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One minute to air, and Bale Dilweg and Angela Kirk sat patiently as the crew finished positioning cameras and adjusting microphones. Well, Angela sat patiently while Dilweg continued trying to talk her into dinner and drinks. The bastard just couldn't take "no" for an answer, even after being shut down on each of his four appearances on her show. "You know, as a Councilman, I can help you move up to the affiliate job in Spokane, or even Seattle if you play your cards right,"

Chapter 1: On the Road (continued) Not even an hour later, and the tickle was already starting up again. Of the many things that arrived with Daphne's pregnancy--morning sickness, insomnia, swollen ankles, tender breasts--the absolute worst for her was the frequent need to urinate. Well, that and the barely concealed judgment she felt from the medical "professionals" when they found out the father was a former circus freak, a real one born without legs. Honestly, Edwin's bi

Author's Note: A little less than 10 years ago, my friend Darryl and I wrote a screenplay submitted it to a competition sponsored by the Sundance Institute. It chronicled the lives of a community of sideshow performers, the essential stars of the traditional circus. Darryl and I wrote with respect; we wanted to show that, despite being ridiculed and considered outsiders, these performers were ordinary people doing their best to overcome physical and financial hardships. We

It’s all about rules. If you follow a few simple rules, you won’t have a problem. The first rule is essential. Don’t ever make it personal. As soon as you know anything more about a subject than who it is or where they’ll be at a given time, you have the potential for it to become personal. And when you take the type of jobs I do, it’s even more important that it never becomes personal. Don’t get me wrong. Know your subject’s habits, what they’re wearing, who they hang with,

It’s his funeral, for God’s sake. I’m supposed to mourn. I’m supposed to cry. I’m supposed to wear black. So I do. I’m doing pretty well, actually. I introduce Jenny as my friend. Those who don’t know better don’t care anyway, and those who know the truth pretend not to. I hear my Aunt Betty, my favorite aunt, whispering to a family friend whom I don’t recognize: “It’s such a shame. I don’t know what could have happened to make her that way. No one else in the family is a ga

I stop the truck in front of Jeri’s house and wait while she walks out and gets in. She smiles a little as she comes out the front door of her pa’s little house, but she looks down at her feet for most of the walk to the truck, so I know something is wrong, or maybe just not right. A breeze out of the west, off the reservation, out of the past, blows Jeri’s long red hair across her cleft chin and cupid’s bow lips, and I remember why I love her. Jeri opens the door of my old

“Is that red tide?” The fat woman in the black one-piece bathing suit was standing in front of me, pointing at the long skeins of dark red seaweed washed up on Turtle Beach by a hurricane far out in the Gulf. Her daughter, a pretty girl of maybe 20 who was not thin but showed few signs of inheriting her mother’s weight, smirked and kept walking. She had succeeded, accidentally, in siccing her mother on an innocent bystander. I was that innocent bystander, but I was in a good

If a guy takes a dump in a museum, is it art? I’m in the lower-level men’s room in the Hirshhorn Museum when this thought occurs to me. After viewing the Warhols (a quadruple self-portrait and umpteen screen prints of Marilyn Monroe’s lips in various colors), several works by Mario Merz (constructions of neon tubes, photographs, and other objects based on Fibonacci sequences), and the ultra-realistic sculptures of Ron Mueck (a super-sized, sullen, hairless man; a just-slight

“ A candy-colored clown they call the sandman Tiptoes to my room every night… ” Ya hear that, Buddy? I hear that song twice for each of you guys. Well, not twice for all of you. If you’re lucky, this is the only time we’ll hear it together. Please allow me to introduce myself. I’ll be your DJ for this evening, your tour guide, your oracle. We’re most definitely not on a first-name basis here—keeps things from getting personal—but you can call me whatever you please. I’m the

I wish I could say I had noble motives, causes, moral righteousness. But I would be lying. The bottom line was always the bottom line. I did it for the money. It’s not too hard to get a hold of me. People who know how tell people that need to know how. A mark on a mailbox, an ad in the Auto Shopper. I see the right words, I show up at a specific pay phone or reach behind a specific toilet tank, I become an employee. I don’t know what’s going on in Washington, and I don’t ca

What the hell’s wrong with me? Good question, baby. Any man in his right mind, married to you, wouldn’t do the things I do. I don’t know what makes me chase pussy like I need it to live. I don’t need it to live. I can honestly say the only thing I really need to live is you, but for some reason, I just can’t keep my mind, or my hands, or my dick off of any receptive woman that comes along. Is it the challenge of getting someone else to fuck me? Is it the danger of gett

Dear John; The attached picture is of something very valuable to you. You seem to value it above all other things in the world. You seem to value it so much that you spend much of your time searching for similar objects, usually in the possession of strangers. It hurts me to know this, especially with all the diseases going around. Anyway, if you ever expect to see this particular one again, you’re going to have to do me a few favors for a change. IF you do not comply with th

“I am truly sorry for all of the pain I have caused. I wish every day that I could return your loved ones to you alive, and well, and…alive. I wish every day that I hadn’t said the things I said or did the things I did. I wish you could forgive me, but if it was me out there behind that glass and you in here on this slab, I wouldn’t forgive you. I can’t tell you why I did what I did. I’m not crazy, but I guess in those few seconds it took to destroy those lives I was not hum

Forrest Wheeler lay peacefully in the clean white hospital bed, his emaciated chest rising and falling rhythmically as a beaded green...

All right, you dried-up geriatric bastards! The doors are locked, the batteries have been removed from your Rascal Scooters, and I’ve...

Editor’s note: This letter was censored in transit by military authorities. Dear Jimmy, I wrote a letter to mom and daddy, but I know...

A Bloody End to a Long-Time Feud Eyewitness Narrowly Escapes Death! The Gruesome Details By Augustus Branch Shortly after nine this...

I’m sitting in the parking lot at the Boom Boom Room with that fat fuck Tony Roses, and it’s raining so fucking hard we can’t see the...

Susan sits smoking at a corner table in a bright, noisy coffee shop. It’s a place she would not be caught dead in, and so it is exactly...

Beat cop Dan Reynolds drew a chalk line around the body. It wasn’t his job—someone from forensic services typically took care of such...