#1993 #AmericanWriters #ThePleasuresOfTheDamned
my grandmother had a serious gas problem. we only saw her on Sunday. she’d sit down to dinner and she’d have gas.
Christmas eve, alone, in a motel room down the coast near the Pacific— hear it?
have we gone wrong again? we laugh less and less, become more sadly sane. all we want is the absence of others.
I had worked my charms on her for a couple of nights in a bar— not that we were new lovers, I had loved her for 16 months but she didn’t want to come to my…
That summer, July 1934, they gunned down John Dillinger outside the movie house in Chicago. He never had a chance. The Lady in Red had fingered him. More than a year earlier the banks h...
you may not believe it but there are people who go through life with very little friction or
murdered in the alleys of the land frost-bitten against flagpoles pawned by females educated in the dark for the dark vomiting into plugged toilets
the centerfielder turns rushes back reaches up his glove and
a house with 7 or 8 people living in it getting up the rent. there’s a stereo never used and a set of bongos
My father had two brothers. The younger was named Ben and the older was named John. Both were alcoholics and ne’er-do-wells. My parents often spoke of them. “Neither of them amount to a...
first time my father overheard me… this bit of music he asked me, “what is it?” “it’s called Love For Three Oran… I informed him.
I been readin’ you for a long time… I just put Billy Boy to bed, he got 7 mean ticks from somewhere… I got 2, my husband, Benny, he got 3.
screen like a burglar to take your… the snake had crawled the hole, and she said, tell me about yourself.
I walked into the counselor’s office. It was Eddie Beaver sitting behind the desk. The clerks called him “Skinny Beaver.” He had a pointed head, pointed nose, pointed chin. He was all p...
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...