On Thursday night Bobby phoned again. “Hey, man, what are you doing?” “Oh, come on, man, I’ll just stay for a few beers. . . .” “You treat him mean. He gets lonely when his wife is at w...

I’ve always had trouble with money. this one place I worked everybody ate hot dogs and potato chips

the goldfish sing all night with g… and the whores go down with the st… the whores go down with the stars I’m sorry, sir, we close at 4:30, besides yr mother’s neck is dirty,

the schoolyard was a horror show:… freaks the beatings up against the wire f… our schoolmates watching glad that they were not the victim…

That night I gave another bad reading. I didn’t care. They didn’t care. If John Cage could get one thousand dollars for eating an apple, I’d accept $500 plus air fare for being a lemon....

here things are tough but they’re mostly always tough. basically I’m just trying to get a… with the female. when you first meet them their eyes

Nothing matters but flopping on a mattress with cheap dreams and a beer as the leaves die and the horses d… and the landladies stare in the ha…

I am in this low—slung sports car painted a deep, rich yellow driving under an Italian sun. I have a British accent. I’m wearing dark shades

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...

I mean, I just slept I awoke with a fly on my elbow and I named the fly Benny then I killed him and then I got up and looked in th…

We got back to 1010. I had my check. I’d left word that we didn’t want to be disturbed. Tammie and I sat drinking. I’d read 5 or 6 love poems about her. “They knew who I was,” she said....

re-reading some of Fante’s The Wine of Youth in bed this mid-afternoon my big cat

at exactly 12:00 midnight 1973-74 Los Angeles it began to rain on the palm leaves outside my window

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...

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