“your poems about the girls will s… 50 years from now when the girls a… my editor phones me. dear editor: the girls appear to be gone

Lydia and I were always fighting. She was a flirt and it irritated me. When we ate out I was sure she was eyeballing some man across the room. When my male friends came by to visit 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...

sleepy now at 4 a.m. hear the siren of a white ambulance,

Our English teacher, Miss Gredis, was the absolute best. She was a blonde with a long sharp nose. Her nose wasn’t much good but you didn’t notice it when you looked at the rest of her. ...

Fay was pregnant. But it didn’t change her and it didn’t change the post office either. The same clerks did all the work while the miscellaneous crew stood around and argued about sport...

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....

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

the men phone and ask me that. are you really Charles Bukowski the writer? they ask. I’m a sometimes writer, I say, most often I don’t do anything.

So gramps wrote Joyce a big check and there we were. We rented a little house up on a hill, and then Joyce got this stupid moralistic thing. “We both ought to get jobs,” Joyce said, “to...

you just don’t know how to do it, you know that, and you can’t do a lot of other useful things either. it’s the fault of the

great writer remains in bed shades down doesn’t want to see anyone doesn’t want to write anymore doesn’t want to try anymore;