My father had two brothers. The younger was named Ben and the older was named John. Both were alcoholics and ne’er-do-wells. My parents often spoke of them. “Neither of them amount to a...

self-congratulatory nonsense as th… famous gather to applaud their see… greatness you wonder where

drunk and writing poems at 3 a.m. what counts now is one more tight

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

she wore a platinum blond wig and her face was rouged and powder… and she put the lipstick on making a huge painted mouth and her neck was wrinkled

I pick up the skirt, I pick up the sparkling beads in black, this thing that moved once around flesh,

I looked for a job all summer and couldn’t find one. Jimmy Hatcher caught on at an aircraft plant. Hitler was acting up in Europe and creating jobs for the unemployed. I had been with J...

you haven’t lived until you’ve been in a flophouse with nothing but one light bulb

A week later I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard with Lydia. A weekly entertainment newspaper published in California at that time had asked me to write an article on the life of the...

oh, how worried they are about my soul! I get letters the phone rings... “are you going to be all right?”

is a highrise apt. next door and he beats her at night and she… and I see her the next day standing in the driveway with curl… and she has her huge buttocks jamm…

Lydia phoned me in the morning. “Whenever you get drunk,” she said, “I’m going out dancing. I went to the Red Umbrella last night and I asked men to dance with me. A woman has a right t...