if I suffer at this typewriter think how I’d feel among the lettuce— pickers of Salinas?

I’d tell them to have an unhappy l… affair, hemorrhoids, bad teeth and to drink cheap wine, avoid opera and golf and chess, to keep switching the head of thei…

dying for a beer dying for and of life on a windy afternoon in Hollywood listening to symphony music from m… on the floor.

But then it began raining again. The Stone had me out on a thing called Sunday Collection, and if you’re thinking of church, forget it. You picked up a truck at West Garage and a clipbo...

when I was in grammar school my parents were poor and in my lunch bag there was only a peanut butter sandwich.

The 5th grade was a little better. The other students seemed less hostile and I was growing larger physically. I still wasn’t chosen for the homeroom teams but I was threatened less. Da...

there are beasts in the salt shake… and airdromes in the coffeepot. my mother’s hand is in the bag dra… and from the backs of spoons come the cries of tiny tortured animals…

the old L.A. Public Library burn… down that library downtown and with it went large part of my

I know that some night in some bedroom soon my fingers will rift

Then I developed a new system at the racetrack. I pulled in $3,000 in a month and a half while only going to the track two or three times a week. I began to dream. I saw a little house ...

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...

Dee Dee had to pick up her son at the airport. He was coming home from England for his vacation. He was 17, she told me, and his father was an ex-concert pianist. But he’d fallen for sp...

I think of automobiles parked in a parking lot when I think of myself dead I think of frying pans when I think of myself dead

around 2 a.m. in my small room after turning off the poem machine for now

this one always arrives at the wrong time a basically good sort I suppose an honest man