#Americans #XXCentury
So I was surprised when the phone rang a couple of nights later and it was Cassie. “What are you doing, Hank?” She gave me the address, it was either Westwood or West L. A. “I have plen...
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 ...
Beowulf may have killed Grendel a… Grendel’s mother but he couldn’t kill this one:
the phone rang at 1:30 a.m. and it was a man from Denver: “Chinaski, you got a following in Denver...” “yeah?”
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...
On the elevator up, I was the only white man there. It seemed strange. They talked about the riots, not looking at me. “Jesus,” said a coal black guy, "it’s really something. These guys...
I had to fly to Illinois to give a reading at the University. I hated readings, but they helped with the rent and maybe they helped sell books. They got me out of east Hollywood, they g...
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 stop my car at the signal I see her walking past the graveya… as she walks past the iron fence I can see through the iron fence and I see the headstones
the critics now have me drinking champagne and driving a BMW and also married to a socialite from
I can see myself now after all these suicide days and n… being wheeled out of one of those… (of course, this is only if I get… by a subnormal and bored nurse
one of the terrible things is really being in bed night after night with a woman you no longer
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...
red summers and black satin charcoal and blood ringing the sheets while snails are stepped on and moths go batty
Lila Jane was a girl my age who lived next door. I still wasn’t allowed to play with the children in the neighborhood, but sitting in the bedroom often got dull. I would go out and walk...