In bed I had something in front o… “Sorry, baby,” I said. Then I ro… Then something awakened me. It wa… “Go, baby, go!” I told her. I arched my back now and then. Sh…

The next day was Saturday and Debra cooked us breakfast. “Are you coming antique hunting with us today?” We ate in silence for a while, then she said, “I liked your reading at The Lance...

The track had moved down the coast a hundred miles or so. I kept paying the rent on my apartment in town, got in my car and drove down. Once or twice a week I would drive back to the ap...

all the women all their kisses the different ways they love and talk and need. their ears they all have

I have been hanging here headless for so long that the body has forgotten

Times were still hard. Nobody was any more surprised than I when Mears– Starbuck phoned and asked me to report to work the next Monday. I had gone all around town putting in dozens of a...

she wrote me for years. “I’m drinking wine in the kitchen. it’s raining outside. the children are in school.” she was an average citizen

watch them push the crippled and t… in their wheelchairs on to the electric lift which carries them up into the lon… where each chair is locked down

lonely as a dry and used orchard spread over the earth for use and surrender. shot down like an ex—pug selling dailies on the corner.

It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus stale baked food in the “non-profit” cafeteria. Plus the ...

I got a letter in the mail. It was addressed from Hollywood. Dear Chinaski: I’ve just read almost all your books. I work as a typist in a place on Cherokee Ave. I’ve hung your picture i...

Our man was there to meet us, Gary Benson. He also wrote poetry and drove a cab. He was very fat but at least he didn’t look like a poet, he didn’t look North Beach or East Village or l...

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...

big black beard tells me that I don’t feel terror I look at him