From Tinsley’s, I find my way to the service road of the Expressway. There’s no sidewalk, so I stay close to the curb, where my boot heels scrape along the road grit, cigarette butts, and other detritus. The same rubbish I used to ride past when I was younger and ferrying jars of coins to banks for the paterfamilias. Most of the cars give some berth when they pass, but now and then a car or truck barrels past within a few feet and the trailing wind whips my hair around. Someone shouts, “Get a haircut!” Someone else throws an empty RC Cola can that misses me and lands in the weeds beside the road.

A white Jaguar XK-E passes.

The first time the paterfamilias goes to see the junk-mail factory, he brings me along. It’s the beginning of sophomore year, and I guess he wants to introduce me to the fascinating world of business. He should be taking Arno; I could care less. The only reason I go is because it’s easier than not going.

The factory smells of ink and is filled with workers feeding stacks of mail inserts into clicking, wheezing inserter machines. The owner is an older and grayer version of the paterfamilias, tanned, nattily dressed, trim and athletic looking. His office is neat and orderly except for a large corkboard covered with snapshots of him, his friends, and lots of dead fish. The owner points to the framed photo on his desk of his gleaming white fishing cruiser. He tells us that every summer he fishes off Montauk Point at the eastern end of Long Island. Every winter he hires a captain to take the boat down to an island in the Bahamas called Bimini. A couple of times a month, he flies down with his friends and fishes there. These stories are the owner’s way of making sure we know he’s made a lot of money by paying his employees less than they deserve.

While he talks, the owner keeps looking out the window at a dark maroon Jaguar XK-E parked outside. It sparkles in the fall sunlight. The owner says it’s brand-new. That is another way of saying he has a lot of scratch, in case we didn’t get the message the first time.

The owner places some ledgers on the desk so the paterfamilias can inspect them. The paterfamilias skims thoughtfully through the pages. In a low, confidential tone, the owner says that the company is a gold mine, easy to run and practically prints money. He says he’d always hoped his sons would take over the business, but one son is a big-shot lawyer in New York and the other is a big-shot producer out in Hollywood and neither wants anything to do with junk mail. The owner pretends to be sad about that, but you can tell he’s proud that his sons are big shots.