“Suddenly I was in danger. I’ve never been in a fight in my life; throughout school I’d always bribed a tough kid to be my bodyguard. And as a teenager I had become a pacifist. I knew that this skinny punk could hurt me. So I gave him the four bucks or so I had in my pocket, and said, ‘Here, now you’ve got more than me.’ And I felt guilty telling that monstrous one-quarter-of-one-percent truth. While literally the case for the moment, it was a cruel mockery, for he would never have as much, no matter how hard he tried, than I had won in the lottery of birth.”

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