Stories from America's backbone — told through diesel, dive bars, broken dreams, and the long-haul road between regret and reinvention.
This excerpt is from "The West," a piece set on the fringes of Los Angeles:
So here we are, Kalen and me, rolling our bobtail down the PCH—that beautiful bastard ribbon of highway they call the Pacific Coast Highway... We find ourselves at this hole-in-the-wall joint, nothing more than fuel pumps and a congregation of the dispossessed... That's when we see him. Standing there like some fever dream of America itself—a figure in a pink bunny suit, nothing below the waist. I shit you not. Dive bars are the last honest places in America. Ricky, the man in the suit, becomes the night's gravity. And through pool games, cigarettes, and quiet confessions, we all find something at The West.
This piece—and others like it—form the spine of The Blacktop Chronicles, a linked collection of essays and short fiction about men, movement, memory, and the invisible threads that tie us to the country we move through.
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