The Front Porch – County Highway

You Only Live Once

The Cracker Smacker

Fight night in Harlem, where black celebrities bay for white blood in a reversal of the famous scene from Richard Wright’s ‘Black Boy’

Poop in the shower of Mrs. Greenfield’s boarding house

A visit with the Bleeder of Bayonne

By Ted Mann

Sammy was in his late sixties and he worked the door at Gleason's Gym, which was on 30th Street in Manhattan. That was in the mid 1970s, before the home of great boxing champions like Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, and Roberto Durán migrated to Brooklyn to begin its third life in a new borough, on Water Street. In the 70s, in Manhattan, Sammy ruled Gleason’s door. Strangers, media representatives, and anyone Sammy didn’t like paid a buck and a half; girlfriends, managers, trainers, fighters, and wingmen were admitted free. Very few girlfriends applied to Sammy for admittance, though. Gleason’s was a business-like place. Boxers worked out, matchmakers came and went; trainers, occasionally, and managers, inevitably, (still) smoked cigars at ringside. Boxers would train and get out. No one lingered longer than was necessary to decide on somewhere else to meet. The smell of boxers’ hand wraps was that bad. Locker-room wisdom had it strong enough to whip the needle of an old analog …

Fugitives

The Fugitive Road

Invisible ink, invisible maps, lead you to the Valley of the Moon.

Hunter Thompson, M.F.K. Fisher, and Jack London’s ghost all dwell herein.

Harvesting flowers with Jesus leads a man to marry a farm.

By Jonah Raskin

M.F.K. Fisher, known to friends and family members as Mary Frances, boasted that she wrote her books in “invisible ink” and that she had “invisible maps” of places where she had made her home, like Aix-en-Provence. I didn’t catch up with her until she settled in Glen Ellen, California, an invisible town, until folks like Jack London and, much later, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson found that it suited their fugitive ways. Mary Frances wasn’t a fugitive from the law, but she maintained a very low profile in Glen Ellen, where she hosted intimate gatherings where she served champagne, real champagne from France, and oysters from Hog Island on the Sonoma Coast, an hour’s drive away. I’ve long loved the idea of writing in invisible ink and consulting invisible maps; they appeal to my underground self, the self that wants to be in hiding and only surface on rare occasions. Mary Frances might have written her books — Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, and The Gastronomical Me — in …