La Jolla 1962 Dressed in long trousers and boat shoes and a white Lacoste tennis shirt, I accompanied Toby across Vista del Mar and Neptune Place to the Pump House and down concrete steps to …

Ten Reasons Why You’d Have to Be Crazy to Live in Borrego Springs To paraphrase what Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, there is no there there — no people (population: about 3000), no movie …

[Editor’s note: This is a condensed version of an article by Alexander Theroux that originally ran in the Reader on July 20, 1995, titled The Grammar of Rock ‘n Roll.] Rock ‘n’ roll music, any …

San Diego's intrepid metal finders The faint sound through the earphones is like the buzz of a mosquito on the other side of the room when you're trying to sleep. It nags at your attention, …

Decent life led by ordinary man He loved Lincoln, above all, and was word-perfect as to every facet of the assassins’ lives, especially Booth’s. Of special interest to him was the Battle of Bunker Hill, …

Orchids and Onions — 20 years later The ’95 jury opened by dubbing 1976 Orchid-winner Rancho Bernardo “the ultimate suburb.” Nicoloff and Collins concurred, calling it “one of the few really successful and well-planned new …

Among the creatures I put the dog on the table. I felt inexplicably ill at ease with just the dog, myself, and Dr. Smith there; it was a rare moment shared by just the two …

A Living Cloud The next morning, I am greeted by my media escort, Penny. This is a fascinating new feature of my life — escorts. They pick you up, drive you around, provide snacks, meals, …

Janet, My Mother, and Me “We went out to Belmont, and Harry couldn’t stop picking winners. We went to the 21 Club for dinner, and we scalped tickets for a Broadway musical in the fourth …

I am my own queen "Once, a guy, a drunk guy took my taxi from downtown. He wanted to go to this particular colonia, this neighborhood. It was raining, I remember. When I got there, …

Eating people is the ultimate control You won’t find Dahmer’s Diner on the bill at the Cannibal Bar in Mission Beach. In fact, DD has been banned from all but two venues in town, SOMA …

Just Relax and I'll Get Dinner I am stepping through the front door of Andronico’s, my countenance set to grim purpose. Andronico’s is a grocery store, the kind that doesn’t carry 1 variety of pear, …

Decent Life Led by the Ordinary Man I will never forget the time a monsignor from our church, favoring our simple household with a visit, stopped by and in the course of dinner, sat back, …

Are Off-Roaders Destroying Anza-Borrego? "A green-sticker dune buggy decides to drive in past the closure sign and fiddle around. There’s a camper back in there, and they have a verbal duel. The camper takes down …

Inside the Padres' lockers Caught looking. Tony Gwynn sat in a canvas-backed chair and peered into the wooden cubicle in front of him. “What’s in my locker?” he asked, repeating the question that had been …

Birth of the Beat Farmers Jerry Raney: “This guy from El Cajon High named Jack Chan knew how to play, we’d go out and get the Beatles songbooks and go through 'em and he’d teach …

Mafia in San Diego before World War II (first in series of six stories) “The raids, all made with search warrants, started soon after noon and were not completed until early evening. All of the …

I've got Perry Mason on board! In early 1960, the man who created Perry Mason was introduced to an Imperial Beach resident named Francisco Muñoz. Erle Stanley Gardner had many friends, and he particularly liked …

From Toro Peak to Fonts Point, barely Their plan was to start at Toro Peak, in the Santa Rosa Mountains just north of Borrego Springs, hike along the mountainous spine over Rabbit Peak and Villager …

Phoenix without apologies Traveler, consider our Phoenix. An hour away by air, this flat, posh suburb of Greater L.A. is your finest summer vacation bargain. For the price of a bad weekend in a tacky …

Theroux is an American novelist and poet and brother of novelist Paul Theroux and Peter Theroux, a translator of Arabic literary work. Alexander Theroux's best-known novel is Darconville's Cat (1981). Among his non-fiction works are …

It was all of it sad, godforsaken country. Last summer in a remote area south of here, around Split Mountain, a man whose car had broken down was found dead. He was shoeless and his brain had boiled.

Paul told me that if he had read my novel Darconville’s Cat in high school, he would never have started to write. And in a way, I began to write in order to catch up to him.

Black’s Beach. The “world’s largest nude beach” as it is commonly billed, it may come as something of a surprise to many San Diegans, is officially—legally, technically, formally—a non-nude beach. Clothing is not optional; it …

Avenida Revolucion begins at the boundary of the United States and Mexico, at the junction with Avenida Internacional where, at rush hour, cars come racing around the corner onto Revolucion. At the very bottom of …

"A GREAT DEAL OF VIRTUE AND PIETY” wrote Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, “is simply the easy price we pay in order to justify a life that is essentially trifling. Nothing is …

We were not allowed to talk about money at the table, crush the counters of our shoes, leave dirty silverware on the sideboard, or refer to our mother as “she,” which he found particularly disrespectful.

Only minutes before, Cochran had unctuously and fatuously portrayed the O.J. Simpson case as part of the long and unending struggle for civil rights in America, comparing this murder trial to the battles against slavery.

Parsing the demon-tongue of shake-your-groove-thang-ism.

So on that Sunday, young Dana — a stripling tar, 20 years old — walked into San Diego wearing a blue jersey, duck trousers, and a straw hat. He and his friend Stimson headed right to a “grog-shop.”

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.

"There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter who ever lived!" That was the goal — the constant wish — of The Kid as expressed not only in his autobiography My Turn at Bat (1969) but …

There have been many big mouths. William Randolph Hearst. Mick Jagger. Desi Arnaz. Wallace Beery. Nat “King” Cole. MacDonald Carey. Fifties singer Guy Mitchell. Probably no one has a bigger mouth than Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.