Speaking into the crackling microphone on the small plane’s radio, the Russian heavyweight wrestler spoke guttural Russian as we flew low and over the stacks of Three Mile Island. “That ought to get somebody’s attention,” I said. The wrestler’s laugh sounded coarse as Cossacks dancing on broken vodka bottles. Ivan and his comrades had rolled […]
Fifty years to the day after Nguyen Van Minh shot and killed Anthony Venezia in the village of Ben Suc, the former Viet Cong soldier knocked on the front door of the house where Venezia grew up. Anthony Venezia’s sister Angela answered. “Yes,” she said. “These are for you,” he said. Overcome with soft emotion, […]
Look at this face. Do my many charms immediately come to mind? I don’t think so. In addition to nurturing an irascible personal identity, my writing is equally contentious, defiant and troublesome. Lame critics over the years have attacked me and my work with many epithets. I’ve been called hostile, arrogant, combative, rude, belligerent and […]
Imagine the squeaky sucking sound and explosive pop a champagne cork makes when it blasts from the bottle. Now envision the noise a human eyeball makes when it’s freed from a tight socket after Wally Wilson inserts and turns the corkscrew, twists the orb and removes the unsightly sphere. Envision? Unsightly? Get it? Gross, don’t […]
From where white boy Jimmy Ray stood at the back of the nightclub dance floor he could see the two-tone couple glistening beneath the blue spotlight, dancing slowly, sweating, hardly moving pressed that tight against each other. In a dress that matched her pale freckled skin, the white woman confused Jimmy Ray by keeping her […]
