Sublime

I’ve always rejected the tendency to talk about Southern food as unhealthy. Greens, beans, corn, and even freshly slaughtered meat, the mainstays of our foodways, are, relative to the standard American diet, quite healthy. Our nutritional deprivation these days is more than anything a consequence of fast food, mass production, and poverty. But I th

Gold died from pancreatic cancer in 2018 at the age of fifty-seven. The day after, I drove around Los Angeles to eat three of his favorite Mexican dishes: smoked marlin tacos in Inglewood, a shrimp taco in Boyle Heights, the clayuda at an Oaxacan restaurant in Koreatown.

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

I took that story with me in the coming days and turned it over, like the stone in a ripe peach: the sudden, unexpected hard shock in the centre of everything.

‘That’s the story,’ I said. ‘But with Tully it’s hard. He’s one of those people. We struggle to accept he’s not twenty. Him not being twenty means that none of us is twenty. Him dying means we all are. That’s what gets everybody – he was always first with everything and now he’s showing us how to die.’

Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole? What choic

The confusing thing was that I liked that he was a stoner. I had an extant teenage fetish for skateboarders; I would be flooded with affection watching him sit in the windowsill, his deep inhales and slow exhales, the soft bubbling of the bong.