Now a convincing negative.
Then, as now, our leader was sparing in the use of words. At the end of our brief interview, I was "staked" to a nickel to buy my first stock of papers, and those who know Tim Sullivan will also know that I was not the first or the last to get "staked" by the Bowery statesman.
He not only furnished my working capital, but also taught me a few tricks of the trade and advised me to invest my five pennies in just one, the best selling paper of the period.
So, in less than twelve hours after leaving what had been for several years my home, I was fully installed as a vendor of newspapers.
Then began the usual existence of "newsies," eating and "sleeping" when lucky, and "pulling through somehow" when unlucky. I stuck to that business for over ten years.
The life of the streets did not at all disagree with me. My childhood had been full of bitterness, childish bitterness, and I had a dull longing to make the world at large feel my revenge for having dealt so unkindly with me. Whatever good traits there had been in me were quickly and willingly transformed into viciousness. This helped me to become a leading member of our gang of boys.
Among us there was none so absolutely orphaned as myself. Those who were orphans had, at least, their memories. I did not even have them.
In odd, emotional moments, one or another would let his thoughts stray back to some still loved and revered father or mother, or would confess to having crept up to his former home, at some safe time, to have a peep at forfeited comforts. I welcomed these references and day dreams of my colleagues, but solely because they were utilized by me as pretenses for inflicting my brutality on those who had uttered them.
There is a question, a number of questions, to be asked here. Why did I do this? Was it because I was naturally vicious, or because I wanted to stifle a certain gnawing in my heart by my ferociousness? A strange reasoning, the last, perhaps; but in years I was still a child, and if a child has but little in his life to love, and that little is taken out of his life, that child can turn into a veritable little demon. Those, whom I had believed my parents, turned out to be nothing more than charitably inclined strangers; that what I had believed to be my home, proved but a refuge, and my boyish logic saw in this sufficient cause to envy those, who had all this behind them and to give vent to this envy in the most ferocious manner.
That was the tenor of my life as a newsboy. I had enough callousness to bear all the hardships without a murmur. One ambition took possession of me. I wanted to be a power among newsboys. I wanted to be respected or feared. As I did not care which, I succeeded in the latter at the expense of the former. The heroes of newsboys are always men who owe their prominence to physical prowess. I chose as my models the best known fighters of the day.