I had a variety of potentially helpful contacts.

The latter were extremely well known about Harlem, and they were feared and respected. It was known that if upset, they would break open your head and think nothing of it.

What I was learning was the hustling society's first rule; that you never trusted anyone outside of your own closemouthed circle, and that you selected withtime and care before you made any intimates even among these.

I would learn to sensethe presence of any police types.

A well-dressed member of the gang who wouldn't arouse suspicion by his manner would go into a selected store about closing time, hide somewhere, and get locked inside when the store closed.The police patrols would have been timed beforehand. After dark, he'd pack suits in bags, then turn off the burglar alarm, and use the telephone to call a waiting truck and crew. When the truck came, timed with the police patrols, it would be loaded and gone within a few minutes.

Some people played one number all year. Many had lists of the daily hit numbers going back for years; they figured reappearance odds, and used other systems. Others played their hunches: addresses, license numbers of passing cars, any numbers on letters, telegrams, laundry slips, numbers from anywhere.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life.

Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again.

I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.

  In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting,

But look, if I suck it in just a wee bit more, push that bellybutton up against the back; can you see what will surely come to pass if you but rid yourself of this extra flesh?

I should lay off those Snicker bars, those liverwurst sandwiches with gobs of mayonnaise and those Goddamned caramel sundaes.

I tighten, suck at the air and recall that Charles Atlas was a ninety-nine-pound weakling

I stand naked before the mirror. Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle. It has not changed that I can remember. I was always a fat kid.

But the hole that he left was a big one, and nobody even tried to sew it up.

Move west down Ventura boulevard