I am waiting for my father. No matter the urgency, he makes everyone wait. I am no different than everyone, son or no. This is not entirely true. I am markedly different when it comes to material things. Being the …

Today I’m finally gonna do it. I’m gonna kill Frank, my stepfather. It’s exactly thirty days since I decided I had to, before he kills Jackie first. Jackie’s my little brother, and he’s not even three yet, and you can’t …

Having returned from the reading at The CAST, which went from exhilarating to extinguishing in the span of ten minutes when Baby Huey put the kibosh on any further performances, Karen and I went into a kind of cordial limbo, …

In a state of beer plus antihistamine, on a stomach empty as a dry tank, I wrote my monologue in a wired and woozy day/night burst. My government arts grant/unemployment would not go entirely to waste. It was the rant …

It was a sold out theatre for the monologist from New England via Manhattan. I had recently devoured Gray’s book Sex and Death to the Age 14 and loved every word, felt a kindred spirit, and I’d been trying to …

After laying me off, Frank Moe made sure to remind me to apply for unemployment ASAP. I appreciated his concern, almost as much as I appreciated losing my job. I did, of course, apply and I began collecting those jobless …

The moment I knew I had no future at M.G. Electric (not that I craved a long one) came the night the Iraq War broke out, and it occurred nowhere near the warehouse, nor during my hours of regular employment. …

Tommy left the TV on his desk the entire week, and it was tuned to the war every second. Orders were down, the days dragged, and we all found ourselves watching that violent screen more than we should have. It …

After my night out with the Hank and the other guys, when I’d smoked too much pot and drank too much tequila, when I’d sloppy sneezed on a girl who kissed me, when my warring brains had wracked me with …

It was supposed to have been a night out with the warehouse guys. But it had toked into a night out with myself, stoned beyond my gourd’s capacity, and lost in the shadowy darkness of Hank’s Scripps Ranch condo complex. …

“So Hank pestered me into agreeing to go out with the guys on Friday night.” I said this to Karen as we were eating dinner at her house sometime that week. I did not, however, mention that Hank had said …

“What’s up with you and your lady?” Hank asked me as he climbed onto the pallet that I’d just scooped up with the forklift. It was a few months into my M.G. Electric tenure, holiday season fast approaching. “You still …

“What’s up, Cool Daddy-O?!” Tommy, the shipping/receiving clerk, gave me the nickname during my first week at M.G. Electric. Long hair plus goatee equaled Cool Daddy-O. And it stuck. “How much acid did you drop this weekend, Cool Daddy-O?” “Cool …

As I sat across the desk from him, squinting through the fumes of his Tanqueray and tater-tots lunch at the strip club, M.G. Electric co-founder Frank Moe looked over my application with a subtle frown, which concerned me, littered as …

Fortunately, Mr. ESPN play-by-play man turned out to be a nice guy, and he was entertaining from the moment he plopped his plump and perspired butt into the passenger seat of the network’s white rental sedan. That he sat in …

I’m jumping ahead here for a stretch because spring training has just begun, and baseball is in the air. In the summer of 1991, after I’d been laid off from my job delivering electrical supplies (a stint we’ll dissect in …

When J and Quinn moved in together late in the summer of 1990, my time on Ward Road was over, but I chose (for reasons chain-bound to my barely functional, first-love induced, emotional retardation) to stay in San Diego for …

After I took the job hauling electrical supplies in a stake-bed truck, Karen and I maintained a silence for almost two weeks. This one felt differently, deeper, I could sense that crumbling again, but it was exponentially more dire than …

As the 1990’s rolled in, Karen and I, like almost everyone else we knew, had been captivated by the political events around the world the previous year. The communists in eastern Europe were on the ropes, but in China there …

It’s odd to think of how much different it was looking for a job twenty years ago. For decades, millennia perhaps, job hunting went largely unchanged. In the summer of 1989 you still read through the want-ads in a real …