Miller Time

UNITED STATES—Eric Radcovich fit in, and Brendan didn't. That was how it was in college. Eric was into fitness and brought to the apartment a device that imprisoned your ankles and then you could hang upside down and develop a six-pack. Eric owned heat. That was how he came from the other apartment to live where Brendan had been...

UNITED STATES—Regrets, I’ve had a few, but not too few to mention. In fact, regret has been a dynamic force for change and improvement. I will even go so far as to say that it is one of the secret secrets of success: of course you must put shoes on regret and walk forward with the knowledge so painfully acquired. One...

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—The end of April, the city was in flames. Incredibly my new city, a week before had suffered an eight-mile explosion when a sewer full of gasoline exploded and left a permanent scar in Guadalajara, April 22. Then Los Angeles was in flames. A lot of people had seen it coming. "The Day of the Locust," Nathaniel West had...

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—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—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—Today was the day. Allegra Newton (nee Scruggs) had had enough of dental profiteering, and she was going to hold the dentist at gunpoint till he performed emergency work on her son. In preparation, she went to the living room, which had been overtaken by all her son’s toys in the trophy house they moved into after leaving...

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—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...