Three or four days later I found her note and phoned Debra. She said, “Come on over.” She gave me the directions to Playa del Rey and I drove over. She had a small rented house with a f...

After nine or ten hours people began getting sleepy and falling into their cases, catching themselves just in time. We were working the zoned mail. If a letter read zone 28 you stuck it...

“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...

a symphony orchestra. there is a thunderstorm, they are playing a Wagner overture and the people leave their seats u… and run inside to the pavilion

I had begun to dislike my father. He was always angry about something. Wherever we went he got into arguments with people. But he didn’t appear to frighten most people; they often just ...

she pulled her dress off over her head and I saw the panties indented somewhat into the crotch.

New Year’s Eve was another bad night for me to get through. My parents had always delighted in New Year’s Eve, listening to it approach on the radio, city by city, until it arrived in L...

the virus holds the concepts give way like rotten shoelaces toothache and bacon dance on the lawn

I was in the 4th grade when I found out about it. I was probably one of the last to know, because I still didn’t talk to anybody. A boy walked up to “Your mother has a hole . . .”—he to...

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,...

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was—with my crazy 12 hour night I was no longer sure what was what—I said, "Look, baby, I’m sorry, but don’t you realize that this job is driving me...

I only met one student at City College that I liked, Robert Becker. He wanted to be a writer. “I’m going to learn everything there is to learn about writing. It will be like taking a ca...