In the men’s room is an ad which reads: “Sanitubes for defense, protect our Army and Navy.”
Bettye is the town’s chief call girl madame, operating through the hotel switchboard.
The Village Bar, 12 Harrison Street, around the corner from Baltimore, is a pick-up dump with B girls, hustlers and barmaids who go through the customers, and we mean just that. Three of us saw a guy get rolled. He was a good-looking, well-dressed young fellow, obviously plastered. A whore in an evening gown sat next to him and pawed him with both her hands. Then she got up, went to the women’s room for a minute, then took a seat by herself at the far end of the bar. When the cluck woke up, he frisked his pockets for his poke. It was gone. Still in a daze, he wandered around the room looking for the dame. She didn’t give him a glance. He wandered off, befuddled.
Even the better places have circular bars. We figured that out—they are better for pick-ups. You can look at the girls from front, then motion them. But in most places you don’t have to motion. They practically attack you. Not even in Chicago are they so voracious. They don’t ask you to buy a drink. They move right in and order.
Few Baltimore B girls work on commission. Most of them live on their tips, which they solicit after they’ve bilked you for drinks. The procedure is for a girl to move in next to you, order without asking, then get ready to blow if not propositioned and demand a dollar tip for her “company.”
Some saloons which specialize in better-looking ones give them $5 a night and they keep their tips and anything they can make after hours. Entertainers must cadge drinks to keep their jobs. No commissions.
Baltimore has a 2 A.M. closing, which except in Little Italy is generally observed—one of the few laws that is. These easy hours give the girls plenty of time to pick up money after work. A strange sight is East Baltimore Street a few minutes before 2 A.M. It is lined with walls of men waiting for the frails to come out of the bars, strip dives and burlesque houses. These are not pimps or dates, but men on the hunt who saved drink-money and put a ceiling on the commodity. Hundreds of pick-ups are made this way every night, openly in front of the few cops there on patrol.
Streetwalkers pace in front of the filling-station at Baltimore and Fallsway. They are very low-grade stuff. Asking prices start at five bucks and waver to what they can get.
Parlor-houses have about disappeared from Baltimore, as from most cities, but there is a line of them in the 600 block, on West North Avenue. There’s one in the 1000 block of N. Charles, also one next door to the Blue Mirror.