Junk City

Book excerpt: Fiction. Poetry. California Interest. Set in San Francisco, the stories and poems in JUNK CITY are linked by characters and the characters are linked by addiction in one form or another. You'll meet a hard-drinking mail carrier struggling to find deeper meaning when he comes across a suicide on his route; a seasoned city cop trying to make it to retirement before he ends up viral on YouTube; a teenage runaway selling his body for dope; an aging stripper named Eskimo convinced she can turn over a new leaf by getting her poetry chapbook published (and whose poems link the stories); a cross-dressing accountant running a Ponzi scheme on his clients; and a legend of the local street fighting scene whose life is spiraling out of control in a swirl of brown booze and pain pills. The characters that roam these pages live in a shadowy world, but from time to time slivers of light manage to break through the fog.