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

outside my window Sunday. I am eating a grapefruit. church is over at the… Orthodox to the west.

Fay was all right with the pregnancy. For an old gal, she was all right. We waited around at our place. Finally the time came. “It won’t be long,” she said. “I don’t want to get there t...

we have everything and we have not… and some men do it in churches and some men do it by tearing butt… in half and some men do it in Palm Spring…

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

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...

Beowulf may have killed Grendel a… Grendel’s mother but he couldn’t kill this one:

It was another Sunday that we got into the Model-T in search of my Uncle John. “He has no ambition,” said my father. “I don’t see how he can hold his god-damned head up and look people ...

Four or five days passed. The phone rang. It was Tammie. “Listen, Hank. You know that little bridge you cross in your car when you drive to my mother’s place?” “Well, right by there the...

When Jonstone saw me the next 5 a.m. he spun in his swivel and his face and his shirt were the same color. But he said nothing. I didn’t care. I had been up to 2 a.m. drinking and screw...

The funeral was to be at 10:30 a.m. but it was already hot. I had on a cheap black suit, bought and fitted in a rush. It was my first new suit in years. I had located the son. We drove ...

I was sitting in my shorts one afternoon a week later. There was a tender little knock on the door. “Just a moment,” I said. I put on a robe and opened the door. “We’re two girls from G...

she was sitting in the window of room 1010 at the Chelsea in New York, Janis Joplin’s old room. it was 104 degrees

Curly Wagner picked out Morris Moscowitz. It was after school and eight or ten of us guys had heard about it and we walked out behind the gym to watch. Wagner laid down the rules, “We f...