With the cigarette released from his control, she’s smoking it now with such smirking confidence that he’s got his teeth out. To think that I ever doubted her capacity to subjugate a death stick….⠀⠀

Gloria Grahame’s gin-and-tonic stretches her shadow out towards Miss Grahame’s gauzy arm. Not too precariously – she doesn’t want to look foolish in front of Bogart’s gin-and-tonic. And as she stretches her shadow, and looks, she discovers an intense longing…

I’m still here. They are too. Like cigarettes in a toilet bowl, refusing to be flushed, no matter how many times you send down a Great Flood from on high.

Still looking for gaps, tears in the fabric of space-time, escape: the gap today appears below Bogart’s earlobe, the dark shadow there, a portal through his jaw, or more likely straight into the part of the brain called the Pons,…

If I wrote a self-help book, I would write that you will survive the seemingly endless days of seeing only surfaces – you will! – and then someday you will discover a gap, a break in the surface (which for…

“Instead of paying attention to the faces of people passing by, I watched their feet, and all these busy types were reduced to hurrying steps – toward what? And it was clear to me that our mission was to graze…

The lemon peel in Gloria’s gin-and-tonic is not like a parasite embedded in its host. It’s more like a heart or a soul or a sex appeal. The lemon glances through the haze of the gin and the tonic at…

Here’s what Bogie’s gin-and-tonic wants to say to Gloria’s gin-and-tonic this very instant: “You see how the smoke from her cigarette flows like liquid right across the gap between them, as if he’s sucking it in with his teeth? I…

The days I’ve squandered with Britt have regrettably caused me to miss some of those moments that come but once in a lifetime: his smile has spread to show a gap in his teeth, and from her clenched hand, if…

In the Lonely Place, hangovers last a decade or two.⠀