while at that lunch—we were probably drinking champagne, and I was probably on Klonopin—I remember telling my friend about the last time I’d been at the Odeon, a few weeks earlier, when I found myself sharing cocaine with Jean-Michel Basquiat (we were both wearing suits) downstairs in the men’s restroom during a drunken dinner after a photo shoot for Interview magazine. Basquiat asked why there were so few black people in my first two novels and I said something about the casual racism of the white society I was depicting and we lit up cigarettes as we walked back, high, to the respective
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