I promptly cashed the check and booked a plane ticket to Amsterdam for the holidays. Out of the country for the first time in my life, loose on the Continent with a Eurail pass, I spent every dime of that dirty money as frivolously as I could — champagne in Paris, dope in Amsterdam, ephemeral pleasures of one sort or another from London to Venice — shadowed the whole time by a mixture of exhilaration and shame, that familiar cocktail of emotion in all my dealings with the old man, almost from the beginning: the exhilaration of having got away with something, the shame of having let him off the hook for one more gift of cash.

He had at last made of me an American hustler, just not the kind he’d hoped.