Tag: First Person

When my autistic son is good, he’s very, very good. But when he’s bad, it’s horrid.

I took my great-grandmother’s maiden name to bring down the patriarchy. Dunno if the patriarchy noticed, but I feel better.

These Parts–I thought I was ready to go back to the land, but the land had other ideas.

She was cute, willing, and almost naked. I was smitten. But I knew that I was just another chick in the audience.

In the popular imagination William S. Burroughs was to have died with a syringe hanging out of his arm, sprawled in the nearly windowless apartment in New York’s Bowery that he’d nicknamed the Bunker. He spent his last two decades exploiting the grim, gray junkie persona of his best-known novel, Naked Lunch, and enjoying his […]

How my brother-in-law turned Beanies into Weenies.

I was out of breath, running down the gallery to my cell. I was running because I would be getting out the next morning, and for that there were seven prisoners within 20 feet ready to kick my ass. That’s the law of the penitentiary-of the Western Illinois Correctional Center, where I was serving time […]

I don’t want to suggest that her experience of Alzheimer’s is in any way representative, but Margaret is physically healthy and happy – even blissful.

When I was in my 20s, selling out was a hot topic of conversation among us young writers, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, and such. Twenty years later I was making car commercials. You’da thought I could’nt sink any lower. I could. Three years after car commercials I was writing and producing a 900-number psychic infomercial. I […]