“Yeah. Who told you?”

“One of the women you were with, named Alice.”

“I guess you know what I was doing time for, too.”

“Yeah, she told me about that. But what I can’t understand is why you didn’t cool out at home your first day out. Couldn’t wait to get some pussy, eh? Yeah, I can dig it.”

“Oh, you can, hunh? Well, tell me about it!”

“Oh, excuse me. I forgot. You’re one of those cats who are willing to go to jail for a principle. And you’d never allow something as counterrevolutionary as pussy to even enter your mind… But tell me, Melvin, why didn’t you go into the service?”

“I didn’t feel I had anything to fight for.”

“Look, don’t tell me what you read in a book. Tell me your own reasons for not going in.”

“I guess I just didn’t understand how the army had a right to decide when I should put my life on the line.”

“Do you always refuse to do something you don’t understand?”

“It depends on what it is. And when it comes to my life, I figure I should have the final say on what I will or won’t do.”

“Well, tell me this, then. Did you think you were putting your life on the line when you grabbed that kid with the bottle?”

“I didn’t really think about it.”

“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.”