re-reading some of Fante’s The Wine of Youth in bed this mid-afternoon my big cat

A week later I was driving down Hollywood Boulevard with Lydia. A weekly entertainment newspaper published in California at that time had asked me to write an article on the life of the...

I found that the only way I could keep from dizzy-spelling into my case was to get up and take a walk now and then. Fazzio, a supervisor who had the station at the time, saw me walking ...

After English class one day Mrs. Curtis asked me to stay. She had great legs and a lisp and there was something about the legs and the lisp together that heated me up. She was about 32,...

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

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...

The voices of the people were the same, no matter where you carried the mail you heard the same things over and over again. “You’re late, aren’t you?” “Where’s the regular carrier?” “He...

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…

more wasted days, gored days, evaporated days. more squandered days, days pissed away,

I had boils the size of tomatoes all over me they stuck a drill into me down at the county hospital, and

Of all the guys left in the neighborhood, Frank was the nicest. We got to be friends, we got to going around together, we didn’t need the other guys much. They had more or less kicked F...

Then I started attending Mt. Justin Jr. High. About half the guys from Delsey Grammar School went there, the biggest and toughest half. Another gang of giants came from other schools. O...