We got back to 1010. I had my check. I’d left word that we didn’t want to be disturbed. Tammie and I sat drinking. I’d read 5 or 6 love poems about her. “They knew who I was,” she said....

my mother, father and I walked to the market once a week for our government relief food: cans of beans, cans of

she was a short one getting fat and she had once been beautiful and she drank the wine she drank the wine in bed and

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...

all the women all their kisses the different ways they love and talk and need. their ears they all have

Curly Wagner picked out Morris Moscowitz. It was after school and eight or ten of us guys had heard about it and we walked out behind the gym to watch. Wagner laid down the rules, “We f...

I forget the beginning time. 6 or 7 p.m. Something like that. All you did was sit with a handful of letters, take a streetmap and figure your run. It was easy. All the drivers took much...

they laugh continually even when a board falls down and destroys a face or distorts a

The war was going very well in Europe, for Hitler. Most of the students weren’t very vocal on the matter. But the instructors were, they were almost all left-wing and anti-German. There...

“It’s the manager, Freddy. He has started whistling this song. He’s whistling it when I come in in the morning and he never stops, and he’s whistling it when I go home at night. It’s be...

She wasn’t really a cop, she was a clerk-cop. And she started coming in and telling me about a guy who wore a purple stick pin and was a “real gentleman.” “Well,” I’d ask, “how was old ...

I used to hold my social security… up in the air, he told me, but I was so small they couldn’t see it,

yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m… don’t knock if the lights are out or you hear voices or then I might be reading Proust if someone slips Proust under my d…