Miller Time

UNITED STATES—The filmmaker Everett Lewis with whom I was collaborating on “The Strawberry Butterfly” used to peer down and say “yep yep yep” when a scene in the screenplay clicked. The pages mounted, almost effortlessly; the Brother Word processor kept humming. Finally, come December, Everett took one last look at the batch of pages, now over 105, and said...

UNITED STATES—The farmhouse was farther away than it looked. The brothers, flanking Zorba --former Detective Zorba-- trudged as the crow flies toward the white clapboard house and they crossed through a cornfield that was tall, almost tall as they were. The razor-sharp edges of its long silky green leaves cut Zorba’s bare hands. The former detective pondered an urge to...

UNITED STATES—The die was cast: An opalescent pile of pill-pods glittered hypnotically in the noon day sun, which spared the eye little that was unpleasant, such as the raw welts near the base of the spine where the pill-pods had been lanced. It seemed later, but the sundial—one of the crude technologies permitted by the old lady inside The...

UNITED STATES—The revamping of the Palmer House, a fleabag of over 100 rooms, didn’t just occur out of the blue. Nothing ever did in Wylie’s world. The city was tightening the thumbscrews on landlords. There had been cases of landlords in Pico Union and Westlake, slumlords chained to their own apartments in punishment for renting substandard apartments. That said,...

UNITED STATES—Sam early on discovered one of the secrets of his success. He could not fret over what he could not control. He'd be politely reading, even in advanced age this invisible eminence who was flattered by his friends' indifference to his earthly achievements. He would see a lady with a baby stroller struggling with the door during the...

UNITED STATES—The obituary for the celebrated Look-Life shutterbug, Phil Stern, whose lens caught scenes of war and froze iconic images of Marilyn and James Dean for all time, struck a dissonant chord when the scribe just had to chip in “Stern, a longtime smoker, had emphysema.” You know, maybe he died because he was older than the hills (he was...

UNITED STATES—The drug store was a place where the community manifest itself. People could make any old comment about the weather and it would pass for wit, or they could rib my dad about his shirttail sticking out. That was an enduring, endearing sartorial feature of a man oblivious to the physical details of a shirttail sticking out. Once...

UNITED STATES—It was not the “constitution” per se that got Allied Fruit Co. back up again and going. It was the energy behind the policies. It was a new deal, and the new deal was an old deal, going back to the lean and small Chamelecón Co. format, the minnow that swallowed the whale of Allied; it was a...

UNITED STATES—In Hollywood, I ran into some French tourists and their children. One of the dads told me, "We feel good in Hollywood." I replied, "You come here to feel good, and I go to Paris to feel good." We laughed. Of course when I said that I was thinking really of Madrid, and those days in the end of...

UNITED STATES—Since Denny wasn't so bright, he had thought he could get the cash for Danielle's fender-bender pay-off at the ATM. It exceeded his daily limit. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) they were in luck (or unlucky) depending if you were in Danielle's Ferragamo's or Denny's Dan Post boots. "One-thousand five-hundred d-d-d-dollars," Denny stammered. The bank teller...