Miller Time

UNITED STATES—In Danny’s coffee shop Uncle John looked at me levelly and said, “Someday you are going to hit it big.” He said it so jauntily, so casually—like a fact of nature. My uncle secretly implied that it may not happen right now. But it will happen. That’s a nice thing to put in your pocket and travel with. I...

UNITED STATES—This was the best year of my life. I shall make no feeble attempt to hang onto the unhangable and give up any pretense of clinging to a past even before the calendar relinquishes the year’s final dates. Nor shall I bore you with why this was the best year for me (you and I are so selfish...

UNITED STATES—Brendan Howe watched the hypnotic tumblings the drying socks and underwear through the glass circle of the dryer door. It was his first time here in the laundromat in the new neighborhood where he had moved after the divorce. Scribbling in a small spiral notebook, he sat in regimented plastic chairs, bolted to the floor. An attendant watered hanging ferns....

UNITED STATES—Even as the memory of the Christmas feast and the goat pit-barbecued in the driveway warmly lingered, I got new lessons in human nature, or at least a lesson in the nature of one human, named Mac Murphy, in the aftermath of his arrest for the stolen street signs. I took Mac at his word that he hadn't done...

UNITED STATES—I was flush in confidence, soon to complete a second draft of my screenplay, “The Persecuted,” on my Olivetti portable that fit snugly atop a sun-bleached street find Art Deco table, positioned by the driveway window where my eyes could wander to the tops of the palm trees tall my dreams. I had made a sweet deal to...

UNITED STATES—"First he said he was going to the library and now he's not answering my texts," says Sasha. The edge in her voice conveys a perfect trifecta of horrors, drugs, sex, lies. The ex-husband is worried about their son, very worried. "He sounded so sleepy over the phone," Jared exclaims. "I could have sworn he was here in bed...

UNITED STATES—The greatest influence Gabriel Garcia Marquez had over me was to open my eyes to the computer. This elder writer sung hosannas to the machine that allowed him to feel like a child again and to write as many as 45 pages in one session. It was Carolyn Kellogg who gave me the definitive push, she had a...

UNITED STATES—After the Delaney’s second tenure, the company gradually but steadily slid in till the year Richard Nixon ran for president, the new Nixon (thank you Bernard Lukasey, the public relations wiz manipulator extraordinaire) who said there were indeed some people he would not work for, including Hitler, whose people had sought to contract him, but Nixon he didn’t...

UNITED STATES—It all comes to a head for Agnes and her roommate. I said, Agnes, you came to share my apartment, and you've taken it over. My own apartment isn't mine and I wait on you hand and foot. Everybody around here has to pull their own weight. How can I be a nurse for other people if I...

UNITED STATES—Anybody who can take a cross-country trip with a dog and write a book has my respects. Mine is barely learning to let me read in peace. I have new respect for John Steinbeck. After a trip up north, I stopped in downtown Salinas to pay my respects and read part of a Swedish mystery which was just...