The only thing I ever won in my life and actually received was an armoured car. When I was a child I had a paper route that went for miles along the rough edge of town.

I would have to ride my bicycle down a hill, following a road that had fields of grass on both sides and an old plum orchard at the end of the road. They had chopped down part of the trees and built four new houses there.

Parked in front of one house was an armoured car. It was a small town and every day after work the driver took the armoured car home with him. He parked it out in front of his house.

I would pass there before six o’clock in the morning and everybody would be asleep in the houses. When there was light in the morning I could see the armoured car from a quarter of a mile or so.

I liked the armoured car and would get off my bicycle and walk over and take a look at it, knock on the heavy metal, look in the bulletproof windows, kick the tyres.

Because everybody was asleep in the morning and I alone out there, after a while I considered the armoured car to be mine and treated it as such.

One morning I got into the armoured car and delivered the rest of my papers from it. It looked kind of strange to see a kid delivering newspapers from an armoured car.

I rather enjoyed it and started doing it regularly.

‘Here comes that kid in the armoured car delivering papers,’ the early risers said. ‘Yeah, he’s a nut.’

That was the only thing I ever won.

The Literary Life in California/1964

1

I was sitting in a bar last night talking to a friend who was from time to time looking down the bar at his wife. They had been separated for two years: no hope.

She was palling it up with another man. They looked as if they were having a lot of fun.

My friend turned and asked me about two books of my poetry. I’m a minor poet, even so, people sometimes ask me questions like that.

He said he used to have the books but he didn’t have them any more. They were gone. I said that one of the books was out of print and copies of the other book were down at City Lights Bookstore.

He took a look down at his wife. She was laughing at something the other man had said, who was then quite pleased with himself, and so it goes.

‘I have a confession to make,’ my friend said. ‘Remember that night I came home from work and found you and my wife drunk together on sweet vermouth in the kitchen?’