Every route had its traps and only the regular carriers knew of them. Each day it was another god damned thing, and you were always ready for a rape, murder, dogs, or insanity of some s...

We were in the air twenty minutes when she took a mirror out of her purse and began to make up her face, mostly the eyes. She worked at her eyes with a small brush, concentrating on the...

was much easier to be a genius in… only 3 or 4 literary magazines and… or 5 times you could end up in Ger… you could possibly meet Picasso fo… maybe only Miró.

no way back to Barcelona. the green soldiers have invaded th… madmen rule Spain and during a heat wave in 1952 I b… no way back to the Rock of Gibral…

this poet he’d been drinking 2 or 3 days and he walked out on the stage and looked at that audience and he just knew he was going to do it. there was a grand piano on stage and he walke...

sitting on a 2nd-floor porch at 1:… while looking out over the city. could be worse. we needn’t accomplish great things…

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...

I was the last one off the plane and there was Joanna Dover. “Joanna, let’s have a Bloody Mary while we wait for my baggage. Oh hell, I don’t have any baggage. But let’s have a Bloody M...

My father always ran the neighborhood kids away from our house. I was told not to play with them but I walked down the street and watched them anyhow. “Hey, Heinie!” they yelled, “Why d...

all of a sudden I’m a painter. a girl from Galveston gives me $50 for a painting of a man holding a candycane while floating in a darkened sky.

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...

it was up in San Francisco after my poetry reading. it had been a nice crowd I had gotten my money I had this place upstairs