That’s another kind of wealth, the wealth I prize most, the wealth of my experiences. I wouldn’t have missed any of it. Or the memories. What did the poet say? I loved them all in my own fashion—and I have no regrets. I wanted my album full.

Well, it is. How was I able to do it, and still live a “respectable” life?

The answer is—and here’s the bad part—duplicity. That’s the solution I arrived at in the suite below Al Capone’s in that South Michigan Avenue hotel almost fifty years ago. What I decided in that season in Chicago was to cut myself loose from the plague of guilt, from society’s approved restrictions and morality. Secretly, quietly, I scorned them and went my way, pulling out of life the pleasure and adventures I craved.