After a two-week trip from Vladivostok, Soviet Russia, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I fetched up in Helsinki, Finland, without a kopek to my name. Flogging my winter coat in the flea market on the quay, I started hitchhiking around the Gulf of Bothnia in a light woolen sweater and a hooded rain slicker. But auto-stop in Scandinavia is chancy at best. The weather in late April is more like the dead of winter than spring. The Nords themselves are not notable for their solicitude toward shaggy and itinerant young strangers. And there are several times when it’s touch and go. In Turku, I break into a university dormitory and pass the night in a tubful of hot water. On the Swedish border I get caught in a snowstorm and spend the night running up and down the empty highway, waving my arms, beating my chest and shouting into the forest…
In the year 1966, I spent my twenty-third birthday on a truck crossing the yellow plains of the Punjab. My happenstance companions: three other…
You have not seen our home. You have never been to our village. You do not know its name. But what does it matter…
They knew well I was blind. The world could see that. Still, the transport on the road didn’t slow down. The bastards just wouldn’t…
Now when I try to conjure my essence as a young man, I see myself waking up one morning to the overpowering odor of…
Ernest Brawley, a native Californian, is the man behind the gritty prison novel The Rap, a runaway bestseller which went on to be adapted…
