That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...

I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy,...

Fay was all right with the pregnancy. For an old gal, she was all right. We waited around at our place. Finally the time came. “It won’t be long,” she said. “I don’t want to get there t...

love, he said, gas kiss me off kiss my lips kiss my hair my fingers

Abe Mortenson was had enough to be around but he was just a fool. You can forgive a fool because he only runs in one direction and doesn’t deceive anybody. It’s the deceivers who make y...

R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corps) was for the misfits. Like I said, it was either that or gym. I would have taken gym but I didn’t want people to sec the boils on my back. There...

Then I started attending Mt. Justin Jr. High. About half the guys from Delsey Grammar School went there, the biggest and toughest half. Another gang of giants came from other schools. O...

the swans drown in bilge water, take down the signs, test the poisons, barricade the cow from the bull,

the schoolyard was a horror show:… freaks the beatings up against the wire f… our schoolmates watching glad that they were not the victim…

—he’s a dandy —small moustache —usually sucking on a cigar he tends to lean into cars as he transacts business