Androgynes Resourceful.
Every one had retired. Able to raise the covering, I dropped to the coal-pile. I discovered that the door at the head of the cellar stairs was also fortunately unsecured. With trepidation and in absolute silence, I ascended, in stocking feet, to my chamber and devoutly thanked Providence for restoration to my family without a hair injured.
I had only recently purchased the appropriated habiliments. The subsequent day I visited the same establishment and succeeded in securing an exact duplicate so that my family would not observe the disappearance of the original.
Frank—Eunice.
II. The Pug Heaven.
I henceforth visited the Pugilists’ Haven one evening each week. After the appropriation of one good suit, I always attired myself rather shabbily. After seven o’clock dinner, I would change to the cast-off apparel and noiselessly glide down the two flights of stairs from my chamber. Fortunately father always had prayers after dinner. While the family were in the prayer-room and all the servants in their dining-room, I succeeded in engineering my exit for an evening’s revel with little risk, in my poverty-stricken disguise, of encountering any individual in the halls. No one ever suspected the reason for my absences. It was several times remarked that I had been out late. But I threw the observer off the scent by the pretext of a perambulation to obviate insomnia.
As I proceeded rapidly from my domicile, I would, if I detected a familiar figure advancing, cross to the other side of the street and make a feint of ringing a door-bell. In order, in my dilapidated apparel, to avert the danger of encountering on the public conveyance some one acquainted with my identity, I would perambulate more than a mile in order to attain the Bowery by an east-side car. On the way I would conceal my house-key and an emergency greenback in a crevice in the Central Park stonewall—always the identic cavity in order to be regained with ease.
At Pug Heaven—as my dive was nicknamed—I was universally given a hearty welcome and secured |A Female with Male Genitals.| the society of adolescent ruffians fairly clean and sprucely attired. Of course they always ransacked my pockets the first chance that offered. Before it could happen, I had treated liberally half-a-dozen of the handsomest, and thus insinuated myself into their good graces. I always kept a reserve five-dollar bill sewed in the waistband of my trousers—a pair worn on these sprees alone because too shabby to be a temptation for appropriation.
On my second appearance at Pug Heaven, the heroic gunmen entertained me with episodes about other female-impersonators they had encountered. I particularly remember stories about the “Duchess of Austria,” from whom, they recounted, “some lucky guys had pumped” hundreds of dollars. One narrated anecdotes of a physician located south of Fourteenth Street. Young fellows would visit his office to be medicated and he would reveal his own bisexuality. My pals did not marvel at all over my strange appetencies. They entreated me to bring around other female-impersonators. They were merely anxious for the money it would bring them. When I apologized for my queer penchant, they said: “It is nothing. It is Nature.” Ralph, those adolescent Pug Heaven sluggers knew more about the psychology of instinctive female-impersonators than all the M. D.’s in America combined! From that single hour’s conversation, I ascertained more about my own personality than in my prior fourteen years pilgrimage on this planet. For the first time, the riddle of my existence was solved; I perceived that I had been born a biological sport—a female with male genitals.
I soon acquired half-a-dozen permanent favorites. |Impersonators Expert Actors.| These adolescent sluggers and gunmen lost no time in assuring me: “You’re only a doll-baby, Eunice, and so need us big, strong fellows to fight your battles. But you must stay with our gang! If we should catch you running around with any other, we’d murder you!”