when I was in grammar school my parents were poor and in my lunch bag there was only a peanut butter sandwich.

he got knifed in broad daylight, c… holding his hands over his gut, dr… on the pavement. nobody waiting in line left their… he made it to the Mission doorway,…

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was—with my crazy 12 hour night I was no longer sure what was what—I said, "Look, baby, I’m sorry, but don’t you realize that this job is driving me...

over my radio now comes the sound of a truly mad org… can see some monk drunk in a cellar mind gone or found,

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 got up for a glass of water and as I walked into the kitchen I saw Picasso walk up to Joyce and lick her ankle. I was barefooted and she didn’t hear me. She had on high heels. She loo...

The guide took us all over the building. There were so many of us that they had to break us up into groups. We used the elevator in shifts. We were shown the employee’s cafeteria, the b...

I get many phonecalls now. They are all alike. “are you Charles Bukowski, the writer?” “yes,” I tell them.

I remember the Model-T. Sitting high, the running boards seemed friendly, and on cold days, in the mornings, and often at other times, my father had to fit the hand-crank into the front...

she’s up seeing my doctor trying to get some diet pills; she’s not fat, she needs the speed… I go down to the nearest bar and w… at 3:30 in the afternoon of a tues…

On Christmas I had Betty over. She baked a turkey and we drank. Betty always liked huge Christmas trees. It must have been 7 feet tall, and 1/2 as wide, covered with lights, bulbs, tins...

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 ...

I had Fridays and Saturdays off, which made Sunday the roughest day. Plus the fact that on Sunday they made me report at 3:30 p.m. instead of my usual 6:18 p.m. This Sunday I went in an...