Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Nine minutes of video brought many White people a sudden awareness that different treatment for people of brown and browner skinbn was a real thing. Say the name, George Floyd. I was not a newcomer to that unequal treatment. When a friend of mine, a widely traveled Rhode Islander, came to Los Angeles for the first time five years...

UNITED STATES—I reviewed my diary from 1989-90 and found an entry that divulged much more about the weather and a prize fight watched on television than what I tersely referred to “an interesting proposal.” The proposal was a plane ticket to Amsterdam and a job packaging opiates to be sent back to the U.S. At the time I noted,...

UNITED STATES—The Jones moved in. They were the picture of happiness. The young couple who had been wed in Las Vegas got Mac’s recently vacated room, the nicest and most spacious in the house. It had a window bay and a huge closet, where Mac had stored all the illicit street signs. If that closet had had its own...

UNITED STATES—Part of the mystique of Cafe Om was for people to gather at this hole in the wall and know people by face and remain ignorant of their resume. Which goes contrary to what is usually so up front here when it comes to small talk: what project are you doing? What is your goal? There’s something nice about...

UNITED STATES—There had been a boiling point reached the day before when Yglesias was digging out a trench for a new irrigation canal with a steam shovel. They had been in the banana forest when they heard a huge explosion, it could have been one of the Americans dynamiting fish, and it could have just as easily been an...

UNITED STATES—As 1991 matured from spring to autumn, Ahmet, the Turkish husband of Dee had his second job in Santa Monica, in addition to the car wash. And he needed a lift to the record store. With the Subaru I went into uncharted territory west. Afterward, he insisted on buying me a hot chocolate, thus exposing me to another...

UNITED STATES—In April, when I took over the managerial duties for all the Wylie properties, no sooner had I moved out of Estrella Avenue, and every  thing boiled over. Tenant squabbles, empty rooms, drug dealing. The house didn’t go to pot; it went to crack. It was horrid; it was entertaining. Because I didn’t have to live there any...

UNITED STATES—Indeed. The different chapter for the world had begun. It was a phone that was the start of definitively breaking relations with the Underground Cities in 2033, Zorba recalled. The Leader “up there” had abolished all phones in a startling degree. Years earlier photography had been abolished. Phones had been thought to make people stupid, to ridicule them...

UNITED STATES—It was splendid, driving home from the university and taking the scenic route, winding down Sunset Boulevard, where all is green, dark and shady. You pass by the monastery, the route punctuated by green lights and yellow lights that blink and flash. The screams of children wafted through the open cabriolet window, down a crack. Danielle shivered for...

UNITED STATES—Lead by curiosity. . . Really Sam’s story began when he had that $8000  burning a hole in his pocket, as they say. Due to his deep conviction that he was fated to make a name for himself, while wandering around the French quarter, he saw a dimly-lit alcove behind a muslin curtain billowing in the hot wet...