“For the sake of argument, know everything about me. I was a flask-shaped man in a velour shirt sitting at long lunchroom tables in business schools, cosmetology schools, junior colleges, community colleges. My business was buying used textbooks and crating them off to a distributor. Kids would come up and lunge their thick, thuddingly unread books at me. I would lip the names of the authors and the titles—Gurson’s Invitation to Secretarial Science or Fritchman’s Accounting Principles Today, third edition—and flirt through my blue loose-leaf price guide while the kids gloomed above me. Then I’d reach into the tackle box I kept my cash in, slam some dollar bills and quarters onto the tabletop, watch the hands grubble for the money.”