up the phone in his Little Italy apartment on the first ring. As soon as he learns the caller is a reporter from Buffalo, he begins talking. He is intense and chatty, as dishy as a drag queen on her break.

"Did you see that Entertainment Weekly review?" He refers to the magazine's late November review of "Palookaville", Alan Taylor's acclaimed indie about three New Jersey bozos who screw up an armored car heist. "Calvin Klein model Vincent Gallo," he hisses, reciting the line from memory. "I've had gallery exhibitions, I've released albums, I've made 17 films, and they say 'model'. That was evil. Evil."

The word stings because there are better ones to describe Gallo-neurotic, musician, artist, motorcycle racer, lover, rich guy, actor, for crying out loud-and none of them appeared in EW's review.

Yet all of these words, taken in that order, paint a pretty clear picture of Vince Gallo. Rather, they paint the picture that the lanky, piercingly blue-eyed former West Sider wants you to see.

"He is cryptic, that's for sure," laughs a local friend, describing Gallo's conversation as "a lot of legend and a little bit of reality. But you gotta love him. He is very, very real."

The reality starts in the '60s, when Gallo's parents, both hairdressers, moved their three children from Fargo Street to Kenmore and then to an Amherst home on Delta Road.

But to tell the story from there puts Gallo in a delicate place. This is the first story about him that the hometown folks will see, so he refuses to tattle about his family the way he has to other reporters.

Yet his hometown angst was central to his struggle to become an artist, and to who he is. "My whole career is based on revenge, at this point." he told the New York Times in November.

To skip over any of that would be a huge lie. So he settles for this:

"Everyone, I think, had a s****y childhood. Mine was no exception. But I was not responsible for it because I was a child. I had a very unpleasant feeling about myself all my life because of it. But I don't want to complain about it now. I'm an adult and I'm responsible for my feelings."

If it sounds like years of therapy have paid off, they have. Gallo credits a Dr. Hill, in New York, with helping him learn to believe in himself.

But there was no Dr. Hill hanging around the Ken-Ton area Gallo haunted as a teen. Just bands, and the older guys in them. And they were therapist enough.

"Kent Weber, Mark Freeland, my God, I idolized those guys." says Gallo, whose obsession with both Pegasus musicians grew out of a childhood fascination with Genesis/Gentle Giant/King Crimson prog-rock of the '70s.

By the time he hit Sweet Home High, Gallo was excelling in academics and sports, but didn't seem to care. He had other things on his mind--guitars and girls--and friends remember him treating both similarly: with fascination, loyalty, and a quirky kind of nervous energy.

"He bought this fretless bass once, for about two grand," laughs former bandmate Bernie Kugel, who now lives in Brooklyn and sees Gallo occasionally for lunch. "Then he spent another grand putting frets in it. That's how he was, nutty, but with a huge heart."

A huge heart often broken by Sweet Home High School girls. "I was just this creepy guy who couldn't talk to them," Gallo confesses, still sounding somewhat morose. "I would either just sit there and stare at them, or if they liked me, I'd run."

All of this eventually drove him to become something else: determined as hell to leave.

"All Vince talked about, other than girls--and he was gaga about girls--was getting out of Buffalo and going to New York and getting into the scene down there," says Mary Moser, who remembers Gallo hanging out at Home of the Hits on Elmwood Avenue, where she worked in the late '70s.

Frustrated, horny, alienated and hard-wired to do something--anything--beyond Buffalo, Gallo collected his diploma from Sweet Home High and headed straight for New York City almost immediately--and permanently.

"There was nothing here for me. Nothing. I had to get out. I had to," he says, the urgency still in his voice almost 20 years later. "If you stay in Buffalo, they will nickel and dime you to death. It doesn't matter what you do. You will be drained, but so slowly, you won't feel it till it's too late."

What greeted Gallo in the Big Apple was the first of many shocks.

His sharp features, piercing eyes, smooth skin and buglike intensity were considered hot. Very hot.

"In Buffalo, the fat barmaid at the Jolly Brown Jug probably wouldn't take her gum or cigarette out of her mouth long enough to look at me," he sneers.

"But as soon as I crossed that (George Washington) bridge, everyone wanted me. Models, beautiful women, gay boys, you name it. Here, my look worked."

But still there were times he had to resort to crawling around the floor of Studio 54 with a flashlight to scoop up fallen bills and change; and often sleeping in his big Chevy; and flat-out lying about his roots to fit in.

"When I got to New York, I was so ashamed of being from Buffalo that I actually taught myself Italian. I spoke with an accent and told people I'd just moved there from Sicily. I called myself Vincent Vito Gallo. I was channeling a little of 'The Godfather', you could say that."

That he has now become, some 15 years later, a Calvin Klein cologne and Anna Sui runway model, and an upcoming De Niro-esque actor in films, strikes New York's cognoscenti as mildly amusing.

"I saw him around for a long time...in Paris, in London," Sui told Paper, the stylish New York monthly that featured Gallo on its cover last fall. "He always had great style and was with beautiful women."

His rise from Buffalo boy to don of New York City's downtown demimonde wasn't exactly meteoric. And it definitely wasn't all fun and parties. In past interviews he has referred to a rather shattering breakdown in the early '80s, several years after leaving home, but he will not now discuss it, except obliquely.

"Let's just say that I was so used to hearing negative voices all around me, that when I went away, I simply re-created them, and my home, even the worst parts of it, because it's all I knew."

His refuge was his art--painting on metal sculpture--and by selling it (and trading in vintage guitars and recording equipment), he was able to indulge in his true passion; racing motorcycles.

"That's actually what got me into acting," he explains. He then proceeds to reel out a story that may not be entirely true, but sounds true enough to make any by-the-book Stella Adler acting student pull his hair in frustration.

"To race, I needed health insurance, and (the Screen Actors' Guild) had good coverage. So I would try out for parts in whatever, I didn't care. 'The Equalizer' or 'Miami Vice'."

He got them, of course--directors adored his look and his unvarnished edge--and the health insurance to go with the parts. While he raced, his headshots made the rounds of casting offices. And one by one, calls started to trickle in, and small parts in films followed.

In 1991's LSD-ish "Arizona Dream", with Johnny Depp, in which Gallo mimics a scene from 'Raging Bull' with hair-raising accuracy; in 1993's '"House of the Spirits," in which he interrogates Winona Ryder with a slow insidiousness, and in 1995's "The Perez family," which seems best forgotten.

And then, last year, back-to-back knockout punches.

First, a contract as one of Calvin Klein's wastoid-looking cK be cologne models, whose incessant ads have dotted hip magazine gatefolds and MTV for months.

Then Abel Ferrara's "The Funeral," for which critics lauded Gallo for holding his own with the likes of Christopher Walken and Christopher Penn, which was extraordinary, seeing as Gallo played a dead guy for half the film. (It's his funeral.)

Then, hard on it's heels, Alan Taylor's brilliant and touching "Palookaville", in which Gallo steps out as Russ Pataki (named for the New York governor, whom the rabidly right-wing Gallo adores).

Gallo's leather-wearing New Jersey bozo who can't mastermind a simple stickup, much less keep his underage girlfriend from running away to L.A., struck critics instantly. In scene after scene, his face, by turns elegantly sculpted and pugnaciously jut-jawed, is set off by laser-beam eyes that pop with insistence.

And when he opens his mouth, his voice is pure Buffalo; ripped from the throat, bounced off the nasal passages and shot into mid-air where it hangs suspended, waiting for an answer to the question, "Whadda you lookin' at?"

By last summer, the buzz machine began to crank in earnest. Gallo was called "edgy," "unpretentious," "twitchy," "exquisite" and a flat-out scene-stealer.

The New York Times aptly noted his "Mamet-like tic of reiterating dialogue "which only adds to his intensity."

Keifer Sutherland wanted-and got-Gallo for the movie he recently finished directing, the crime thriller "Truth or Consequences, N.M.," due out this month.

And Roland ("The Killing Fields") Joffe landed Gallo for his first full-out romantic lead in "Goodbye, Lover," playing against Patricia Arquette.

Gallo has been in L.A. since Christmas. It has given him time to wrap up his latest film, and fine-hone his take on Hollywood. Right now, it's one of loathing and disdain.

"Everyone in Hollywood is completely dishonest about who they are," he says flatly on the phone, late one night. "Anything you would read about them, or see on a show, is a total lie. They reinvent themselves constantly. I would rather go to Vietnam than hang out with actors. They are creepy creeps."

His refuge from La-La Land's insincerity has been, once again, music. In between takes, he has been sequestering himself in an L.A. studio with his band Bunny, recording an experimental album for Sony, also due out next year.

The pace-and media attention-amuse Gallo now, for 20 years after dreaming about leaving Buffalo, and then finally doing it, there is very little he hasn't done.

He seems finally to like who he is, or at the very least, the life he has managed to carve out from all the alienation, struggle and hustling.

He has a good apartment, (the same for over 15 years), good friends (Johhny Ramone is his closest) and reportedly many lovers. (His pick-up lines are New York legend, he has been linked to model Shalom Harlow, and he's rarely seen "without some beautiful creature hanging off his arm, or whatever," drawls Village Voice nightlife writer Micheal Musto.)

Capping it all off, next month, Gallo comes home to Buffalo for the first time in more than five years to shoot his film, "Buffalo '66."

The plot is dark and bleakly hilarious, centering around a wildly dysfunctional Buffalo family whose Italian parents are so oblivious to their son that he resorts to kidnapping a girl and bringing her home to dinner, in hopes that her coached bragging a bout him will make his parents notice him. (They don't.)

Extremely big names in Hollywood are said to be vying for the roles of his mother, father, and the girl he kidnaps outside the Studio Arena, where she is tap dancing to stay warm.

The Bills, the lottery, Tops, Scott Norwood's fateful kick and various landmarks figure prominently. And Gallo, the film'' writer-producer-star, wants Weber and Freeland to have roles.

And that is about all he wants. Not revenge. That's over with.

"Lately, I've fallen madly in love with the idea of Buffalo. The absurd extremes of the weather make the people there very extreme. The look of it is beautiful. Buffalo is representative of the aggression of the entire East Coast, and there's great charisma in that."

"Any revenge I would look for now would only be for purely comical reasons," he says. "I mean, from Buffalo to artist to music to film to modeling to my own movie. How brilliantly funny is all this, really, if you know me?"

Pulling no punches, mincing no words

I must find these girls.They are all I think of. These were unrequited loves."

* If you are one of these girls, contact me and I will give you this number.