Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Well, I had an English student named Berta in a class I was substituting. She had a motto that she got from her grandfather: Live and learn. Well Berta was talking about how she already had her five minutes of fame. Somebody with a camera had followed her around for a month in her job and life and made...

UNITED STATES—Then the boy got up and reflexively pulled down his shirt, so it covered his open fly. He peered out the window onto the gray street and flipped around the CLOSED sign. The bolt in the door made a solid clunking sound as it engaged with the doorframe. Mary pulled herself upright, grasping on of the cold black...

UNITED STATES—A couple days after my last day at the census bureau, I witnessed my first lock-out at Mr. Wylie’s house on St. Andrews Place. The victim was a tall bald guy with a greasy moustache. He hadn’t paid his rent for months. The lock-out was early, earlier than I would have gotten up normally. The white guy had...

UNITED STATES—One Tuesday afternoon, sunny and cool, lullabied by the sound of cars streaming from the 10 to the 110, I neared the end of another day on my Olivetti. Mac, the electrician, ran into the kitchen. “I was watching the World Series on TV,” he panted, his voice congested with emotion. “The camera started shaking. Then TV went...

UNITED STATES—Newton was in the mist of a siesta, recovering from a rigorous morning of sun and much traffic, dropping off a screenplay with his agent and doing a couple errands. He was just pleasantly drifting off. Max came and shook him by the shoulders. In one hand, he held the feeding bowl he had dug out, still specked...

UNITED STATES—I had no time to worry about the earthquake in Watsonville. Everything seemed to be falling apart at the house I was managing. The young couple from Mexico who shared the downstairs bay-window room off the other side of the kitchen had a new person living with them: Pedro’s dad from Puebla. Though his son wasn’t much more...

UNITED STATES—February 10, 1992, I said goodbye to Los Angeles. “The Strawberry Butterfly,” the screenplay that had grown from the chrysalis of “The Persecuted,” had not sold, but I had faith in it and Everett Lewis’ belief in it. Three years had come full circle. It was surely time for me to move on, and just as surely, when...

UNITED STATES—The Cinerama Dome is a geodesic souvenir. The Buckminster Fuller thing was supposed to run wild, architectural hubris being what it is, so it is unique, modest, and iconic in terms of what the sequel to 1962 brought us. It has been immortalized in Quentin Tarantino’s valentine to Hollywood and the summer of 1969—and now young hip tourists...

UNITED STATES—Allied Fruit wasn’t the only one pressing for intervention. Carneyism was at its peak, the Cold War was heating up, and conservatives in Congress and the Saurkraut administration were anxious to take on an apparent Red push in their own hemisphere. Many liberals, afraid of being labeled appeasers and soft, remained mum or joined in sounding the alarm....

UNITED STATES—The week of savage Black Friday crowds we would do well to consider loving neglect, the counterpart of radical love, discussed last week. Accepting this concept when dealing with others may add a degree of peace to the season some call the most harried time of the year. Loving neglect is where a laissez-faire environment is created for the...