I used to hold my social security… up in the air, he told me, but I was so small they couldn’t see it,

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

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I ...

sun-stroked women without men on a Santa Monica Monday; the men are working or in jail or insane;

my father was a practical man. he had an idea. you see, my son, he said, I can pay for this house in my lif… then it’s mine.

people went into vacant lots and pulled up greens to cook and the men rolled Bull Durham or smoked Wings (10 a pack) and the dogs were thin and the cats were thin and the cats learned h...

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...

I got lucky the next day. They called my name. It was a different doctor. I stripped down. He turned a hot white light on me and looked me over. I was sitting on the edge of the examina...

suppose like others have come through fire and sword, love gone wrong, head-on crashes, drunk at sea, and I have listened to the simple…

It was 3 or 4 days before I had to fly to Houston to give a reading. I went to the track, drank at the track, and afterwards I went to a bar on Hollywood Boulevard. I went home at 9 or ...

if I suffer at this typewriter think how I’d feel among the lettuce— pickers of Salinas?

in the center of the action you have to lay down like an anima… until it charges, you have to lay down

she’s from Texas and weighs 103 pounds and stands before the mirror combing oceans of reddish hair

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...

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