“I told you last time. It’s no good to me in a hotel room.”

“So you give it to your lady friend. Let her make you a cup of the best.”

“Thanks.”

“You just drink coffee, right? You don’t drink booze?”

“Not these days.”

“But you used to.”

And probably will again, I thought. But not today.

“Same as me,” he said. “I don’t drink, don’t smoke dope, don’t do any of that shit. Used to.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“Didn’t go with the image.”

“Which image? The pimp image?”

“The connoisseur,” he said. “The art collector.”

“How’d you learn so much about African art?”

“Self-taught,” he said. “I read everything I could find, went around to the dealers and talked to them. And I had a feel for it.” He smiled at something. “Long time ago I went to college.”

“Where was that?”

“Hofstra. I grew up in Hempstead. Born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, but my folks bought a house when I was two, three years old. I don’t even remember Bed-Stuy.” He had returned to the hassock and he was leaning back, his hands clasped around his knees for balance. “Middle-class house, lawn to mow and leaves to rake and a driveway to shovel. I can slip in and out of the ghetto talk, but it’s mostly a shuck. We weren’t rich but we lived decent. And there was enough money to send me to Hofstra.”

“What did you study?”

“Majored in art history. And didn’t learn shit about African art there, incidentally. Just that dudes like Braque and Picasso got a lot of inspiration from African masks, same as the Impressionists got turned on by Japanese prints. But I never took a look at an African carving until I got back from Nam.”

“When were you over there?”

“After my third year of college. My father died, see. I could have finished all the same but, I don’t know, I was crazy enough to drop out of school and enlist.” His head was back and his eyes were closed. “Did a ton of drugs over there. We had everything. Reefer, hash, acid. What I liked, I liked heroin. They did it different there. You used to get it in cigarettes, used to smoke it.”

“I never heard of that.”