Feature Stories
Pulling out a chair for Peggy, I notice there is a rank smell, and it’s coming from the kitchen. “I’ll be right back,” I mumble and roll over to the doorway. THERE’S A GREASE FIRE!
Walter Anderson, Jr., who runs the landmark Anderson Nursery on Pacific Coast Highway, said he remembers a photograph in the San Diego Union, circa 1970, of Teresa standing on Harbor Drive between a bulldozer and a palm.
“People don’t realize that when they’re hitting somebody, blood transfers onto whatever they’re using — not the first time, but by the time you come back like this” — he mimes a baseball bat coming down on a skull.
It looked like the fossil of a dinosaur, there on the CAT scan film. The veterinarian, Dr. Marjorie McMillan, pointed her index finger, the nail clipped, unpolished, toward the skull. “There and there,” she said. …
AA has been swamped by people sent to the program by courts: people arrest for drunk driving or other alcohol-related crimes.
“To have your hand in someone’s belly, helping surgically correct something that will allow them to live or palliate their pain, it’s an...experience. Especially if you know the person. Your eyes, your hands, all your senses are involved.”
No sleep comes, even after Mom’s sour-milk kisses goodnight. My sister, buried beneath a Day-Glo paisley bedspread matching mine, quiets or whispers to the cat. Mom-breath lingers on my upper lip, both comfort and disquieting …
I have quoted to myself enough passages from Dante, Othello, The Changeling, The Dunciad, Swift and Yeats, skip-rope rhymes, Lord Byron, Burma-Shave jingles, “Lycidas,” Proust, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Great Expectations to have tried to make them mine.
I never thought anyone would respond to the flier. The suit is ugly, the flower looks more appropriate for a funeral, and I’m posting with a 32-ounce can of Miller, Buttafuocco style. I’m every high …
I asked about Ginsberg. “Ginsberg,” Jan said, “has turned out to be a real hypocrite.. At the Beat Conference last year in May, he would come up to me and say, ‘How are you feeling, my dear?’"
We watch TV together. I listen to complaints about their health, answer ritualistic questions about my life, glance surreptitiously at my watch, and wait until it is over. We’ve never been “close.”
I got up, went in, pulled down my pants, sat down, thought, fucking often has nothing to do with being “lovers” and fucking seldom has much to do with literature and literature has nothing to …
“What’s developed since, are ‘personality bunnies,’ items as Willy Wacket, a hollow bunny with a tennis ball and tennis racket. There’s Dapper Dan, a hollow milk chocolate fellow who wears a pink candy top hat.”
Grunge replaced Goth as the year’s passing fashion fad, and soon she was wearing ripped jeans and flannel shirts to school, apparently no more acceptable to the peer groupies than black velvet and wan looks.
Mr. Ledgerwood said that he’d been eating a lot of carrots and spinach lately. “I used to suffer a lot from arthritis, and now I’m just as clean as can be. It is a surprise to me.
I'm rolling west in my unheated van, make a right toward the ocean on prospect. It’s a crisp Monday morning and downtown La Jolla is already too crowded. I poke around Silverado and Girard seeking …