It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I ...

she’s young, she said, but look at me, I have pretty ankles, and look at my wrists, I have pret… wrists

“I’ve made it,” she said, “I’ve c… through.” she had on new boots, pa… and a white sweater. “I know what… want now.” she was from Chicago an… had settled in L.A.’s Fairfax dis…

The ultra-violet ray machine clicked off. I had been treated on both sides. I took off the goggles and began to dress. Miss Ackerman walked in. “Not yet,” she said, “keep your clothes o...

“It’s the manager, Freddy. He has started whistling this song. He’s whistling it when I come in in the morning and he never stops, and he’s whistling it when I go home at night. It’s be...

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 ...

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

the men phone and ask me that. are you really Charles Bukowski the writer? they ask. I’m a sometimes writer, I say, most often I don’t do anything.

Back in L.A., there was almost a week of peace. Then the phone rang. It was the owner of a Manhattan Beach nightclub, Marty Seavers. I had read there a couple of times before. The club ...

they’d come around and they’d ask “you finished your 2nd novel yet?” “no.”

in grievous deity my cat walks around he walks around and around with electric tail and

we talk about this film: Cagney fed this broad grapefruit faster than she could eat it and

in junior high school Big Max was a problem. we’d be sitting during lunch hour eating our peanut butter sandwiche… and potato chips.

half-past nowhere alone in the crumbling tower of myself stumbling in this the

A month went by. R.A. Dwight, the editor of Dogbite Press wrote and asked me to do a foreword to Keesing’s Selected Poems. Keesing, with the help of his death, was at last going to get ...