You had to fill out more papers to get out than to get in. The first page they gave you was a personalized mimeo affair from the postmaster of the city. It began: “I am sorry you are te...

Dee Dee had to pick up her son at the airport. He was coming home from England for his vacation. He was 17, she told me, and his father was an ex-concert pianist. But he’d fallen for sp...

The toughest in the station. Apartment houses with boxes that had scrubbed-out names or no names at all, under tiny lightbulbs in dark halls. Old ladies standing in halls, up and down t...

very tall girl lifts her nose at m… outside a supermarket as if I were a walking garbage can; and I had no desire for her, no more desire

was on the train to Del Mar and I… to go to the bar car. I had a beer… back and sat down. pardon me,” said the lady next to… sitting in my husband’s seat.”

He hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be dominated by women and dollars but he screamed at me, F...

“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...

I got back, made love to Lydia several times, got in a fight with her, and left L. A. International late one morning to give a reading in Arkansas. I was lucky enough to have a seat by ...

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

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