SEVEN CITY STORIES(1982) describes the lives of isolated, marginal people in San Francisco in the 1970’s, focusing on their struggles for survival and meaning and their oblique encounters with other people. These stories include:
- “The Blue Jade Heart”: is the tale of a burn-disfigured mulatto who sells flowers in bars and who falls in love with a hooker in a bar on his route.
- “Three Musketeers”: follows a father with his two little children — “Tommy, Daddy, and Jody,” he tells them, “we’re the three musketeers!”– as he takes them in a cab to visit their dramatic, desperate mother.
- “A Brief Encounter”: tells of an encounter between a cabbie and a hooker who enlists his help, after the act, to drive her home to take care of her kid.
- “Next of Kin”: describes a family-like friendship between a cabbie and an old woman that he defends from being accosted in an alley.
- “Michele”: tells of the guilt-racked encounter of a young cabbie intellectual with a teen-age hooker who claims she enjoys her work. This story is about the cabbie’s presumption of an artistic license that, as he interprets it, allows him to venture into this world.
- “Ruby Ellington”: is a story of more than 100,000 words, told in a continuous flow without breaks, as the central character, a dancer on the Broadway Strip, struggles to overcome a sense of inner dryness, centered in her womb, that she associates with an inability to find spiritual meaning.
- “John Grafton”: describes a sexually tortured aspiring artist who falls in love with someone he thinks at first is a biological woman, but who turns out to be something he cannot accept, turning his world asunder.