A Sadder, but Wiser “Reub.”
I judged it time to escort him to his hotel, because he needed some one to steady him. He looked a wreck. Because he was not used to champagne and all. We shook hands with Pedro and Tracy, and boarded a car for the Grand Union, where all the middle-class Reubs put up. Even when we were alone in front of his hotel, he did not have the nerve to call me down. I have fleeced Reubs who have given me a good punch in the mug when they got me alone. Abe must have thought I am straight.
I shook his hand good-night, patted him on the back for the last time, and said I would call this coming evening to give him a chance to win back his money. Of course I never expected to keep the engagement. I don’t suppose Abe did either. As soon as he got inside his hotel, I sneaked away as fast as my legs would carry me. For a week, I shall have to keep away from the Monte Carlo.
The Fairie Boy.
IV. A Stuyvesant Square Pick-up.
It is August, 1895—several weeks after Buddie McDonald had left me in the lurch, as he had his legal wife, and as he probably through life went on deserting quondam soul-mates when having no more use for them. Furthermore, during this single summer that I frequented the Rialto, I found it a barren stamping-ground for myself. Nearly all my Lotharios were of the moneyed class that go out of the city for the heated term, or at least while away their evenings at a shore resort in the suburbs. For I did not drift with solid business young men, but with those who sought an easy life. The book-makers were at Saratoga, the vaudeville artists at seaside theatres. Even professional gamblers preferred Saratoga or Long Branch during the months that fools with money to burn went to those places rather than to little old Fourteenth Street.
But in June I was fortunate in being introduced to some refined “young fellows” living near Stuyvesant Square, five minutes walk from the Rialto. Business or a slim pocketbook kept them in the city. I therefore formed the habit of staging my impersonation sprees in the Square—a park of about six acres. Within four weeks I had been introduced to several score young bloods—so many because all belonged to a neighboring club the talk of which I came to be on my advent because of my ultra-androgynism and female-impersonation. The majority liked to flirt with |An Unrivaled Hercules.| me an hour in the park as if I were a full-fledged mademoiselle. I was always clothed as a youth, although exceptionally loud, as fairies are wont. But the present work will pass over my relations with the Stuyvesant Square club-men because described in my Autobiography of an Androgyne.
In that August occurred one of the most eventful evenings of my twelve years’ career as overt female-impersonator. I had promenaded every path in the Square without running across any clubman—very unusual on a balmy evening. Therefore just before dark I seated myself next to the most attractive stranger in the park, where two thousand people were enjoying the cool of a scorching day. He looked to be twenty, was rather shabbily clad, but clean. It was not his features, but his powerful and well proportioned figure, that attracted me. His hair was red—a favorite color for neckties, but the very last I would choose for a beau’s chevelure. His face, while well formed, was close to the very worst among the more than one thousand young bachelors with whom I have coquetted. His eyebrows and lashes were blonde and barely visible. His complexion resembled a sheet of faded pink muslin—a solid color all over, not rosebud or peachlike, as the lamented Buddie McDonald’s. Particularly his cheeks were covered with pimples, common in redhaired men, so that one wonders how they shave. But because of his unapproached bone and muscular development visible even through his clothes, I did not like him a whit the less on account of his pigmentary defects.
For several months after that night, I fell in love, at first sight, with nearly every red-headed adolescent |Influence of Environment.| I ran across, particularly if his cheeks were covered with pimples.
In order to ascertain the trustworthiness, goodheartedness, and liberalmindedness of the Hercules, I first drew him out craftily by a long series of questions. Even people in my every-day world have given me the palm for inquisitiveness. I expected to put myself in the power of Hercules and needed to find out all about him. I was always ultra-wary about falling into a trap, as I already had several times in the Underworld. Androgynes are murdered every few months in New York merely because of intense hatred of effeminacy instilled by education in the breasts of full-fledged males.