Stories. My stories. (Not all them of them are fiction.)
There are three material things I love greatly in life, three hedonistic focuses if you will. Coffee, Books, and Movies. I wouldn’t choose a life absent of any one of those things. Not that I’d give up my whiskey, tobacco, marijuana, cherry pie, or chocolate without a violent struggle. Those are just not really the hills I’d choose to die on, all things considered.…
When Harry met Morrie it was 1969. They were two young men, both in their early twenties, both recently released from military service. Morrie was a Navy man while Harry had been in the Marines. Harry had been to Vietnam and was discharged with a Purple Heart he never talked about. In later years whenever Morrie would drive Harry would remind him their relationship…
It is always the end of the world these days. Everyone is apoplectic. No one is apologetic. It used to be that the end of the world would come and go like the tide but it’s everywhere these days like a flood. You pick up the newspaper and the headlines scream it at you. You ride the train to work and all the eyes…
It was Tuesday and I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard when this woman approached me. Her skin was pale and her face so caked with cosmetics she could be the walking dead and no one would notice. She was wearing an overcoat the color of pea soup and a strange hat that looked as if it were made from an old cigar box. After…
It was the day after somebody shot Cindy Ryder’s dog with a crossbow and most of the people in town had heard about it. The dog wasn’t a particularly well-loved animal, but the shooting of any pet tends to heighten anxieties in such a small community. A group of animal lovers had gathered early in the morning before business hours outside the Landsburg General…
There were two bits of advice Bob Ranger gave his brother Kevin before the latter shipped off to college in California. “Never borrow more than you can repay,” Bob advised. “and stay away from women with dogs.” The first piece of wisdom was commonplace and straight out of Shakespeare. You had to be familiar with Bob Ranger’s history to understand the relevance and significance…
Jimmy Killingsworth always told me I keep too many irons in the fire. He was the first person to give me a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, the man who turned me on to Pynchon, so I was inclined to take his advice in every area but that one. It was also a delight to entertain him with ridiculous stories of how I managed to…
On my first official day of work with the Agency, I went to the main office on Wilshire Boulevard and was told to report immediately to a separate location in West Hollywood. The Agency was expanding and setting up a new office, and I was one of the lucky elite who would help set up that office. It sounded neither lucky nor elite to…
When I first came to Hollywood, a cauldron of unholy loves sang all around my ears. Which is to say, I was a production assistant at a talent agency that specialized in representing fashion models. This may sound like the ideal job for a young hetersexual male, but while interacting such women may be the object of most male fantasies, the professional reality of…
Tuesday is always a good day to visit the Fairfax Farmer’s Market. There’s rarely a crowd, only in summer when long tour buses line up along 3rd and hordes of Japanese and Germans crowd the market. Since the grass knoll and flashy shops of the nearby Grove were built, the place has also become a haven for yuppie moms pushing four-figure strollers, often two-seats…