Meanwhile, there was still Joyce, and her geraniums, and a couple of million if I could hang on. Joyce and the flies and the geraniums. I worked the night shift, 12 hours, and she pawed...

I had been sleeping on a terrible mattress with the springs sticking into me for several years. That afternoon when I awakened I pulled the mattress off the bed, dragged it outside, and...

used to drive those trucks so hard and for so long that my right foot would go dead from pushing down on the accelerator.

3 small boys run toward me blowing whistles and they scream you’re under arrest! you’re drunk!

the swans drown in bilge water, take down the signs, test the poisons, barricade the cow from the bull,

at the window I watch a man with a power mower the sounds of his doing race like flies and bees

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 ...

my first and only wife painted and she talked to me about it: it’s all so painful

sleep at Lila’s and in the morning we get the breakfast special at th… then it’s up to her friend Buffy’s… Buffy has boy twins, father in dou… in a $150-a-month apt.

he talks like he writes and he has a face like a dove, unt… externals. little shiver of horror runs throu… about

Lydia had two children; Tonto, a boy of 8, and Lisa, the little girl of 5 who had interrupted our first fuck. We were together at the table one night eating dinner. Things were going we...

women don’t know how to love, she told me. you know how to love but women just want to leech.

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