“Your friend Otis didn’t think about what he was doing either. And now he’s dead.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Only that neither of you did very much thinking last night. The difference is that you came out alive. But only because you were dealing with kids.”

“Yeah, but it was my choice.”

“Then it was a bullshit choice.”

“Hey, you don’t know anything about me!”

“Maybe not, but I bet I’m close.”

I leaned back against the bed to steady myself.

“Sit down on the bed for a minute,” he said.

“Leave me alone!” I said, knocking his arm away. “You must really dig taking people apart.”

“Hey, why not? I don’t get any satisfaction trying to put them back together. Every weekend people come through here wasted. And for shit that don’t even matter. And that’s the funny part. When you get right down to it, none of it really matters. Hey, I want you to listen to something.”

He went through a stack of records, found the one he was looking for, and put it on the turntable.

“I play this for people I treat who I figure can profit from it. It’s a Miles Davis tune called So What. And that’s the advice I give: that ultimately you should be able to say ‘so what’ to just about anything. That things really don’t matter… Listen to this.”