by Gary Beck
Jack E. Boucher, 1974, Library of Congress
“I didn’t go back for twenty years.
What a change, citizens.
I had lived in Germany,
walked the ruins of World War II,
saw defeated ghosts of the Vaterland,
heard the laments of destruction,
met a madman, crooning for the lost “Fuerher”, rushing crazed through Stuttgart streets, chanting:
‘The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.
The bombs are fallen, Berlin is dead.’
What does this have to do with the Bronx?”
by Gint Aras
Karolis Gintaras Žukauskas
I swear right now that everything your gonna read in here happened 100% true. Cauze when I used to look back at all this crap that went down with me, sometimes I wouldn’t even believe it myself. I used to trip a lot on shrooms and acid, plus get high off weed or hash in weird places which can mess up how your ass remembers shit. (Though shrooms can help you with other stuff, but I’ll tell you about that later.) The thing is, when you start writin’ down a story from your life, it totally makes you sort shit out, so I’ll admit I’m doin’ this to understand what the fuck happened myself. Still, for anybody who wants to read it, it’s a real good story even though there’s parts in here that get kinda wigged.
by Joseph William Frank
Detroit, 1967. © The Bettmann Archive
A few years before 1970 I met a nice white guy who gave me work driving lady wrestlers to Joe Arven Arena in the south end of Windsor. What’s now a suburb was then a bad area swollen with drunks and gamblers and married men. I know now that I was no better. I kept my nose down. I tried to stay out of trouble. But my problem was I fell in love with the circuit’s best fighter, a lithe white girl named Clara Noble. And for me, she felt nothing. God bless her.
by Kimberly Ruth
"Hanging Trees and Flying Geese" by Andrew Bardwell
It was strange. Well, maybe just unexpected. I slowly made my way into the car-jammed parking lot at 2:33 pm the Friday after Thanksgiving, hating myself for choosing to do a story on shopping malls, or America, depending on how you look at it. I was hoping to catch a fight with crazy ladies to prove to the world that this is not cool, but I didn’t.
On The Beach
“We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet.”
-Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
by Jimmy Lam
Jimmy's father, Lin Lam, as a teenager
“Jimmy, you think I’m like an American? Do you think I went out every day to waste away my life fooling around? I told you, my life was simple. If someone asked me to explain my life, I could explain it in one sentence: I worked. There is nothing more to my life. When I was your age, I did nothing but work, work, and more work.”
