By Pete Dexter Esquire May 1985 All right, let’s start with the head. Say check-out time is 1:00 and everybody who reads this magazine is stuck in a room at a Holiday Inn somewhere in Louisiana because nobody can figure out how to unlock the security chain, and...
By Red Smith The New York Times October 19, 1977 It had to happen this way. It had been predestined since November 29, 1976, when Reginald Martinez Jackson sat down on a gilded chair in New York’s Americana Hotel and wrote his name on a Yankee contract. That day he...
By Pete Dexter From Spooner 2009 Later that year Spooner began his career in organized baseball. The coach of the baseball team was Evelyn Tinker, who in addition to being held almost blameless in the Lemonkatz boy’s injury was now rumored to be collecting sixty bucks...
By Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix March 5, 1985 Now that it’s arrived in its uncut, 227-minute, director-approved form, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America emerges as a pulp masterwork—at once the simplest and most indescribable of movies. In a sense, it’s...
By Seymour Krim The New York Times November 1973 Both articles are collected in Krim’s You and Me. Part One: Won’t You Come Home, Jimmy Breslin? A friend of mine who works for UPI airmailed Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight yesterday (two pesetas...
By Red Smith The New York Herald Tribune October 27, 1951 [This column is collected in American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith] Joe Louis lay on his stomach on a rubbing table with his right ear pillowed on a folded towel, his left hand in a bucket of ice on the...
By John Eskow New Times October 30, 1978 The face is a harbormaster’s face, or a potato farmer’s, or a lobsterman’s: sharp, prominent nose, articulate features, eyes meant for pinpointing danger. At 39, the body is aching but supple. As he enters the sepulchral...
By Mark Jacobson New West August 30, 1976 The zooty mobiles are rolling slow and sweet up the Strip. In front of the Roxy there’s style a block long. Hats, satin, dudes with their names rhinestoned on their eyeglass lenses, jumpsuits emblazoned with the word “coke,”...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice Late ’80s [Date Unknown] Collected in No Success Like Failure On the third step of the entrance to the Palace Hotel on the Bowery and Third Street I catch an unmistakable whiff of aging vomit; halfway up the steep concrete stairs I...
By John Schulian Bronx Banter April 19, 2012 As soon as they heard Levon Helm was coming, the guys in the band began to imagine him sitting in with them, playing the drums, maybe even singing “The Weight.” It was one of the songs they did when they got together on...
By Marilyn Johnson Life 1997 ONCE UPON A TIME Hundreds of years ago, she would have been beheaded. She was a fair maiden, a beautiful virgin born on a summer’s day, married on a summer’s day. Touchingly, she loved her prince. He loved her not. She did her duty to the...
By John Schulian GQ March 1985 They were drinking their dinner in a joint outside Chicago. It was just Mike Royko and his pal, Big Shack, and whatever their bleary musings happened to be that night three years ago. They probably never even gave a thought to the fact...
