In the Slums in My Best.
After waiting here also a half hour in vain, I became hysterical, wept, wrung my hands, and gave utterance to suppressed shrieks. I finally decided the only thing to do was to walk up Mulberry Street. About the middle of the block, I happened to find him seated, as usual, in a group of my beaux. They all made exclamations of surprise and pleasure when they caught sight of me. It was my first and only appearance there dressed up. My mate called out: “Hello pretty little girl!”
“Hello big, brave, bouncing boy!”
They immediately pulled me down to a seat among them and several hands were stuck into my pockets. I had tucked my bills away in the waistband of my trousers. The street was alive with recent Italian immigrants, and I might have saved my coin by raising an alarm, but of course did not choose to. On every visit here I had my pockets rifled, and did not mind the loss of the coin.
My mate sought to be as captivating as possible, and put me in a state of perfect happiness. Before long he asked me to sleep with him and a pal that night. All this time, among this group of young bloods, there was but one female, only sixteen years of age, whose home was on this block. It was decided that we should spend the night in her rooms. Accompanied by the two ruffians and the young woman, I thus finally sauntered down a pitch-dark alley and descended some steps to the basement of a ramshackle rear tenement, occupied entirely by illiterate Italians recently immigrated. I revolted at what I saw and smelt, but on this and other occasions was drawn by sexual attraction into pestilential places where nothing else would have induced me to remain a minute.
In the Lair of a Strumpet.
When the lamp was lighted, I found myself in a suite of two dilapidated rooms, scantily and poorly furnished. On a century-old bedstead rested a dirty mattress filled with straw, and no pillows or bed-linen. Benefiting by my money, my associates drank to excess as the evening wore away, while I found my pleasure in the usual manner. Toward midnight, after the two ruffians had become half-intoxicated, my mate placed the muzzle of a revolver, which the young woman kept for self-defence, against my head, saying he would blow my brains out if I got him into any trouble. Because of the maudlin condition of the two young men, and because I had something on me that they might consider worth committing a grave crime for, I now half expected never to leave the place alive, and repeatedly breathed a prayer that no serious harm might be permitted to befall me. I now let them dispossess me of the balance of my bills and my other valuables in dismay and without the slightest protest, for fear of angering them.
Finally, in order to frighten me further from making complaint to the police, one of the ruffians asked the other whether they should put a bullet through my head or turn me over to the police because of my peculiar addiction. Thoroughly frightened, I implored them to let me go home. After some deliberation, designed to show how they had me in their power, including the assurance that I had that night rendered myself liable to a long term of imprisonment—ignorant men always thinking only the androgyne is amenable to the law—they finally decided to let me go if I ran away from the neighborhood as fast as my legs would carry me. The three of them escorted me to the mouth of the alley, and the last words I caught were: “Run faster! Run faster!”
Yearning for Feminine Apparel.