Ship of Fools “She poured wine for all of us. I picked up a glass and raised it in a toast and said, ‘Nostrovia ... Gorbachev... Nostro-via.’ The place erupted. The damn first engineer comes …

Robert Byron of La Mesa, who claims to be the only living direct male descendant of the poet Lord George Gordon Byron, gave us a call the other day. He sounded pleased. Although he’s known …

I brought in the accordion from my Mitsubishi. I remembered one Russian folk song, ‘Da-da-da-da ... ’ like that. It’s a Ukrainian song. Jesus Christ, they went crazy! Everybody was clapping along, buying drinks.

Thirteen years ago, while a freshman at a small private college in Florida, I picked up Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. An amusing, often vicious satire of mindless conformity and middle-class morals, Babbitt plucked a chord in …

“Everybody I know is dead. All the big shots that hung around the Grant Grill; they’re all dead now.” The liver-spotted hands of Kent Parker clench, relax. “San Diego was a much tougher town then …

Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.