the ladies of summer will die like… and the lie the ladies of summer will love so long as the price is not forever

I drank for the next week. I drank night and day and wrote 25 or 30 mournful poems about lost love. It was Friday night when the phone rang. It was Mercedes. “I got married,” she said, ...

I’ve always had trouble with money. this one place I worked everybody ate hot dogs and potato chips

The next thing I knew, I had a young girl from Texas on my lap. I won’t go into details of how I met her. Anyway, there it was. She was 23. I was 36. She had long blonde hair and was go...

yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m… don’t knock if the lights are out or you hear voices or then I might be reading Proust if someone slips Proust under my d…

I had Fridays and Saturdays off, which made Sunday the roughest day. Plus the fact that on Sunday they made me report at 3:30 p.m. instead of my usual 6:18 p.m. This Sunday I went in an...

like the fox run with the hunted and if I’m not the happiest man on earth

New Year’s Eve was another bad night for me to get through. My parents had always delighted in New Year’s Eve, listening to it approach on the radio, city by city, until it arrived in L...

Well, I took the scheme sheet and I related everything to sex and age. This guy lived in this house with 3 women. He belt-whipped one (her name was the name of the street and her age th...

sometimes I forget about him and h… innocence, almost idiotic, awkward… he liked walking over bridges and… to night I think about him, the wa… one felt space between his lines,…

They had me in the counselor’s office in one of the back rooms of the second floor. “Let me see how you look, Chinaski.” He looked at me. “All right, Mr. Chinaski, we’d like to know whe...

On Thursday night Bobby phoned again. “Hey, man, what are you doing?” “Oh, come on, man, I’ll just stay for a few beers. . . .” “You treat him mean. He gets lonely when his wife is at w...