The Exiles: Finding the Story
By Essay Issue 67
A HALF CENTURY AGO I was standing in a skid row bar wondering what role I was playing. The bar was called, almost mockingly, the Ritz, and we were making a film, but the role I pondered wasn’t an acting part, and it was more than a question of what function I had at the moment.…
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By Short Story Issue 73
GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…
Read More111th Street Jesus: The Art and Faith of Muralist Kent Twitchell
By Essay Issue 82
KENT TWITCHELL has painted Jesus on the sides of buildings in Los Angeles four times. One of those Jesuses (until it was whitewashed recently by a new property owner) was on the exterior of a liquor store at Vermont Avenue and 111th Street, in a gang-patrolled part of south Los Angeles known by city homicide detectives…
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