If you don’t think there are any interesting tales in the Tenderloin, just go there some night and look around. You don’t have to look long before you will find something that is worth going a distance for.
You’ll find tragedy and pathos as close together as the meat is to the bread in a ham sandwich, and it doesn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to discover it, either.
I know a few things about the Bowery and the Tenderloin, and for the past twenty years I have roamed about New York by night, simply because I was fascinated by the life after dark. Of course, you know that this night owl business is a disease, and when once you get it, and get it good, it is one of the hardest things in the world to cure. In my day I have seen many a nice, straightforward young fellow go to the bad simply because he got the night habit.
It isn’t much of a combination that gets you, either, for it’s the white lights, the music, the women and the drinks, not counting the good fellowship, or what passes for good fellowship, on the side.
The lid is on in New York to a certain extent, that I’ll admit, but I’m going to take you under the lid.
It’s all a bluff, anyhow, and things go on the same as they have been going for years, with very little change.
The same kind of girls are roaming the streets, the same kind of booze is being served on the little round tables in stuffy back rooms, and the same class of waiters are making short change whenever the mark looks easy. There may be a new police captain in the district or the precinct, but there are some things in this world that can’t be held down any more than a man can hold down a charge of dynamite after the cap has been exploded.
Talk about your high pressure life—that’s it. Ten years is the limit for the careful ones, and I’ve seen them go off in five. Why, only the other day a hospital ambulance backed up to a downtown tenement, and when it went away it carried a woman whose lease of life had about expired.
There was a crowd which gathered, as usual—men, women and children, all filled with a morbid curiosity, which makes people flock and gaze with interest at anything which approaches a bit of human wreckage, and of them all there was not more than one or two who knew that the sick woman had once been known as the Queen of Chinatown, and had been made the subject of many an interesting story.
It seems only a few years ago that they called her the Queen, and you wondered why until you looked at her and heard her talk.