A good pickpocket is very careful. I did very little time in the joint, relatively speaking, and I made incredible income. Never hurt a soul. Didn’t like jail. You know, joint chow is conducive to arterial occlusions. It’s all starch and fat. It’s garbage and then you lay around eating all that commissary candy. Smoking. I hate dead time in the joint. Idleness truly is the devil’s workshop. I was goin’ nuts watching fucking Jeopardy! up in my living room, no cigarettes, no action—just waiting for my stump to heal. Reading medical books. When doctors Banting and Best was up in Toronto processing insulin in 1922 they give what little they had to a vice president of Eastman Kodak’s kid, James Havens, and it brought James around and saved his life. Meanwhile everybody is going to Toronto where they are trying to make bathtub insulin as fast as possible. They can only produce just a couple of units a day and they give it to this one and that one while a thousand diabetics are dying each day. One thousand a day. The treatment then in vogue was a semistarvation diet which might give you a year, a couple of months, a few days. When you are a diabetic out of control and you get hungry, it ain’t like ordinary hunger. It’s a sick hunger—polyphagia. Put such a person in the hospital and they’ll eat toothpaste. Birdseed. I mean, I said I got connections and I could have gotten some of that 1922 insulin. After that there would come a phone call one day and somebody would want a favor and I would have to say yes to that favor, no matter what. That’s part of the life.

Even now insulin isn’t cheap. It ain’t no giveaway. Shoot up four times a day. Syringes, test strips. They cost as much as three packs a day! Heh heh. But each day I get is a gift, okay? I should be dead. Before 1922, I am dead. The shortwave is an old fart’s pleasure, but then I am sixty-seven years old. Most criminals don’t live that long outside or in.