Akin to truancy is the “wanderlust.” This passion to get out and away, travel, and court adventure, comes to the boy of the Middle West Side as it comes to most boys—and often he obeys its call. The resulting experiences are usually only a short and amusing incident in his life; very rarely do they lead to a permanent change. One young adventurer told of a characteristic trip:
“Denny Murphy came over to our house one morning last summer and said, ‘Red, let’s beat it.’ ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘where to?’ ‘Out west,’ Denny said. I did not have anything else to do and I thought it would be a good thing to go west. So that afternoon, Denny and I went over to Jersey City. Denny had some money. I don’t know where he got it, but he probably stole it, for he was always crazy about robberies; talked about ‘pulling off’ robberies and things of that kind, and I knew he had been in some hold-ups. We were going to go to Philadelphia first, but I thought we needed more money and could probably get a job in Paterson. So we took a freight train to Paterson. Got there in the evening and I tried for a job in the factory. I told the man I had been getting six dollars a week in another factory and told him I lived in Paterson, but the manager caught me lying about where I lived and fired me out. So Denny and I slept that night in the doorway of that same factory.
“In the morning we both looked around for a job, but there was nothing doing. Finally I got on a barge and they were going to take me on there washing dishes and being cabin boy, but there was nothing for Denny to do, and the boat was going up the river instead of down, so there wasn’t any use in our staying there; so that night Denny came in and we slept on the back of the boat. Denny had some more money now—No, I don’t know where he got it—and we went over to Jersey City again on the trolley car. Then we caught a freight train for Philadelphia. The cars were locked and we had to climb clear up and ride on top. We got down to some town just the other side of Trenton before a brakeman saw us and booted us off, and then we had to wait there the rest of the afternoon and get on a coal car which took us to Philadelphia. We spent that night in a freight car and then got on another freight train out in the West Philadelphia yards and started west. We climbed in a box car marked ‘Springfield, Ohio,’ shut the door, and I went to sleep. When I woke up it was daylight, and the car was in another city. I supposed it was Springfield but it wasn’t; it was only Harrisburg. We walked all around the town, but we couldn’t find anything to do, and finally we got out of money. Along about dark we saw a bellboy, we thought he was, coming out of a hotel. He was a ‘coon’ in uniform, so we thought he must be a bellboy. Then Denny said, ‘Here’s our chance to get money.’ He said we could take a club and come up behind and blackjack the coon and rob him. So we came up in the dark and just as we got close up behind him, he turned around and we saw that he was not a bellboy at all but a policeman. I never knew before they had ‘coon’ policemen anywhere.
“Denny and I beat it for the railroad as fast as we could go. We did not wait to eat or anything, but caught a freight train that we saw moving, and when we got on we found we were bound for Philadelphia again. In the car with us was a ‘coon’ bumming like we were. He wanted to know who we were and where we were going. We told him we were just looking around the country, and he wanted to take us south with him. He said the Southern people were mighty fine people and would surely give us good jobs if we would go with him as far as Atlanta. We had come back from the west now and we thought we might as well go south as anywhere else, so we told him we would go with him. Then I went to sleep again and when I woke up there wasn’t any coon any more. He had beat it somewhere and left Denny and me behind.
“We got off the train at a little station called Overbrook, just outside of Philadelphia, and just as we hit the cinders, two railroad detectives jumped out from behind the switchhouse and grabbed us both and that ended our western trip.
“They took us into the city to the House of Detention, where we stayed over that night and the next two or three days. There was a man there who treated us fine and made us tell all about ourselves, and after two or three days he put us on a passenger train and sent us back to New York. I’ve never tried to go west since.”
Parties and dances, now and then a “grand annual ball” or “fête” at a dance hall or casino, an occasional visit to a moving picture show, one or two dilapidated poolrooms, and the sordid and ever-present saloon—these are practically the only amusements definitely offered to the West Side boy. And as he casts about for means to supplement them it is natural for him to turn early to indulgence in sexual immorality, which he has seen and heard talked of in the tenement and the street since he began to be old enough to notice anything. His sense of modesty has been strangled at birth. All round him he is accustomed to hear obscene terms, the meaning of which any older person will freely explain in a way which robs them of any moral significance whatever. There are plenty of “big fellers” and “wise girls” on the streets to teach him anything that he wishes to know. In the tenements themselves immoral practices are common even among small children, with the full knowledge of everyone except their parents, who are nevertheless apathetically aware of the sins of their neighbors’ children. In a number of ways the boys here learn, not the truth about reproduction, for that is very little known here, but about sexual enjoyment and its many forms of perversion, topics which occupy a large share of the mind of adolescent youth in this environment. Children of both sexes indulge freely in conversation which is only carried on secretly by adults in other walks of life. Certain roofs in the neighborhood have a name as rendezvous for children and young couples for immoral practices.
In common with other districts of the city the neighborhood has many sexual perverts, and these furnish an actual menace to the children. As infants, practically, the boys have heard the same stories repeated until they regard sexual matters as forbidden, of course,—and therefore, like smoking cigarettes and gambling, to be hidden from parents, police, or other authorities,—but with no sense of abhorrence. Knowledge of the methods of the perverts, on the other hand, leads to experimentation among the boys, and to the many forms of perversion which in the end make the degenerate. Self-abuse is considered a common joke, and boys as young as seven and eight actually practice sodomy. Every night the doorways are blocked with girls from fourteen to twenty years of age who lean against the walls and rails, and talk with the young men, the “talk” occasionally degenerating into a laughing scuffle. Girls as a rule are never mentioned by the boys except in club-room stories of the grossest immorality.
Universally these boys lack stamina—physical, mental, moral. They are incapable of prolonged exertion; a minute or two of fast boxing exhausts them completely, and only the exceptional ones are able to box continuously for more than two or three rounds. Their baseball teams are too apt to “blow up” in the fourth or fifth inning, no matter what individual cleverness some of the members may have shown, because the players are so shortwinded and feeble of limb. There are, of course, a number of well developed athletes among them, but a boy of normal physique stands out far above his playmates, and those of exceptional skill are few indeed.
Their mental energies are scattered and undependable. They are incapable of prolonged thought upon any one subject, and lack absolutely the concentration which mental discipline can impart. Quick they may be and clever, but they are seldom deep, and through years of mental inaction they seem unable to grasp anything like an abstract idea or principle. Of any except the simplest and most exciting card games they quickly tire.