I found a room on Temple Street in the Filipino district. It was $3.50 a week, upstairs on the second floor. I paid the landlady—a middle-aged blond—a week’s rent. The toilet and tub we...

R.O.T.C. (Reserve Officer Training Corps) was for the misfits. Like I said, it was either that or gym. I would have taken gym but I didn’t want people to sec the boils on my back. There...

Two mornings later, at 4 am, somebody beat on the door. I let Tammie in. She sat down and I opened a couple of beers. “I’ve got bad breath, I have these two bad teeth. You can’t kiss me...

she’s young, she said, but look at me, I have pretty ankles, and look at my wrists, I have pret… wrists

you have to have it or the walls w… in. you have to give everything up, th… away, everything away. you have to look at what you look…

he’s a runt he snarls and scratches chases cars groans in his sleep and has a perfect star above each…

you know I sat on the same barstool in Phi… 5 years I drank canned heat and the cheape… I was beaten in alleys by well-fed…

Vallejo writing about loneliness while starving to death; Van Gogh’s ear rejected by a whore;

There was this place. It stretched over the sea, it was built over the sea. An old place, but with a touch of class. We got a room on the first floor. You could hear the ocean running d...

That evening I started drinking. It wasn’t going to be easy without Katherine. I found some things she had left behind—earrings, a bracelet. I’ve got to get back to the typewriter, I th...

I had agreed to give a reading up north. It was the afternoon before the reading and I was sitting in an apartment at the Holiday Inn drinking beer with Joe Washington, the promoter, an...

Beowulf may have killed Grendel a… Grendel’s mother but he couldn’t kill this one:

Sara was preparing the turkey dressing and I sat in the kitchen talking to her. We were both sipping white wine. The phone rang. I went and got it. It was Debra. “I just wanted to wish ...