Who is Michael's mentor in the book, Loving Women: A Novel of the Fifties?

Miles serves as Michael's mentor into the world of art—"real art," Michael says, not cartoons—and a way of seeing and talking that would open doors for Michael: "I'd never heard anyone talk like this, with all the sentences perfectly formed, and words rolling around in a rich crazy obscene way. Miles had a southern accent, too, a softness in the vowels that made the consonants sound even harder when he started firing his sentences like bullets."