half drunk I left her place her warm blankets and I was hungover didn’t even know what town

ask the sidewalk painters of Paris ask the sunlight on a sleeping dog ask the 3 pigs ask the paperboy ask the music of Donizetti

screen like a burglar to take your… the snake had crawled the hole, and she said, tell me about yourself.

They had me in the counselor’s office in one of the back rooms of the second floor. “Let me see how you look, Chinaski.” He looked at me. “All right, Mr. Chinaski, we’d like to know whe...

The toughest in the station. Apartment houses with boxes that had scrubbed-out names or no names at all, under tiny lightbulbs in dark halls. Old ladies standing in halls, up and down t...

nobody goes downtown anymore the plants and trees have been cut… Pershing Square the grass is brown and the street preachers are not a…

I was asked to give a reading at a famous nightclub, The Lancer, on Hollywood Boulevard. I agreed to read two nights. I was to follow a rock group, The Big Rape, each night. I was getti...

Tony phoned and told me that Jan had left him but that he was a… helped him he said to think about… like D. H. Lawrence pissed off with life in general bu…

remember, he told me, that when I… years old my mother was always tak… to the doctor and saying, “he hasn… she was always asking me, “have yo… pooped?”

in the men’s room at the track this boy of about 7 or 8 years old came out of a stall

I was casing next to G.G. early one morning. That’s what they called him: G.G. His actual name was George Greene. But for years he was simply called G.G. and after a while he looked lik...

watch them push the crippled and t… in their wheelchairs on to the electric lift which carries them up into the lon… where each chair is locked down

consistency is terrific: shark-mouth grubby interior with an almost perfect body, long blazing hair—

I awaken about noon and go out to… in my old torn bathrobe. I’m hung over hair down in my eyes barefoot