Miller Time

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—As they sank into the couch, Mr. Monroy opted for Nescafe and Mrs. Monroy accepted the honey-ginger tea proffered by Mr. Wynn. "Thank you, Don Carlos," she said. With the real estate sharks absent, the 'don' reinserted in their courtly discourse. And she started to speak frankly about why they were forced into selling. "During the summer we got really...

UNITED STATES—It’s often easier to go unrecognized as a diet guru. And what happened after my daughter’s 8th grade graduation, has left me with a intricate desire to scream. I could scream. That’s right. After the blazing sunny ceremony, held on the lawn of Beverly Hills High School, a couple of parents, friends and children, now teen graduates clad in togas, adjourned...

UNITED STATES—Both are born in 1892. Ernst is being groomed to enter the family tailoring business. Max is bitten by the stage, though it’s unclear his enthusiasm rubbed off on Ernst, or the love of drama was something both Ernst and Max carried already and bounced off each other. The two had been childhood playmates and then they becaome...

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—Looking across a sea of white-enamel washers in the laundromat, Brendan watch the receding back of Radcovich. Brendan felt a pang at his candor in telling Radcovich about his marriage in Denmark. To his boyfriend. Why did he have to go and say that? But it was essential and true; of course he had to say it. Radcovich took...

UNITED STATES—Two British girls traveling in Los Angeles had met the poet Eric on a bus on his way home from the law office. They came breezing into the living room at Nadeau Dr. one evening around Boone's Farm hour. One of them had slightly buck teeth; they giggled a lot. After that, they kept coming to share their...

UNITED STATES—As the youngest of his children prepared to leave the nest—not tomorrow or the next day, but inevitably it would happen—the old vices came back, and a few new ones. The smoking (tobacco mostly) and drinking. Who's fooling whom? Kids see a lot now. In the middle school someone had to call 911 because a kid had overdosed...

UNITED STATES—Two thousand dollars was an unusually small amount for a trust deed. For that amount I had sewn up as collateral the whole ramshackle six-unit apartment house on 47th St. The payments came from Gus Morales as regular as clockwork, thus vindicating my faith in Gus and his family. There came a time when I would leave Los Angeles...

UNITED STATES—Not Toledo, as promised for the mythical roasted rabbit... but Segovia. We departed mid-morning after a sluggish morning due to the cumulative effects of all the merrymaking. Midday hunger drove us out of Madrid. We reached Segovia clustered around hills and ravines, full of tan buildings from the 1500s. A Roman aqueduct sweeps across one end of the town....