I. Female-Impersonation.

In Part Three, I shall outline what kind of adult career is the natural sequel of the childhood and adolescence described in Part Two; what kind of adult career is bound up with the physique and psyche with which I am endowed. I shall disclose what Providence had in store for the youthful religious prodigy of the Connecticut hills—the delicate, lilliputian, chicken-hearted girl-boy—after he had been swallowed up in New York’s millions.

Since ultra-androgynes are, in a sense, instances of dual personality—a male soul and a female soul inhabiting the same brain and body—it is natural for them to live a double life.

Moreover, as the “classy,” hypocritical, and bigoted Overworld considers a bisexual as monster and outcast, I was driven to a career in the democratic, frank, and liberal-minded Underworld. While my male soul was a leader in scholarship at the university uptown, my female soul, one evening a week, flaunted itself as a French doll-baby in the shadowy haunts of night life downtown.

Since my student and subsequent professional career were prosaic, I leave them almost unmentioned |The Fourth Sex.| throughout Part Three. I, however, always gave them first place in my life. But I here confine myself to what I experienced and learned while impersonating a French doll-baby because it constitutes something novel to most readers.

Indeed Parts Three, Four, and Five portray the social life and diversions of the most cultured New York coterie of THE THIRD SEX during the last decade of the nineteenth century. For, while little has yet been published about instinctive female-impersonators because of the prudery of the sexually full-fledged, they form (necessarily sub rosa) quite a large class of society—about one out of every three hundred physical males. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was their chief stamping-ground in the New York metropolitan district. I became acquainted with them because during the decade indicated, I was myself in my prime as a female-impersonator in two out of the three principal bright-light quarters of the metropolitan district.

[There exists also A FOURTH SEX, the gynanders. But experience has not qualified me to describe them in detail. That task awaits some brave, high-minded, and brilliant physical female. See, however, chapter on Gynanders in my Riddle of the Underworld.]

The Overworld has enjoined complete silence about female-impersonators because of their thoroughly false view that any adolescent adopting the role must do so from moral depravity. They argue: “If I myself adopted the role, it could only be through unspeakable depravity. Ergo, the same is true for every male.” They overlook the fact that Nature did not |Female-Impersonation Instinctive.| make all anatomical males of like passions. What would be moral depravity for one is not for another.

Instinctive female-impersonators are sexual cripples from their mother’s womb. They had no choice in the matter. Thus they merit pity rather than scorn. Further, since their impersonations occasion no detriment to any one, but are a source of much entertainment to their sexually full-fledged associates, they are a positive ethical good. All beneficent talents that the Creator has distributed among mankind must have been meant for use—not for strangling.

As to the ethical question, I myself, who from the age of nineteen to thirty-one had an intensive career as fairie—female-impersonator, can truthfully state, on arrival in my late forties, that I was not once, during that career, guilty of an irreligious or unethical act—excepting alone that I seriously impaired my own health. But it is doubtful whether the impairment was permanent. In my late forties, my physical vigor is not at a lower level compared with males of my own age than it was during my childhood. My health has always been delicate.

Numerous wives and mothers suffer in health from the sex passion as much as I. If my having had my health wrecked by it proves it immoral for me and to be legally repressed, then the yielding to it by wedded pairs is equally immoral and to be interdicted. If it be objected that the human race is perpetuated by the latter, I answer that this consideration would only permit to married couples a sex-union when offspring was the object—that is, for a cultured couple, from one to three times throughout their married life.

In the description of my own physique and psyche, I have indicated the general characteristics of the extreme type of androgynes foreordained to become quasi-public female-impersonators. But the outstanding feminesque physical stigmata of each “fairie” (as they are commonly called in the United States) tend to be sui generis. In one it is natural beardlessness alone. In another, the possession of female breasts alone. In a third, the female skeletal shape, particularly an over-long spine, short legs, and broad pelvis. In a fourth, natural soprano voice. Etc.

Whoever has beheld an instinctive female-impersonator when keyed up, must confess that this type are born actors—or “actresses,” as they prefer to be called. Their histrionic skill is not primarily the result of practice or instruction.

Their audiences have marvelled because the impersonators’ faces are devoid of any sign of beardal hair. Usually the beard is eradicated. It is allowed to grow for a full week in seclusion. By means of a mask of depilatory wax, every hair is then pulled out by the roots, the outer portion having become embedded, like hair in wall-plaster. For three weeks, the face is as glabrous as a baby’s. Then the week’s seclusion and the final excruciatingly painful yank of the wax mask all over again. The process has no permanent effect, either good or bad.

All the impersonators adopt a fancy feminine name, as Pansy, Daisy, and Lily. Often the names of living star actresses are adopted and “dragged into the mud,” as people say. For while the career of a female-impersonator is a purely physiological and |Obedience to Nature Gave Peace.| psychological phenomenon, it is incorrectly regarded as deepdyed immorality.

All impersonators belonging to the middle and upper classes also choose a masculine alias, represented in the Underworld to be their legal name. They do not wish to risk disgrace to their family name. Moreover, on their sprees in the bright-light districts, they are careful to wear nothing containing their every-day initials.

Except for a few weeks, I myself was only an avocational impersonator. I gave to it only three hours a week, as compared with 109 waking hours to my student (or later, professional) life. I did not adopt the avocation until near the close of my sophomore year. Almost throughout the preceding twenty-four months, however, I had fought violently against almost irresistible tendencies to disappear for an evening in the Underworld on a female-impersonation spree. But my ultra-puritan education had injected into me such a moral horror of female-impersonation that I was able to resist the tendencies for two whole years after the date that Nature ordained them to begin.

The “French doll-baby” spirit had dwelt in my brain since birth. Throughout my life down to nineteen, it had manifested itself strongly, although after fourteen I had struggled to crucify it. At nineteen, it refused longer to be suppressed. I (the puritan, book-worm spirit in me) had to arrange a compromise. I promised to yield my physical and mental powers to it only one evening each week. And the doll-baby spirit was satisfied. Previously I had been the most melancholy person in the university. But dating from the |My Dual Personality.| compromise, my life flowed on peacefully and blissfully. Only occasionally—moments while suffused with ambition to make a name for myself in the intellectual and philanthropic world—would I turn against the doll-baby spirit with abhorrence, and ask myself how I could ever give place to it.

For the serious work of life, I realized that I must practically strangle the feminine side of my duality outside the three hours a week during which I conceded to it full possession of my personality. While at my every-day tasks, I sought to forget the doll-baby spirit that dwelt in my brain side by side with the scholar spirit.

The one evening a week on which I (the scholar spirit) surrendered, I called “going on a female-impersonation spree.” The typical spree did not occur until the December (1894) of my senior year. I had become somewhat adept in the art of impersonation through a year’s apprenticeship in the Mulberry Street Italian quarter. As that training has been detailed in my Autobiography of an Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I omit it here.

On the afternoon preceding a spree, I would be overwhelmed with dread and melancholia. I dreaded disclosure, which I realized would mean expulsion from the university because of the full-fledged man’s horror of a sexual cripple. I dreaded possible disfigurement by blows—or even murder—by one of the numerous prudes who detest extreme effeminacy in a male (supposed). I was melancholy because about to embark on something that my puritan training had impressed me as in the highest degree disgraceful, and that I secretly wished I did not have to undertake. But to be contented and even happy for the following week and to guarantee that tranquillity necessary for the best scholarly success, the weekly spree was unavoidable.

Only a handful of upper-class female-impersonators adopt feminine attire for street wear. For myself (being a university student, and subsequently an honored member of a learned profession) it was too |Fairies Are Extreme Dressers.| risky. I merely kept some feminine finery locked up in my room for occasional decoration of my person while I gazed in the mirror. But during the eighteen months that my sprees were staged in the Fourteenth Street Rialto and the six years on or near military reservations in New York’s suburbs, my attire was as fancy and flashy as a youth dare adopt. Fairies are extreme dressers and excessively vain. To strange adolescents whom I passed on the street I proclaimed myself as a female-impersonator through always wearing white kids and large red neck-bow with fringed ends hanging down over my lapels.

I would set out from my lodgings with the feelings of a soldier entering a terrific battle from which he realizes he may never return. As the car carried me farther and farther from where I staged the puritan student life and nearer and nearer to where I staged the “French doll-baby” life, my overwhelming melancholia would gradually give way to a sense of gladness that in a few minutes I would find myself again on “Jennie June’s” stamping-ground. I had left at home all my masculinity (a very poor variety). The innate feminine, strangled for a week in order that I might climb, round by round, the ladder to an honored place in the learned world, now held complete sway.

During the last decade of the 19th century, the Fourteenth Street Rialto ranked second only to the “Tenderloin” as an amusement center in the entire metropolitan district. While it still holds the same rank in 1921, its present night life is only a shadow of what it was. A quarter of a century ago, New York was wide-open, whereas for more than a decade, the lid has been down tight. Promenading the Rialto on |The Fourteenth Street Rialto.| an evening of 1921, the pedestrian would conclude that no such phenomenon as sex attraction existed. But during the period that I was an habitué, the Fourteenth Street Rialto was as gay as European bright-light districts, which I was fated to explore.

The Rialto is confined principally between Third Avenue and Broadway. While I was an habitué, theatres, museums for men only, drinking palaces, gambling joints, and worse abounded.

On pleasant evenings, when the sidewalks were thronged with smartly dressed adolescent pleasure seekers, I would promenade—up and down, up and down—until I chanced to meet a coterie of young bloods who invited me to join them. Our evenings would be spent in pool-rooms, gambling joints, beer gardens of ill repute, or worse resorts. Nature made me proof against the vices I there witnessed. My only weakness was the craze for female-impersonation. My greatest joy was to flaunt myself as a bisexual before those who did not know my identity. I realized that every soul among my Rialto associates was turning his or her back on the Creator. But I was always determined to give Him first place in my affections. However, for fear of bringing reproach on religion if I made myself its representative—I, a misunderstood female-impersonator, whom even the Underworld in general regarded as one of the most impious of humans—I never mentioned the theme except under extraordinary circumstances.

If the weather were bad, I would immediately enter a beer-garden and call for sarsaparilla. I would consume it in driblets while watching for the opportunity |Female-Impersonators Popular.| to join some tremendously virile bachelors out for a lark.

On the typical evening I have chosen to describe of my many passed in the Rialto, I happened to run across several youthful Lotharios waiting in front of a theatre for something “to turn up”. Only one adolescent “male” out of three thousand in New York City adopts the role of quasi-public female-impersonator. A Rialto habitué therefore does not often run up against one. Judging by my own experience, a female-impersonator proves an attraction of the first order for young bloods having time hanging heavy on their hands. Thus this coterie—as many others have done—called out jubilantly on catching sight of me: “Hello Jennie June!” ... “Hello sweetheart! That is what you want us to call you, isn’t it?” ... “Let me introduce you to Mr. A and Mr. B. They have never met a female-impersonator, and are dead anxious to see you take off a girl.”

“And you are Jennie June, are you?” A and B exclaimed. “We have heard a lot about you and longed to meet you.”

“Bon soir, messieurs,” I replied. I had a liking for addressing chance-met beaux in a foreign tongue. I happened to be the foremost linguist among the university students.

“Bon soir, Jennie, bon soir!”

“Meine sehr geliebten junge Herren, wie geht’s bei Ihnen?” I continued with a twinkle in my eye.

“Ganz gut,” sounded the reply. New York is a Babel. On an hour’s promenade in the Rialto, conversation in a score of languages would impinge on one’s |Female-Impersonators Gifted.| ear. Bright young men brought up in a New York foreign colony acquire a score of the commonest expressions in several languages.

“I miei amici, siete amati da me,” I next declared in a third language.

“Pee-an-gou, savez? We don’t understand Dago, Jennie. Tell us in American how much you love us.”

I reply in Spanish: “Esto es lo mejor que podemos hacer. Hablemos ingles.”

“Bert, Jennie seems to be a bright fellow—or girl—doesn’t she? All these impersonators seem to be brainy. Jennie, I don’t know whether to call you a fellow or a girl. Which is proper?”

“Girl, of course,” I replied with a smile.

“Well, fellows, Jennie June is part he and part she. He wears trousers, but she has breasts just like a woman and wants us fellows to regard her as a girl.”

“Well, Jennie, if you are a girl, why do you wear breeches? And why don’t you let your hair grow long?”

“Because I have the misfortune to be only part girl. I am only a girl incarnated in a boy’s body. But besides my girl’s mind, my entire body is shaped very much like a girl’s and I possess her bone and muscular systems. Because I am part boy, the law prohibits to me my natural or instinctive apparel. But you will be so kind as to overlook my not appearing before you in gown and picture hat, won’t you? I will make up for that lack by out-womaning woman in my actions. It is my nature to give up all I have, and do all I can, for the entertainment of heroes—as you manly fellows seem to be.”

“Jennie, let’s walk around to the ladies’ parlor of the Hotel Comfort^[26] and have a few drinks.”

We arrived in an artistically furnished room 25 feet by 75. At one side was a bar from which waiters continuously carried drinks to the fifty-odd couples seated around the small ornamental tables which occupied most of the floor. Nearly all the patrons were under thirty, and absolutely all, highfliers sexually. The vast bulk merely smoked, drank, and “chinned.” Only a few were playing cards for money. All were refined and orderly. I have never circulated among more delightful people than I met frequently at the Hotel Comfort.

I had become well acquainted with the proprietor and all his employees. For more than a year the “hotel” was substantially the home of my feminine personality, “Jennie June.” But this refined and luxurious “hotel” would have tolerated only a cultured and outwardly modest female-impersonator. Most examples of that biological sport were far below the standards of the Hotel Comfort, and would have been barred. But I was looked upon as a personality likely to attract a pecuniarily desirable class of patronage.

My five companions and I spent an hour sipping beverages.

[While during my twelve years as quasi-public female-impersonator, my companions always drank intoxicants, I always called for non-alcoholics. The latter’s price was double in order to discourage the consumption of temperance drinks. I had been brought up to loathe alcoholics, and during my twelve years intimacy with heavy drinkers, came to a more and more rational loathing.

Alcoholics are by far the greatest curse of the Caucasian race. I have had almost unequalled opportunities for studying venereal diseases. My twelve years of having roues and filles de joies for bosom friends taught me that the presence of alcohol in the blood is the sine qua non of venereal disease. Perhaps my greatest contribution to the betterment and happiness of humanity is the epigram original with myself: No Alcohol, No Venereal Disease. But it is necessary to be a TOTAL ABSTAINER. Mere moderation does not confer immunity. The total abstainer may possibly contract venereal disease, but it is sure to be benign, almost negligible, and inflicting no permanent injury. Dr. Robert W. Shufeldt, who as army surgeon had extensive experience in the treatment of venereal disease, wrote in the Journal of Urology and Sexology, 1917, page 458: “In my opinion, alcohol bears the responsibility more than any other single agent—indeed more than all the others put together—for ensuring venereal infection.”]

“Jennie, why not take a cocktail instead of a lemonade? We want to warm you up. Then you will give us some of your recitations and songs. Won’t you drink a few cocktails for my sake?”

“I would not put the poison into my system for anybody! I do not need that kind of stimulant. You know what kind I need to get warmed up to declaiming and singing!

“If that is all the stimulant you need, Jennie, it can easily be supplied.”

We were the merriest party in the parlor. The attentions of my beaux were having their usual effect. To achieve my best success at female-impersonation, the stimulus of an appreciative and responsive audience of youthful Lotharios was necessary. Our hilarity was more and more attracting the eyes and ears of all other guests. Some recognized me as a female-impersonator. Calls began to reach me: “O you Jennie June, give us an impersonation of a prima donna!” The old-timers were remarking to new patrons of the “hostelry”: “The little fellow with the red bow is a fairie!”

Hypnotized by the adulation of those whom I looked upon as demigods, as well as by the well-disposed attention of the other hundred-odd guests attracted by my unique, yet fairly modest, behavior, I broke into the “Old Oaken Bucket”—a song affording unusual opportunity to display my masculine-feminine tones: below middle A, baritone; from A upward, alto; with an occasional soprano and tenor modulation thrown in just to excite wonder. I fancy my singing voice is unusual in its variety of possible modulation |Man and Woman in One Body.| as a result of my body being both male and female. In my singing voice particularly, these two elements are ever striving for the upper hand. One stanza each of several songs then in vogue followed: “After the Ball Was Over”; “Sweet Rosy O’Grady”; “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me”; etc.

Next I recited a dialogue, my naturally bland, sentimental, and caressing voice now aping a cry-baby mademoiselle, and now a stern, hoarse-voiced he-man. Now I burlesqued feminine airs and cadences; and now strove after the most virile and dare-devil effects.

I was, while the focus for all eyes, conscious only of the joy of being alive and in the midst of an admiring group. I experienced a feeling of exultation that for a brief spell I was looked upon under my real character—a bisexual. I was intoxicated with delight because emancipated—though only for a few moments—from a hated dissimulation and disguise, and enabled to be myself. Assuredly another personality than that of my every-day book-worm self was in possession of my body and faculties. I realized I was the same I who was one of the leaders in scholarship at the university. At the same time, I realized I was doing things incongruous with that position.

At midnight, I bade my convives a reluctant adieu. Before boarding an elevated train, I turned several corners abruptly and hid in the first dark doorway to make sure of not being dogged. But no Rialto associate ever did. After alighting from the train, I adopted the same strategy, to make assurance doubly sure.^[28]

Arrived in my room, I first dropped to my knees to thank Providence for restoration to my every-day world. I rejoiced that the ordeal of a female-impersonation spree was over for a week. But the following days, while resting my mind for a moment from hard study, I gloated over the memory of my latest associations, as a member of the gentle sex, with the tremendously virile type of adolescent.

Note.—See “Memories” in Part VIII.

In chapter III I shall portray one of the most remarkable of the Adonises that I met during my 18-months Rialto career, to which the present Part Three is devoted, and in chapter IV, the most remarkable youthful Hercules. Other Adonises of the Rialto are portrayed in my Riddle of the Underworld. The remainder of the present book, to the end of Part V, will describe some of the most remarkable ultra-androgynes (female-impersonators) that I met in the Rialto. For a description of my most noteworthy “fallen angel” confidants, I refer to my Riddle, and to my fourth book, now in preparation, Susa, which gives the entire life of the Queen of the Rialto of the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century. As I was fated to become the most widely known female-impersonator of the Rialto, Susa was the most widely known vampire. Two detested and cordially loathed types, but actually not a hundredth as bad as they had the name of being!

Numerous Rialto pals were adolescent professional gamblers. Because of that, I have chosen to devote an entire chapter to a characterization of the type. More than that, the young blood forming the subject of the present chapter was my “No. 1” friend among the couple of hundred Lotharios with whom I |New York’s Beau Brummel.| mingled in the Rialto. He became my favorite because he was the most elegantly dressed—and close to the handsomest—adolescent I ever met. Above all, he possessed the most genial disposition.

Has the reader ever remarked that just that kind of disposition generally goes hand in hand with deceit and hypocrisy? Later—to my bitterest sorrow—the hero-boy now being described was discovered to be the greatest hypocrite I ever met. In January, 1895, I made his acquaintance. For half-a-year he manifested the greatest affection—all feigned as I later found. When he had wrung me dry, he—entirely unexpectedly—flourished a loaded revolver around my head, and cried: “If you ever speak to me again, or even come into the same room, I will put a bullet through your head!”^[29]

This quondam soul-mate had such a craze for acquiring money—generally by foul means—as I have never witnessed in another. He made it a condition of our spending a couple of hours together that I put into his palm a five-dollar bill. But though I could get plenty of other company of his type gratis, I was so fascinated with him that I never gave a second thought to the self-sacrifice that such gifts demanded during my student days. While promenading the streets with him, I would, every other minute, glance into his face, reflecting: “The handsomest and best dressed young fellow of the Rialto is MINE.” While we were seated in a theatre together, I would often gaze into his face instead of at the players, reflecting: “New York’s Beau Brummel is MY SOULMATE.” For no soft hair, no rosebud cheeks in a |Apostrophe to Lost Soul-mate.| male, no arched eyebrows—ever surpassed those of the Adonis now being described. He was perfection in face, head, and body. He was perfection in dress. He was perfection in disposition—ONLY HE WAS ULTRA-DECEITFUL.

Buddie McDonald! Whom for over twenty-five years I have not seen or had news of! I am here addressing you because it is the only possible way to get through a message. If these lines should ever fall under your eyes, and you should, in this chapter, recognize yourself—somewhat covered in order to hide our identities—I wish to tell you that I have through the years always granted you first place in my heart after my mother alone, and if we could ever run across one another, I still stand ready to enslave myself to you, notwithstanding you doubtless have lost (because age deals no differently with you than with all other sons and daughters of Adam) nearly all your litheness and charm. But I still love you for what you were in your earlier twenties. Throughout a quarter of a century I have been longing and waiting for a chance encounter with you. Many times have I eyed every man passed in New York’s crowds hoping to recognize your face. Nothing would I like better than to spend my declining years knit to your genial personality and heroic, grand-aired spirit. I freely pardon your past treachery—though it almost drove me insane—if only you would condescend to let my soul be knit to yours until death do us part!

Buddie McDonald! The most precious of all names! If it were my idol’s legal name, I would not |The Gambler’s Antecedents.| disclose it. It was the alias he used in the Rialto and the only name I knew him by.

Buddie told me that he was born and brought up on a farm near Lake Ontario. His people were Methodists. He had always gone to Sunday school and Epworth league, because his parents required it. For he was a black sheep by birth—the only one in his little rural community. When nineteen, the seventeen-year daughter of a neighbor appeared with her parents before a justice of the peace. Buddie lived with his child-wife only three days and then stole away for parts unknown. What pangs the poor girl must have suffered thus to lose a genuine Adonis—in beauty one man out of a thousand—to the arms of the demimonde! She had doubtless been comforting herself and congratulating herself that she had won for life as her helpmeet the most bewitching young blood of the community. And after just three days to be forever left in the lurch!

“Buddie McDonald” immediately bobbed up in the Rialto under that alias. In the Rialto! At that time one of the two chief amusement and gambling centers of the Western Continent, the magnet for the black sheep of pious families all over the United States. He immediately adopted the profession of card sharper, being endowed with the peculiar mentality necessary.

While we were pals, he was twenty-two—just a year older than myself. From ten to midnight one evening each week, I dogged him in one of the half-dozen gambling joints among which he divided his “working” hours.

I was too much of a goody-goody ever to gamble myself. I would merely sit for hours as spectator. It was intense pleasure merely to have under my eyes the type of adolescent that sows wild oats.

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.”

On arrival he exclaimed: “Jennie, what do you think of your new friend, Mr. Abraham Myers, the Beau Brummel of Myersville upstate, who is enjoying his first visit to our village?”

“I think, Buddie, that before to-night he had never been in any place worse than a church social. His evening in the Monte Carlo must have been an eyeopener. |Crooks Are Boastful.| Whenever my gaze fell on the poor innocent, the words of the Bible went through my head: ‘He is led as a lamb to the slaughter! And as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth!’ I am sorry my hero-boy stoops to take advantage of an unsophisticated Reub!”

While we ate our midnight lunch, Buddie confided his evening’s adventure. I was always inquisitive about the ways and habits of the tremendously virile—how they looked upon the mystery we call “life”—and habitually put to my numerous soul-mates a long list of questions in case they did not spontaneously overflow. But it is an earmark of crooks to be garrulous with their soul-mates. The former are proud of their sharpwittedness and gloat in unburdening their minds to some one they think they can trust. Their characteristic bragging to confidants is one of the chief means by which many of them finally fall within the toils of the law.

Secondly, Buddie was my soul-mate. At that date, we felt ourselves husband and wife. For I am myself fundamentally a woman, though possessing the male primary determinants. The relationship of knit souls—amalgamation of two separate personalities of opposite sex into ONE human being—I have discovered tends to mutual confidences. I had already several times been in Buddie’s presence when he had an intended victim (always a Reub) in tow, and saw through everything even if he had not told me. If it be asked how I, pretending to be of high morals, could associate with sharpers, I answer: Love is blind. In my subsequent Bowery period, described in my Autobiography of an |Fairies Best Stool Pigeons.| Androgyne and The Riddle of the Underworld, I was knit into one being with youthful burglars, who, to whet my admiration for themselves, have entertained me with accounts of their burgling houses and demonstrated their truthfulness by exhibiting terrible scars from gunshot wounds suffered as they were fleeing from a burglary they had “made a mess of.” I would never have thought of contributing in any way to bring them to justice; first, because I slavishly adored them, and secondly, because I knew I would be murdered if they should ever entertain the least suspicion that I would “peach.”

Experience taught me, during my six years in New York’s Underworld, that crooks are particularly prone to confess to a fairie intimate. For they considered fairies (under the legal ban of ten years’ imprisonment in New York) far worse criminals and far worse defiers of the law than themselves. Fairies—they thought—would not dare “peach.”

Fairies would serve as the best stool pigeons for ferreting out thieves, just as keen filles de joie are employed as detectives.

Buddie McDonald had already received many proofs that I idolized him and would never do anything to his detriment. True: five months later he did “shake” me definitely and emphatically. But this was because he had discovered he had wrung out of me all the money he could; he had become financially independent beyond his wildest dreams; and I had come to be a terrible bore through hanging around his room several times a week and demonstrating myself insatiable.