Miller Time

UNITED STATES—“It’s nearly noon.” “That’s amazing. I hadn’t realized,” Suzanne said. “Sunday morning evaporates.” Everyone was clustered at the door of the café and Daniel had to go. They were standing and staying and he was going. It had reached the point—there was a precise millimetric point every day when it was no good anymore, and he had to go. Then Peter came...

UNITED STATES—The Grimes had a neighbor who had no manners. It was embarrassingly obvious even to the youngest Grimes, Max. Any fool with eyes could see Max was on his way to somewhere, waiting for his car to come and buried in earphones. He wasn't in the mood for conversation or people getting in the way of his song....

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 Danny’s coffee shop Uncle John looked at me levelly and said, “Someday you are going to hit it big.” He said it so jauntily, so casually—like a fact of nature. My uncle secretly implied that it may not happen right now. But it will happen. That’s a nice thing to put in your pocket and travel with. I...

UNITED STATES—My jailhouse visit to Mac reminded me of the beauty of being free. But all was not free; only my fake walnut-paneled room with the sexy Budweiser poster and the panaderia calendar, charting out the new concept of 1990--that was free. I have an acute sense of survival. I knew I had to get some more money action going...

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—One night in New York we went to the Angelica Theater in the Village and saw David Lynch’s ‘Wild at Heart.’ I got to see that scene where Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage come across a dead-still single car crash in the middle of the desert, the headlights still on. The tires still slowly spinning. Amazingly, a couple weeks...

UNITED STATES—The writer-director Everett Lewis called me up a week or so later and said he had read my screenplay. He said it was basically a mess, but his terms were much more genteel. Within that mess he saw the germ of something real in its treatment of Satan worshiping teens. I had touched on something that was truly...

UNITED STATES—The second half of Otis Quigley Keefauver’s ambitious new Freud-inspired fictional spree begins promisingly enough. After defeating Great Britain, Germany annexes it to the Reich. Drunk on power, Hitler decides to have a plebiscite. At first no one knows what a plebiscite is, and they have everything fumigated. After the votes are counted, Hitler is ousted, peace breaks out...

UNITED STATES—Money in the bank--that's what this new iteration of the screenplay way.  Confident, buoyant, even a little cocky. It was heady to be working on it with an accomplished filmmaker, and it gave me something to talk about at parties. But I just realized something: because of my native thrift I had plenty of money now, thanks to property...