On my first spree, Ralphie—as on all for several years—I boarded an elevated train and alighted at a Bowery station. Several times in later years, I spied acquaintances of my every-day world either on the train or on the Bowery. I always gave them a wide berth, although having a great advantage in means of recognition.
And why, on my very first spree, did I seek the Bowery, Ralphie? Because only a few weeks before, in my home town, I had seen a comic opera staged on that avenue, its keynote the oft repeated refrain:
“The Bowery! The Bowery!
There they say such things!
And they do such things!
The Bowery! The Bowery!
I’ll never go there any more!”
So I was dead crazy to bring to pass there the female-impersonation sprees of which I, for several years, had had merely waking dreams in my home town. Such realization was why I moved to New York. |The Goody-Goody Transformed.| It was, mon cheri, all because I wanted to live within half-an-hour’s journey of the enchanting old Bowery!
On my first spree, I made my way up and down the crowded sidewalks for an hour, staring with all my eyes at the brilliantly lighted fronts of beer gardens, the many gaudily dressed girls strutting up and down all alone, but, most of all, the sporty-looking youthful laboring men seeking their evening’s fun. How longingly and beseechingly I gazed into the latter’s eyes! A hundred times I had accosting words on the end of my tongue. I but barely lacked the brass for utterance, notwithstanding that in my every-day life I had always been morbidly bashful. How I wished I were acquainted with at least one of these powerfully built—and, to me at least, bewitchingly handsome—foreign-looking young fellows!
Who, mon cheri, that knew me as a goody-goody boy in my home town, always going to Bible school twice on Lord’s day, and not merely once as nearly all children of pious parents, would have foretold that some day I would be tapping the sidewalks of America’s greatest red-light district as a common strumpet?[[42]]