I was really scared at the top ’cause my dad said once it broke down at the top and it was stuck.

Esmo’s phone manner was so hugger-mugger that I could be sitting four feet away and could not make out a single word. For all I could tell, he might have been laying fifty on a pony.

That was Steve Esmedina almost six years ago. I suppose you could make a case for almost any random quote from almost anyone being prophetic after the fact of his or her death, but I …

Freddie invites Belushi and Jesus onstage to select an audience member. Dick Nixon is chosen, a middle-aged guy who looks as if he might run a hardware store in the Midwest.

"The people that come out of these places in the Gaslamp are pretty bad, but not as bad as people who come out of the local bars. Like in Imperial Beach.”

Yost is formidable, the body of a wrestler or linebacker. You can picture him as a cop or prison guard with whom you would think twice about arguing. He usually wears a baseball cap or visor.

I was walking along Revolucion when a barker called out to me, “Hey, Paul McCarthy!” Huh? He was pointing at a pretty good T-shirt, black and rose with a portrait of a famous Beatle, not Paul.

Chapter One It was always night in the Hillcrest Club, one of those Southern California cocktail lounges with the red vinyl booths, artificial plants, Formica bar, and no windows. Anyone coming in off the street, …

Ever since Charlie Christian hot-wired a mike to his guit box in the 1930s (or maybe Eddie Durham did it first) and Gene Krupa went nuts on a full drum kit (though maybe he should …

“The idea of running out to spend $3.75 and then returning your movie doesn’t seem the way we’re going. In five years we’ll be saying, ‘Remember when we had to actually go out and rent our videos?’"

As Bogart said in, I think, The Big Sleep, or maybe it was The Maltese Falcon, “I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble.” And, again, at one time I would have agreed. But when the trouble is one’s own doing and for no good cause, it’s a bit different.

I wait 20 minutes. It looks more like 47 inches now, but that’s mostly the soda, and as soon as I take a leak then digest my food overnight, I should be back to 46 inches.

Having no idea what a concertmaster might be, when asked to interview Nick Grant of the San Diego Symphony, I looked up the term in my Penguin edition of A New Dictionary of Music. It …

My spine was being wracked sideways, then back, my neck whipping brutally into sudden, unnatural movements that brought sharp pain. The screams of the others were hoarse, incomprehensible gibberish.

“They call me Chicago Pete. I’ve been in town for about six, seven months.” The man speaking is standing on the corner of Fifth and Market on a Friday night. He is dressed like a …

Certain questions will plague me to my grave. The larger ones, I have, with maturity, made peace with in a way, accepting that answers will most likely be denied me in this life. Questions such …

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

Artifacts of a life surround me. Here is a penmanship certificate from 1933 and a diploma from St. Mel’s High School dated 1937. Here also: an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army dated January 1946, …

Readers of these pages (I mean the music pages, not the pages in general) have read at one time or another the writings of Richard Meltzer. Longtime readers of rock-jazz/blues-pop or miscellaneous contemporary (or even …

Beth at the snack bar asked me if I wanted butter on it and I said sure. Turns out, I think it was butter flavoring, which is really some kind of petroleum product, and I got a headache, which did not put me in the mood for comments like “I hope you didn’t put salt on that. I think we’ve had enough problems in the blood pressure department, don’t you? Is that butter? Well, they’re your arteries.

Vincent Price movies were always the best, I thought, at least at the drive-in. The Abominable Doctor Phibes or Theater of Blood. Billy Jack was good, too, at the drive-in,

I once walked into a dermatologist’s office with a nasty, unnatural-colored inflammation around my fingertips. Right off, I thought it was leprosy. The doctor looked at it in a cursory way, not too interested, and …

“If this were a society of geniuses, it might be a lightly attended. There are societies like Three Sigma, Intertel, the top 1 percent, there are some with so few members they can only meet by e-mail.”

“The walking tour of downtown’s dark corners and bloody sites include the Grant Hotel. In the 1970s they were taking the old fire escape, and it fell and killed two old fellas from the Plaza Hotel.”

On a Friday or Saturday night, when a gentleman comes through the door and I’ve never seen him, I just want him to be aware of what kind of bar this is. A lot of times guys are sent here as a joke.

Adults are just degenerated youths with driver’s licenses, credit cards, academic degrees, and degrees of bad habits. They do come in handy, however, when you need to borrow money or jump-start your car.

Say "millennium" real fast as many times as you can before you puke. For me, I can't get past the first pronunciation of the word. I'm not sure why that is. It's a perfectly functional …

'Subjected to the rational teachings of others, the child only buries his 'true knowledge' deeper in his soul and it remains untouched by rationality; but it can be formed and informed by what fairy tales …

This is exactly the room I’ve been afraid of all my life. A place where I have landed in middle age. Somehow I have failed, this time thoroughly. I find myself on a hard mattress …

It’s almost Friday evening and I’m sitting in the park across from the Coronado Public Library. The book I’m reading is not riveting my attention in the way one always hopes as a reader. I …

After playing guitar for 35 years and figuring in the old dog factor, I had little more to learn, one would think, and less hope of learning it. This proved to be only half true …

'I'll take San Diego for 100!" "All right!" The woman at the head of the line, in front of a dozen or so other Jeopardy hopefuls at University Towne Centre, is wearing a name tag …

Looking at the mortal remains of an 86-year-old Portuguese man in his coffin at the Beardsley-Mitchell Funeral Home in Ocean Beach on a fine spring afternoon I scrutinize his powdered and bald head, his thin …

“We had to cross two fences,” he tells me. “One we had to go under, and the other we had to climb over. It was dark and the fence was too high for me.”

I am looking at a job application for Jack In The Box and trying to talk myself out of turning the thing in. I have enough Prozac to see me through this — it is …

Darth Vader is waving a light saber and a charred Styrofoam ball on a chain in front of Planet Hollywood at Fourth and Broadway. The dark lord, black robes flowing in the wind, is shaking …

When the rain makes its move on San Diego in January, the streets seem more lonely than in other cities; it is a broken promise. On the south Embarcadero on a Monday afternoon, in the …

For 38 years you knew where to look for Henrich Boll, Celine, Jack Kerouac, Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Gertrude Stein. Sometimes Jim Thompson and Stendahl would be there, or you could catch …

As for the AIDS/TJ/dentist question, she says, “That’s not true. I know of no cases.” Naturally, she’ll say that, but if something of that nature came to light, you can bet the Union-Tribune would be all over it.

It is the world’s busiest border crossing; I have just weaved through the gauntlet of Indian trinket vendors on the right and a phalanx of cab drivers on the left. For the hundredth time I …

“They’re like squiggles with different colors.” Anita, from Nashville Tennessee, is squinting into the middle distance of Horton Plaza trying to summon an image of exactly what was hanging on the wall of her room …

'I'm looking for a book." This is the most common opener from a customer in almost any bookstore in America. In an informal survey of employees in chain bookstores, it was voted the most heard …

WHEN YOU'VE GOT THE BLUES. THERE'S ONLY ONE THING LEFT TO DO. GO OUT AND BUY YOURSELF A NEW PAIR Of SHOES. — CHAMPION JOCH DUPREE I don’t have the blues — at least not …

I associate TB with thin, romantic poets and Dashiell Hammett, so in that way, it's kind of cool. I keep waiting to waste away into the frail, sensitive poet I suspect I am deep inside.

New Yorkers will stand in line for any number of things, but when it's your turn at the counter, or to get on the bus, the idea is to just get on with it: let's go, move it.

1990. I was tending bar and would have to duck out into the men’s room, and pray for an unoccupied stall where I could place my hands over my face, let my shoulders rise and fall.

A darkened barroom with rows of men in snap-brim hats, women posed on stools checking out their reflections in the back bar mirror. A blue-white haze swirls in eddies overhead every time someone opens the …

One night, I heard a tapping on the glass of my bedroom’s French door and saw a shadow disappear around the corner. I pulled the gun from under my bed and loaded it in five seconds.

It's 3:00 a.m. Sleep is beyond reach. You don't have cable; you have four channels, not counting those in Spanish. You've got an infomercial, Smokey and the Bandit III, news, and PBS - a show …

Most things on television are moronic and violent, but these players aren't actors; the violence is real and we are invited to participate in the stands, in the parking lots, in our living rooms.