“You ought to try to be like Abe Mortenson,” said my mother, “he gets straight A’s. Why can’t you ever get any A’s?” “Henry is dead on his ass,” said my father. “Sometimes I can’t belie...

looking out the window smoking rolled cigarettes drinking Sanka and watching the workers come on in

I blacked out after that. I guess I had consumed more whiskey than I thought. I don’t remember arriving at Nicole’s. I awakened in the morning with my back to somebody in a strange bed....

you came out, she said, and then you kicked this guy’s car and then you threw yourself into a… you crushed the whole bush,

red hair real she whirled it and she asked “is my ass still on?”

I was hungover again, another heat spell was on—a week of 100 degree days. The drinking went on each night, and in the early mornings and days there was The Stone and the impossibility ...

this poet he’d been drinking 2 or 3 days and he walked out on the stage and looked at that audience and he just knew he was going to do it. there was a grand piano on stage and he walke...

he said, “I was working in Hollyw… working in Hollywood and he was the worst: he was too drunk to sta… end of the afternoon and so I had… into a taxi

In the morning Dee Dee drove me to the Sunset Strip for breakfast. The Mercedes was black and shone in the sun. We drove past the billboards and the nightclubs and the fancy restaurants...

nobody goes downtown anymore the plants and trees have been cut… Pershing Square the grass is brown and the street preachers are not a…

all of a sudden I’m a painter. a girl from Galveston gives me $50 for a painting of a man holding a candycane while floating in a darkened sky.