of late I’ve had this thought that this country has gone backwards or 5 de cades

I was fairly drunk when it began and I took out my bottle and… along the way. I was reading a wee… Kandel and I did not look quite a… pretty but

the soldiers march without guns the graves are empty peacocks glide in the rain down stairways march great men smi… there is food enough and rent enou…

there he is: not too many hangovers not too many fights with women not too many flat tires never a thought of suicide

sitting in a dark bedroom with 3 j… female. brown paper bags filled with trash… everywhere. is one-thirty in the afternoon.

A day or so later I got a poem in the mail from Lydia. It was a long poem and it began: Come out, old troll, Come out of your dark hole, old troll, Come out into the sunlight with us an...

Dee Dee had to pick up her son at the airport. He was coming home from England for his vacation. He was 17, she told me, and his father was an ex-concert pianist. But he’d fallen for sp...

A month went by. R.A. Dwight, the editor of Dogbite Press wrote and asked me to do a foreword to Keesing’s Selected Poems. Keesing, with the help of his death, was at last going to get ...

Times were still hard. Nobody was any more surprised than I when Mears– Starbuck phoned and asked me to report to work the next Monday. I had gone all around town putting in dozens of a...

old grey-haired waitresses in cafes at night have given it up, and as I walk down sidewalks of light and look into windows

maybe I’ll win the Irish Sweepsta… maybe I’ll go nuts maybe Harcourt Brace will call or maybe unemployment insurance or rich lesbian at the top of a hill.

got into my BMW and drove down to… pick up my American Express Gold… told the girl at the desk what I wanted. you’re Mr. Chinaski,” she

in San Francisco the landlady, 80… Victrola up the stairway and I pl… until they beat on the walls. there was a large bucket in the ce… filled with beer and winebottles;

he was a good one say 18, 19, marine and every time woman came down the train aisle

dying for a beer dying for and of life on a windy afternoon in Hollywood listening to symphony music from m… on the floor.