Your body isn't anymore, doesn't ask for much. A little music and a soft touch. Why don't you let it out to play?

Your heart isn't a birdcage, singing in your chest. You want to shut it up, but give it a rest. You're gonna die one day.

Everybody, I think when we left this last time, I had just quit my high-paying job in Midtown Manhattan and the Diamond District. Thanks to the influence of Catalina Montero Alvarez. Where are you now?

Catalina Montero Alvarez. Wow, let's see. She was probably in her mid-30s, I would guess. That was what? The mid-80s? So what's that? So she's in her 60s now?

Catalina, thank you. Anyway, so what happened next? I went to my parents' house, quit my job, had all this money, had...

I don't think I mentioned, I don't know if I mentioned in the last episode, this Russian guy that I met who went into an apartment, in an office in one of the buildings I was managing.

He was a funny little guy. These days, I may have mentioned that in the mid-80s, you could buy your way out of the Soviet Union.

The world was still divided up into the Russians or the Communists and the so-called free world, the capitalist world.

It occurs to me that a lot of people listening to this, if you're in your 20s or maybe even in your early 30s, the notion of what it was like living in the 80s is as exotic to you as India in a way.

The internet was a huge, huge change in the way it feels to be alive if you're living in the modern world. If you're in a little village in Zimbabwe, I guess it doesn't matter as much.

Or maybe it does because now everybody has phones there. But in the days before cell phones and internet email all that, the world was a very different place.

The Soviet Union, when the Soviet Union still existed, there was a very clear division of here and there. I said them.

Anyway, this guy had bought his way out of the Soviet Union, probably with his pockets full of diamonds, came to New York and wanted to establish himself in the diamond business there.

He really needed to have an office on 47th Street in order to do that. Anyway, he and I met and I don't know what he saw in me.

But he decided that he was going to just work me till he got an office. There were no offices.

One day we were in my office and he came by every week, just insistent. Always a good humor, a big smile on his face.

So he wanted to take me out to lunch and I knew he was trying to bribe me or whatever, but there just were no offices.

And there were already people on a waiting list.

So I refused, refused, refused, but he was a nice guy and whatever. And after a while I was like, okay, look, we can go to lunch, but we'll go to this burger place on 48th Street.

So we went to the burger place. And it was awkward and weird.

And I was in my 3P suit with a tie and the whole fucking Shabang.

And I remember taking this bottle of ketchup and instead of like, I don't know what I was thinking, but I shook it like I was flicking a whip, like a back and forth, not up and down.

...