Among my associates in the Rialto resorts were youthful actors playing at the several theatres, racetrack book-makers, wealthy adolescents who spent their evenings sipping gross pleasures, and highfliers of the feminine persuasion—at that date as thick in the Rialto as flies in summer around an open jug of molasses.
I was now in my third year of leading a double life. My every-day circle was without suspicion. Outside my one evening per week in the Rialto, I led a most industrious student life, even winning prizes. I had already been awarded the bachelor’s degree cum laude and was in my first year of graduate study. Of course I had never revealed to any Rialto associate that I was a university student. I was known there merely as “Jennie June,” while the few who took the trouble to inquire my legal name never questioned “Ralph Werther.” And my three most intimate Lothario friends of the Rialto were too busy evenings—Martin and Paul,[[30]] chasing chippies, and Buddie, victimizing youthful greenhorns—to investigate where I spent my time while not in the Rialto. They have each asked me where I lived. I gave a fictitious address, hoping they would not investigate. And they never did. And my three most intimate androgyne friends—Roland Reeves, Eunice, and Phyllis—were, like myself, living a double life incognito, and thus |“Things Are Not What They Seem.”| were the more inclined to respect my disinclination to refer to my every-day life.
To the university circle I thus continued the “innocent” from whose view Heaven had mercifully shut off the seamy side of life, particularly the Underworld. They declared they never saw any one with such weak sexuality! But I actually knew a thousand times as much about passion and crime as any one of them. Some complained because I “never associated with men and learned human nature”! But I secretly knew human nature far better than any of them. They thought that my feminine predilections and lack of worldly wisdom (seeming) were due to my being a recluse! And I was a recluse so far as concerned university social affairs. For I elected to take my diversions as a mademoiselle—not as a gallant.
But to return to Buddie: I have picked out for description that one of my numerous evenings spent in part with him which best illustrates his character and our relations. Afternoons and evenings he hung around fashionable hotel lobbies and exhibition halls to scrape acquaintance with moderately wealthy and sportily inclined Reubs making their first trip to New York. With his unmatched geniality and hypocrisy, he was decidedly successful in getting a line aboard some “sport” from upstate, and taking him in tow. For with Buddie, it was “Brother, this” and “Brother, that”. A large proportion of the Reubs whom Buddie condescended to buttonhole congratulated themselves doubtless on their good luck in happening on such a friendly New Yorker—a gentleman of leisure and a big roll of yellow backs (which Buddie always took pains to wave before the eyes of Reubs, a manoeuvre |Gambling a Master Passion.| tending to hypnotise them) who condescended to show them the sights of the metropolis, and, above all, take them where they could quadruple and quintuple their funds in a single evening. The passion for enrichment by a stroke of luck is, after woman and wine, the chief pitfall for “he-men.” An appeal to this craze in Reubs ambitious to be “sports” has good prospects of success for brainy metropolitan prestidigitators.
On Buddie’s and my entering into a solemn contract—very similar to a marriage bond—to be “best friends,” he agreed to reserve one entire evening each week for me alone. But it was only the fourth that I had to sit in a Fourteenth Street restaurant for two long hours waiting in vain. I was wiping my tear-bedimmed eyes four times a minute. Other diners probably thought I was experiencing some overwhelming bereavement.
At ten I made the rounds of the gambling joints frequented by my soul-mate. I finally caught sight of his wondrous blonde hair and peachlike cheeks in the very last—as always happens—of his half-dozen stamping grounds. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, it was pre-eminently New York’s Monte Carlo (which name I give it in this book). The walls were paneled in rosewood. Every six feet a heavy gilt-framed plate-glass mirror reached half-way to the 15-foot ceiling. The latter was painted with Cupids and Venuses, in all sorts of poses, amid fleecy clouds floating in such a blue sky as is actually beheld only in Italy. The myriads of crystal prisms pendent from the huge chandeliers emitted all the colors of the spectrum. The floor was mosaic—in such exquisite patterns that it seemed a sin to set foot on it. The |In New York’s Monte Carlo.| ebony furniture was inlaid with mother-of-pearl in floral patterns.
I rushed to Buddie’s side noiselessly because, with three other smartly dressed young bloods, he was absorbed in a game. I knelt beside my hero-boy with head against his arm.
When the hand was played out, Buddie, throwing at me the sweetest of smiles, addressed the only one of the four who was a stranger: “Mr. Myers, let me introduce Jennie June, the female-impersonator. I am used to her hanging around while we fellows are playing. Do not let her presence distract you. Jennie and I call each other ‘Best Friend.’ Perhaps you never before ran up against a person who is one-third man, one-third woman, and one-third infant. That explains why she nestles up against me so affectionately.”
But Mr. Myers appeared to be unutterably shocked. Particularly since I was in male attire. He appeared incredulous. He had never even dreamed that a third sex exists.
After an hour Buddie said: “Jennie, take my keys, go to my room, and wait for me there. Because I will not get home until long after midnight.”