The Autobiography of a Thief

by Hutchins Hapgood

I had been in hell for several years; but even hell has its uses. When I was sent up for my third term, I thought I should not live my bit out, and that, as long as I did live, I should remain a grafter at heart. But the pipe house cured me, or helped to cure me, of a vice which, if it had continued, would have made me incapable of reform, even if I had lived. I mean the opium habit. Before I went to the mad-house there had been periods when I had little opium, either because I could not obtain it, or because I was trying to knock it off. My sufferings in consequence had been violent, but the worst moral and physical torture that has ever fallen to my lot came to me after I had entered the pipe house; for I could practically get no opium. That deprivation, added to the horrors I saw every day, was enough to make any man crazy. At least, I thought so at the time. I must have had a good nervous system to have passed through it all.

Insufficient hop is almost as bad as none at all. During my first months in the madhouse, the doctor occasionally took pity on me and gave me a little of the drug, but taken in such small quantities it was worse than useless. He used to give me sedatives, however, which calmed me for a time. Occasionally, too, I would get a little hop from a trusty, who was a friend of mine, and I had smuggled in some tablets of morphine from stir; but the supply was soon exhausted, and I saw that the only thing to do was to knock it off entirely. This I did, and made no more attempts to obtain the drug. For the last two years in the asylum I did not have a bit of it. I can not describe the agonies I went through. Every nerve and muscle in my body was in pain most of the time, my stomach was constantly deranged, my eyes and mouth exuded water, and I could not sleep. Thoughts of suicide were constant with me. Of course, I could never have given up this baleful habit through my own efforts alone. The pipe house forced me to make the attempt, and after I had held off for two years, I had enough strength to continue in the right path, although even now the longing for it returns to me. It does not seem possible that I can ever go back to it, for that terrible experience in the mad-house made an indelible impression. I shall never be able to wipe out those horrors entirely from my mind. When under the influence of opium I used frequently to imagine I smelled the fragrance of white flowers. I never smell certain sweet perfumes now without the whole horrible experience rushing before my mind. Life in a mad-house taught me a lesson I shall never forget.

CHAPTER XIV.
Out of Hell.

I left Dannemora asylum for the criminal insane on a cold winter morning. I had my tickets to New York, but not a cent of money. Relatives or friends are supposed to provide that. I was happy, however, and I made a resolution, which this time I shall keep, never to go to stir or the pipe house again. I knew very well that I could never repeat such an experience without going mad in reality; or dying. The first term I spent in stir I had my books and a new life of beauty and thought to think about. Once for all I had had that experience. The thought of going through prison routine again—the damp cells, the poor food, the habits contracted, with the mad-house at the end—no, that could never be for me again. I felt this, as I heard the loons yelling good-bye to me from the windows. I looked at the gloomy building and said to myself: "I have left Hell, and I'll shovel coal before I go back. All the ideas that brought me here I will leave behind. In the future I will try to get all the good things out of life that I can—the really good things, a glimpse of which I got through my books. I think there is still sufficient grey matter in my brain for that."

I took the train for New York, but stopped off at Plattsburg and Albany to deliver some messages from the poor unfortunates to their relatives. I arrived in New York at twelve o'clock at night, having had nothing to eat all day. My relatives and friends had left the station, but were waiting up for me in my brother's house. This time I went straight to them. My father had died while I was in the pipe house, and now I determined that I would be at last a kind son to the mother who had never deserted me. I think she felt that I had changed and the tears that flowed from her eyes were not all from unhappiness. She told me about my father's last illness, and how cheerful he had been. "I bought him a pair of new shoes a month before he died," she said. "He laughed when he saw them and said: 'What extravagance! To buy shoes for a dying man!'"

Living right among them, I met again, of course, many of my old companions in crime, and found that many of them had thought I was dead. It was only the other day that I met "Al", driving a peddlers wagon. He, like me, had squared it. "I thought you died in the pipe house, Jim," he said. This has happened to me a dozen times since my return. I had spent so much time in stir that the general impression among the guns at home seemed to be that I had "gone up the escape."

As a general thing I found that guns who had squared it and become prosperous had never been very successful grafters. Some of the best box-men and burglars in the business are now bar-tenders in saloons owned by former small fry among the dips. There are waiters now in saloons and concert halls on the bowery who were far cleverer thieves than the men who employ them, and who are worth thousands. Hungry Joe is an instance. Once he was King of confidence men, and on account of his great plausibility got in on a noted person, on one occasion, for several thousand dollars. And now he will beg many a favor of men he would not look at in the old days.

A grafter is jealous, suspicious and vindictive. I had always known that, but never realized it so keenly as I have since my return from the mad-house. Above everything else a grafter is suspicious, whether he has squared it or not—suspicious of his pals and of everybody else. When my old pals saw that I was not working with them, they wondered what my private graft was. When I told them I was on the level and was looking for a job, they either laughed or looked at me with suspicion in their eyes. They saw I was looking good (well-dressed) and they could not understand it. They put me down, some of them, as a stool-pigeon. They all feel instinctively that I am no longer with them, and most of them have given me the frosty mit. Only the bums who used to be grafters sail up to me in the Bowery. They have not got enough sense left even for suspicion. The dips who hang out in the thieves' resorts are beginning to hate me; not because I want to injure them, for I don't, but because they think I do. I told one of them, an old friend, that I was engaged in some literary work. He was angry in an instant and said: "You door mat thief. You couldn't get away with a coal-scuttle."

One day I was taking the editor of this book through the Bowery, pointing out to him some of my old resorts, when I met an old pal of mine, who gave me the glad hand. We had a drink, and I, who was feeling good, started in to jolly him a little. He had told me about an old pal of ours who had just fallen for a book and was confined in a Brooklyn jail. I took out a piece of "copy" paper and took the address, intending to pay a visit to him, for everybody wants sympathy. What a look went over that grafter's face! I saw him glance quickly at the editor and then at me, and I knew then he had taken alarm, and probably thought we were Pinkerton men, or something as bad. I tried to carry it off with a laugh, for the place was full of thieves, and told him I would get him a job on a newspaper. He answered hastily that he had a good job in the pool-room and was on the level. He started in to try to square it with my companion by saying that he "adored a man who had a job." A little while afterwards he added that he hated anybody who would graft after he had got an honest job. Then, to wind up his little game of squaring himself, he ended by declaring that he had recently obtained a very good position.

That was one of the incidents that queered me with the more intelligent thieves. He spread the news, and whenever I meet one of that gang on the Bowery I get the cold shoulder, a gun is so mighty quick to grow suspicious. A grafter who follows the business for years is a study in psychology, and his two most prominent characteristics are fear and suspicion. If some stool-pigeon tips him off to the police, and he is sent to stir, he invariably suspects the wrong person. He tells his friends in stir that "Al done him," and pretty soon poor Al, who may be an honest thief, is put down as a rat. If Al goes to stir very often the result is a cutting match between the two.