Gary Kern
ASIN: B004TTX5AA
Publisher: Xenos Books
Pages: 386
A memoir of slum life in Southern California. The author, an ex-professor of Russian literature, rents rooms on Dwight Avenue in Riverside to a series of oddballs, meanwhile trying to maintain contact with his broken family and to keep up with events in the collapsing Soviet Union. His letters, transcribed from cassette recordings sent to friends, describe ordinary and yet fantastic experiences: living with a religious fanatic, reading to friends with a barn owl on his shoulder, going to a Halloween party dressed as a gorilla, waking up in a field with a nail in his head, chasing his husky in a herd of sheep while a Basque shepherd waves a gun behind him, trying to get a job back East and getting lost on the Washington Beltway, discovering the filthiest toilets in Moscow, getting kicked in the heart in karate class, riding in an ambulance with bullets whistling around him... It's a wild ...