One of the first things I did after my father died and the vast wealth he had spent his life accumulating came cascading down into my hands was to go and visit Valencia.

I had my jacket on and zipped. I was wearing my burgundy parka, the same one I’d had since middle school, seventh grade, and it still fit me fine nine years later, and it looked about the same, too.

Later that day, someone would claim to have seen a surface-to-air missile strike the plane. Another witness on the ground would claim two or three missiles, he couldn’t be sure.

Flat round leaves slid back and forth over black marsh water. Scattered amongst them were occasional yellow fisted lilies, some with their heads closed tight, others opened.

How sweet were those six, seven, and eight-hour love marathons on the rickety bed near the window with its brown, stained shade drawn almost to the floor …

Before she left, Nancy White Feather told Charlie Good Thunder a lot of things–some wistful, some stone-faced angry: “You have got a lot of things on your mind, but–most of all–you have got horses on the brain–forever on the brain.

Though he didn’t usually keep count, over the past couple years, Blake was sure he had been mistaken for someone else at least six times.

Sylvia never missed a chance to hear Ella Fitzgerald. That night’s appearance at the Apollo Theater was no exception.

In a town of drunks, his mother was the town drunk. As the old joke goes, what’s the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic? About fifty thousand dollars a year.

I was on Fulton buying gossip books—five for a dollar—when I ran into that actor, Lamont Evans. Didn’t see him right away, too busy staring at the cover of Mocha Dreams, a best-seller by January “Mocha” Jones, the video vixen who’d been married to seven different rappers, two at the same time.