I'm in a gay bar called "Lester's." The strongest smell of the place isn't that of the gin or the beer or the cigarettes; it's the testosterone. All those homosexual men walking around are putting off a sexual scent so powerful it's making me dizzy. It's also making...
Erica skimmed the border between wakefulness and sleep, slowly emerging from a mellow, cradling fog of serenity. She rolled onto her side and laid her cheek upon her bedmate's back. She began to kiss her way along the subtle hillocks of vertebrae. Such delicious skin,...
She walks along the barren hall. There is no sound. Fluorescent lights flicker. She tries one door, then another but all are locked. Panic rises in her gut. On and on down the hall, each door refuses to yield. "Murrrp?" She looks down into the bright green eyes of a...
"Damn! I used to jimmy this thing all the time. Where's the flashlight?" I glanced over my shoulder at the road, then back to Guy's shape hunched in front of the door. "I think the battery's dead." "Don't chicken out now, Maur," Guy said, teeth gritted from cold and...
Pop rode from Oakland to Guam in my lap. I put my vintage green and yellow A's baseball cap over him so that people wouldn't notice the plain cardboard box with the gold embossed stamp, "Whiteside and Sons Funeral Directors." A dusty cobweb clung to the back corner of...
Tommy was the kind of guy all mothers want to see their daughters bring home. He was good natured, funny, and handsome. He gave up his seat on the bus for little old ladies. He carved turkey at the homeless shelter downtown every Thanksgiving. He sighed heavily every...
I rest my head on my forearm and stare up at the stars, wondering if anything out there in the heavens can compare to this. The campfire throws shadows on the canyon wall. I watch the darkly magnified pantomime of Billy's bent back and curly head bobbing between my...
Charlie Weyland had been to the offices of Blaine and Associates several times, but every time he entered their lobby, he felt like he'd gone to the wrong place. It just didn't look like a detective agency. The furniture looked too tasteful, the carpeting looked too...
Down past the old abandoned Speedway, twenty miles outside of town, there's a road that's just a dirt rut; a weaving ribbon on the ground. It doesn't lead to nowhere. It just snakes up to a ruin. Once an old man lived there, but he died before I was born. My daddy...
Preface. Janine was—meaning as I knew her then—an extraordinary person. She defied a succinct label. Perhaps the closest I can come is to say she lived unselfconsciously as though a parody, or even a satire, of sexuality. If you don't understand what I mean, I'm...