II. The Pug Heaven.
I henceforth visited the Pugilists’ Haven one evening each week. After the appropriation of one good suit, I always attired myself rather shabbily. After seven o’clock dinner, I would change to the cast-off apparel and noiselessly glide down the two flights of stairs from my chamber. Fortunately father always had prayers after dinner. While the family were in the prayer-room and all the servants in their dining-room, I succeeded in engineering my exit for an evening’s revel with little risk, in my poverty-stricken disguise, of encountering any individual in the halls. No one ever suspected the reason for my absences. It was several times remarked that I had been out late. But I threw the observer off the scent by the pretext of a perambulation to obviate insomnia.
As I proceeded rapidly from my domicile, I would, if I detected a familiar figure advancing, cross to the other side of the street and make a feint of ringing a door-bell. In order, in my dilapidated apparel, to avert the danger of encountering on the public conveyance some one acquainted with my identity, I would perambulate more than a mile in order to attain the Bowery by an east-side car. On the way I would conceal my house-key and an emergency greenback in a crevice in the Central Park stonewall—always the identic cavity in order to be regained with ease.
At Pug Heaven—as my dive was nicknamed—I was universally given a hearty welcome and secured |A Female with Male Genitals.| the society of adolescent ruffians fairly clean and sprucely attired. Of course they always ransacked my pockets the first chance that offered. Before it could happen, I had treated liberally half-a-dozen of the handsomest, and thus insinuated myself into their good graces. I always kept a reserve five-dollar bill sewed in the waistband of my trousers—a pair worn on these sprees alone because too shabby to be a temptation for appropriation.
On my second appearance at Pug Heaven, the heroic gunmen entertained me with episodes about other female-impersonators they had encountered. I particularly remember stories about the “Duchess of Austria,” from whom, they recounted, “some lucky guys had pumped” hundreds of dollars. One narrated anecdotes of a physician located south of Fourteenth Street. Young fellows would visit his office to be medicated and he would reveal his own bisexuality. My pals did not marvel at all over my strange appetencies. They entreated me to bring around other female-impersonators. They were merely anxious for the money it would bring them. When I apologized for my queer penchant, they said: “It is nothing. It is Nature.” Ralph, those adolescent Pug Heaven sluggers knew more about the psychology of instinctive female-impersonators than all the M. D.’s in America combined! From that single hour’s conversation, I ascertained more about my own personality than in my prior fourteen years pilgrimage on this planet. For the first time, the riddle of my existence was solved; I perceived that I had been born a biological sport—a female with male genitals.
I soon acquired half-a-dozen permanent favorites. |Impersonators Expert Actors.| These adolescent sluggers and gunmen lost no time in assuring me: “You’re only a doll-baby, Eunice, and so need us big, strong fellows to fight your battles. But you must stay with our gang! If we should catch you running around with any other, we’d murder you!”
I coveted to be their slave, Ralph, and did all I could for them without disclosing that I belonged to a wealthy family, because a female-impersonator of a higher social stratum associating incognito with gangsters must conceal his status. At Pug Heaven, I became an expert detective and actor—an accomplishment requisite for every upper-class impersonator destined to sprees in the Underworld.
A thousand times I desiderated female corporeality so that I could have married one of these magic gunmen. How I have envied many a young mother before my eyes with babe in arms! How could a God of love have created me physically a male when I have always so coveted personal female corporeality, and, in adulthood, the mothering of offspring!
These weekly female-impersonation explosions continued more than two years, when my father relegated me to a university several hours from New York. I leave it nameless—to spare it the disgrace of having once numbered “Frank White” among its students. These evenings in Pug Heaven were the most beatific feature of life. During college vacations, and for several years following graduation, I occasionally visited the joint. But finally, on my return from an extended residence in Europe, I discovered a haberdashery occupying the site. I was informed that an application for renewal of license had been denied. Its habitués became thus scattered.
Frank—Eunice.