The first thing I remember is being under something. It was a table, I saw a table leg, I saw the legs of the people, and a portion of the tablecloth hanging down. It was dark under the...

I remember the Model-T. Sitting high,… friendly, and on cold days, in the morni… father had to fit the hand-crank into th… many times in order to start the car. “A man can get a broken arm doing this.…

My father had two brothers. The younger… “Neither of them amount to anything,” sa… “You just come from a bad family, Daddy… “And your brother doesn’t amount to a da… My mother’s brother was in Germany. My…

It was another Sunday that we got into… “He has no ambition,” said my father. “… “I wish he wouldn’t chew tobacco,” said… “If this country was full of men like hi… over and we’d he running the laundries .…

I had begun to dislike my father. He was always angry about something. Wherever we went he got into arguments with people. But he didn’t appear to frighten most people; they often just ...

I didn’t have any friends at school, didn’t want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me. During lunch one day I was a...

There were continual fights. The teachers didn’t seem to know anything about them. And there was always trouble when it rained. Any boy who brought an umbrella to school or wore a rainc...

I took the envelope home to my mother and handed it to her and walked into the bedroom. My bedroom. The best thing about the bedroom was the bed. I liked to stay in bed for hours, even ...

By the time they called me to dinner I was able to pull up my clothing and walk to the breakfast nook where we ate all our meals except on Sunday. There were two pillows on my chair. I ...

Lila Jane was a girl my age who lived n… to play with the children in the neighbo… often got dull. I would go out and walk… things, bugs mostly. Or I would sit on… thing I imagined was that I was a great…

During the second and third grades I still didn’t get a chance to play baseball but I knew that somehow I was developing into a player. If I ever got a bat in my hands again I knew I wo...

One night my father took me on his milk route. There were no longer any horsedrawn wagons. The milk trucks now had engines. After loading up at the milk company we drove off on his rout...

I was in the 4th grade when I found out… the last to know, because I still didn’t… me while I was standing around at recess… “Don’t you know how it happens?” he aske… “What?”

Later in the hospital they were dabbing at my knees with pieces of cotton that had been soaked in something. It burned. My elbows burned too. The doctor was bending over me with a nurse...

My father always ran the neighborhood kids away from our house. I was told not to play with them but I walked down the street and watched them anyhow. “Hey, Heinie!” they yelled, “Why d...

I didn’t know exactly why but Chuck, Eddie, Gene and Frank let me join them in some of their games. I think it started when another guy showed up and they needed three on a side. I stil...

Of all the guys left in the neighborhood, Frank was the nicest. We got to be friends, we got to going around together, we didn’t need the other guys much. They had more or less kicked F...

Frank liked airplanes. He lent me all h… War 1. The best was Flying Aces. The d… and the Fokkers mixing it. I read all t… I liked going over to Frank’s place to… His mother wore high heels and had great…

The 5th grade was a little better. The other students seemed less hostile and I was growing larger physically. I still wasn’t chosen for the homeroom teams but I was threatened less. Da...

There were times when Frank and I were friendly with Chuck, Eddie and Gene. But something would always happen (usually I caused it) and then I would be out, and Frank would be partly ou...

Then I started attending Mt. Justin Jr… Delsey Grammar School went there, the b… gang of giants came from other schools.… the 9th grade class. When we lined up fo… our guts hanging out, heads down, should…

One day, just like in grammar school, like with David, a boy attached himself to me. He was small and thin and had almost no hair on top of his head. The guys called him Baldy. His real...

At Mt. Justin, biology class was neat. We had Mr. Stanhope for our teacher. He was an old guy about 55 and we pretty much dominated him. Lilly Fischman was in the class and she was real...

Our English teacher, Miss Gredis, was the absolute best. She was a blonde with a long sharp nose. Her nose wasn’t much good but you didn’t notice it when you looked at the rest of her. ...

Curly Wagner picked out Morris Moscowitz. It was after school and eight or ten of us guys had heard about it and we walked out behind the gym to watch. Wagner laid down the rules, “We f...

My mother went to her low-paying job each morning and my father, who didn’t have a job, left each morning too. Although most of the neighbors were unemployed he didn’t want them to thin...

Wagner wasn’t done with us. I was stand… “What are you doing, Chinaski?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” I didn’t answer.

Jr. high went by quickly enough. About the 8th grade, going into the 9th, I broke out with acne. Many of the guys had it but not like mine. Mine was really terrible. I was the worst cas...

That summer, July 1934, they gunned dow… movie house in Chicago. He never had a… repealed and my father drank Eastside be… everybody feel terrible. Roosevelt was… over the radio and everybody listened. H…

I got lucky the next day. They called m… doctor. I stripped down. He turned a ho… “Hmmm, hmmmm,” he said, “uh huh . . .” I sat there. “How long have you had this?”

The next day I sat in the hall in my green tin chair, waiting to be called. Across from me sat a man who had something wrong with his nose. It was very red and very raw and very fat and...

The drilling and squeezing continued for… result. When one boil vanished another w… of the mirror alone, wondering how ugly… my face in disbelief, then turn to exami… horrified. No wonder people stared, no w…

The ultra-violet ray machine clicked off… sides. I took off the goggles and began… What is she going to do to me, I though… “Sit up on the edge of the table.” I sat there and she began rubbing salve…

The next day in bed I got tired of waiting for the airplanes and I found a large yellow notebook that had been meant for high school work. It was empty. I found a pen. I went to bed wit...

The bandages were helpful. L.A. County Hospital had finally come up with something. The boils drained. They didn’t vanish but they flattened a bit. Yet some new ones would appear and ri...

Back at Chelsey High it was the same.… graduated but they were replaced by anot… cars and expensive clothes. I was never… the poor guys in or out of class. About a week into my second semester I…

But there were some good moments. My sometime friend from the neighborhood, Gene, who was a year older than I, had a buddy, Harry Gibson, who had had one professional fight (he’d lost)....

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...

One Sunday Jimmy talked me into going t… to go swimming. I didn’t want to he seen… body. But nobody would notice that. I h… but nobody would see that. I here was nothing to do and I didn’t h…

R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training C… said, it was either that or gym. I would… people to sec the boils on my back. Ther… sports or guys whose parents forced them… patriotic because they had more to lose…

R.O.T.C. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in...

“You ought to try to be like Abe Morten… “Henry is dead on his ass,” said my fath… “Don’t you want to be happy, Henry?” as… “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” said… “What’s going to become of you? How the…

Jimmy Hatcher worked part time in a gro… could get jobs he could always get one.… “Why don’t you come up to the apartment… “What for?” “I steal all the beer I want. I take it…

Graduation Day. We filed in with our caps and gowns to “Pomp and Circumstance.” I suppose that in our three years we must have learned something. Our ability to spell had probably impro...

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...

The first three or four days at Mears-S… similarity was a very dependable thing a… was an accepted fact. There wasn’t a sin… about it as I pushed my cart about. Was… were more intelligent than the stockcler…

“So you couldn’t hold a job for a week?” We were eating meatballs and spaghetti.… “What happened? Why did they can your a… I didn’t answer. “Henry, answer your father when he speak…

I looked for a job all summer and couldn’t find one. Jimmy Hatcher caught on at an aircraft plant. Hitler was acting up in Europe and creating jobs for the unemployed. I had been with J...

Everybody had gym period at the same time. Baldy’s locker was about four or five down from mine in the same row. I went to my locker early. Baldy and I had a similar problem. We hated w...

I only met one student at City College that I liked, Robert Becker. He wanted to be a writer. “I’m going to learn everything there is to learn about writing. It will be like taking a ca...

The war was going very well in Europe, for Hitler. Most of the students weren’t very vocal on the matter. But the instructors were, they were almost all left-wing and anti-German. There...

I found a room on Temple Street in the… a week, upstairs on the second floor. I… My first night there I discovered a bar… the entrance. I liked that. All I had t… home. The bar was full of little dark me…

A couple of nights later Becker walked… my address or he located me through the… “I will do anything honest or otherwise,… calls. Becker sat in a chair as I poured the w…

I saw a vacancy sign in the window in fr… cabby pull up. I paid him and walked up… had one black eye from the fight, anothe… lips were puffed. My left ear was bright… An old man came to the door. He was in…

After English class one day Mrs. Curtis asked me to stay. She had great legs and a lisp and there was something about the legs and the lisp together that heated me up. She was about 32,...

I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future. I didn’t like what I saw down there. Those men and women had no special daring or brilliance. They wanted what everybod...