I went with two ladies down to Venice to look for antique furniture. I parked in back of the store and went in with them.

got into my BMW and drove down to… pick up my American Express Gold… told the girl at the desk what I wanted. you’re Mr. Chinaski,” she

and the subnormal. all through grammar school junior high high school junior college

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

the strong men the muscle men there they sit down at the beach cocoa tans

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…

That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...

R.O.T.C. kept me away from sports while the other guys practiced every day. They made the school teams, won their letters and got the girls. My days were spent mostly marching around in...

I had boils the size of tomatoes all over me they stuck a drill into me down at the county hospital, and

Everybody had gym period at the same time. Baldy’s locker was about four or five down from mine in the same row. I went to my locker early. Baldy and I had a similar problem. We hated w...

the old folks play a game in the park overlooking the sea shoving markers across cement with wooden sticks. four play, two on each side

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...

drinking German beer and trying to come up with the immortal poem at 5 p.m. in the afternoon. but, ah, I’ve told the

he was just a cat cross-eyed, dirty white with pale blue eyes