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Addiction and Recovery
His Body Of Work
I loved my father’s body. It worried me, too. . . . I didn’t know what polio was, but it sounded scary, and he had survived it. This helped form my view of him as someone who could survive almost anything. Like Wile E. Coyote, he might get hurt and maimed, but he never, ever gave up.
November 2023What I Don’t Tell My Wife
There are many things I don’t tell my wife of ten years: Because she has asked me not to. Because she carries her own burdens. Because she has told me mine are too much.
August 2023Drug Experiences
Mushrooms in the desert, pot on a family vacation, black hash on a nuclear submarine
February 2023Beacon
I felt a flash of hope for you, even though I knew — because of the distant and resigned tone of your voice — that you were going to die soon.
March 2022Penned
Drugs can make us do stupid things — though, to be fair, drugs can also help us meet formidable demands. Meth can make you work hard as hell, the way my mom did, doing a full-time job at a farm-equipment company on weekdays and part-time retail jobs on weekends, until it all came crashing down.
December 2021America America
My granddaughter barely speaks. Her name is Effie, which in Greek means “well-spoken.” Maybe in Greece she would be. Names aren’t expected to match the person. If they were, we’d be named upon our death, when someone would have a stab in the dark at getting it right.
November 2021A Very Brutal Game
A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
October 2020Les Calanques
I think of that ancient time when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low it sank, the way the rivers carved canyons to replenish it. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
September 2020Seaside
When James is high, he is at his most affectionate. He becomes generous with hugs. He kisses my face all over, eyelids and all. I am ashamed that I like this about his addiction.
July 2020Now And Then I Look For You
Two alleys down from the bodega, where I found you that time. Under the defunct, overturned hot tub that once or twice served as your roof.
September 2019