used to drive those trucks so hard and for so long that my right foot would go dead from pushing down on the accelerator.

But the next morning it was the sa… “That’s all, Chinaski. Nothing fo… It went on for a week. I sat ther… Then Bobby Hansen, one of the old… “I don’t care. I’m not kissing hi…

one of the terrible things is really being in bed night after night with a woman you no longer

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,...

it was Philly and the bartender sa… what and I said, gimme a draft, J… got to get the nerves straight, I’… going to look for a job. you, he s… a job?

my grandfather was a tall German with a strange smell on his breath… he stood very straight in front of his small house and his wife hated him

A day or so later I got a poem in the mail from Lydia. It was a long poem and it began: Come out, old troll, Come out of your dark hole, old troll, Come out into the sunlight with us an...

there was a frozen tree that I wan… but the shells came down and in Vegas looking across at a g… at 3:30 in the morning, I died without nails, without a co…

I finally, got a day off, and you know what I did? I got up early before Joyce got back in and I went down to the market to do a little shopping, and maybe I was crazy. I walked through...

she cut my toenails the night befo… and in the morning she said, “I th… just lay here all day.” which meant she wasn’t going to wo… she was at my apartment—which mean…

I forget the beginning time. 6 or 7 p.m. Something like that. All you did was sit with a handful of letters, take a streetmap and figure your run. It was easy. All the drivers took much...

I am driving down Wilton Avenue when this girl of about 15 dressed in tight blue jeans that grip her behind like two hand… steps out in front of my car

Two nights later I went over to Tammie’s place on Rustic Court. I knocked. The lights weren’t on. It seemed empty. I looked in her mailbox. There were letters in there. I wrote a note, ...

murdered in the alleys of the land frost-bitten against flagpoles pawned by females educated in the dark for the dark vomiting into plugged toilets

was much easier to be a genius in… only 3 or 4 literary magazines and… or 5 times you could end up in Ger… you could possibly meet Picasso fo… maybe only Miró.