Washington Confidential 5 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 5Part 1 · HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 5
Part 1 · HOBOES WITH NO HORIZON
MortimerEnglish
The pride of the bum, even when he has abandoned the virile vitality to hold out his paw as a panhandler, is a terminal twinkle of consciousness that he is only resting between Election Days, when he is a man. These derelicts have swung cities and states. But in Washington even that last link to a reason for being is lost.
No Hinky Dink, no Pendergast caters to him, gives him free beer and rot-gut or a kip in the flop on the joint. No eager dirty duke stretches forth to greet the floater and the repeater. He can do nothing for anyone.
So he is just a shade lower, lousier and grizzlier than the ones at whom you shudder as you pass them in your own town. Agglomerations of beachcombers vary little, even with differences of climate. Every city has its Skid Row. But Washington has three of them. Like everything else here, they are departmentalized. No alphabetical designations have yet been allocated to them, but don’t despair.
One is for the general riffraff; the second is for old-timers; the third is exclusively for sailors.
But first let us tell you about 9th Street--NW, natch--and specifically where it crosses Pennsylvania Ave.
Stand on one side of the avenue and you are in the shadow of the great marble structure which houses the forces of law and order. This is the Department of Justice Building, and the corner we’re standing on is the entrance to the F.B.I.
Cross Pennsylvania Avenue and walk into 9th Street, and you are an intruder in the most publicized Skid Row of the three--they call it the Bowery here, to distinguish it from the others. As such thoroughfares go, this is pretty classy-looking. It is wide. All Washington streets are kept clean, so neither rubbish nor drunks litter the pavements--anyway not by day. By nightfall, topers rendered hors de combat on smoke and cheap wine pile up in the doorways.
This part of 9th Street is packed solid with “play lands,” featuring pin-ball machines, peep show movies and souvenir stands which sell composition statuettes of the White House and Washington Monument, and embroidered pillows tastefully lettered with “Love to Mom from the Nation’s Capital.”
But this human dump lacks romance and legend. No songs are written about it. There are no grisly tall tales, such as are told about the Barbary Coast, Basin Street and Chicago, much near the Loop and most of the old Levee. This is merely a street of convenience, moved up from around the corner when Pennsylvania Avenue itself was flophouse lane and Al Jolson and Bill Robinson performed on the sidewalk for pennies.
There’s no law agin’ stripping or peeling in Washington, but it doesn’t pay off well enough to build a permanent industry around it. The old Gayety Theatre, which ran pretty high-class traveling burleycue, is now, probably only temporarily, a legit house. Meanwhile, the burlesque fans buy their titillation in the cheap movie houses adjoining the Gayety. Sometimes they amplify their celluloid bills with “living dolls,” at other times the customers have to get their kicks out of sex movies advertised “For Adults Only.” An ad before us, of the Leader Theatre, says, “Burlesque’s brightest stars on screen.” The day’s program provided snake-charming Zorita in “I Married a Savage”; body-peeling Ann Corio in “Call of the Jungle”; and Maggie Hart, the stripper, in “Lure of the Isles,” plus “two more thrills.”
In and in front of cheap saloons, cocktail lounges and lunch rooms, are tarts, reefer-peddlers and novelty salesmen whose chief stock in trade is “sanitary rubber goods.” Pistols are on sale at $20. The local law isn’t tough on gun-toters.
Though Washington’s legal liquor closing on weekdays is 2 A.M., this street, like all in the city, is deserted early. Long before midnight its habitués have already made sleeping arrangements or are snoring in the alleys, cheap overnight lodgings or hallways, paralyzed by alky or cheap domestic red wine.
Crossing 9th Street here, is D Street, known as Pawnbroker’s Row. But get this--hockshops are against the law.
When you see a shop with a sign reading “Pawnbroker’s Exchange,” don’t believe it. The window looks like any “Uncle’s” anywhere in the world, with a profusion of new and used articles ranging from mink coats to tin watches. But that’s the build-up. These exchanges are only second-hand stores which buy and sell uncalled for articles pledged in other jurisdictions, where the three balls of the De Medicis are legal.
The temporarily embarrassed visitor, in need of cash quickly, often gets rooked in one of these pseudo-hock shops. Take the case of the stranger who runs short of petty cash until he can wire home. Suppose he has a $200 watch which he wants to put up for security. Needing only perhaps $25, that’s all he asks for, figuring when he redeems it in a few days he will pay only that, plus accrued interest. Yet when he asks the pawnbroker’s exchange man for $25, he is actually selling the $200 watch for that.
Some of the more legitimate shops get around the law by guaranteeing to sell the article back to the owner at a specified rate after a specified number of days. What usually happens to the unsophisticated is that they have lost their security for a fraction of its value, because it has already been sold.
Little effort is made to police the Bowery stretches of 9th St. The armed forces maintain a few MPs, but practically anything goes, short of mayhem, and even that is not uncommon.
The tomatoes who solicit the young and lonesome men in uniform in this neighborhood are pretty low. The five bucks they ask, plus three dollars for a room in a handy flea-bag, should be reported to the Better Business Bureau, considering the quality of the merchandise and the strong possibilities of picking up souvenirs of the sort they don’t display on counters.
Interspersed between the shooting galleries, theatres and hamburger hideaways are the usual bargain men’s clothing stores, army and navy outfitters, etc. One of the clothing stores, visible from the windows of the Department of Justice, was built by money inherited from a gangster who isn’t around to enjoy it, due to a sit-down strike in an electric chair.
This street is a little too fast, flighty and noisy for the old-time bums and stiffs. It is for younger men. The perennials, who know every flop-house and smoke-joint in the country, and travel from town to town with the seasons and the harvests, prefer the Skid Row at 3rd and G Streets, NW and vicinity, around the corner from Chinatown. Come to think of it, Skid Rows all over the continent are around the corner from Chinatown.
We call this Mission Row, because it’s where the mission stiffs hang out. These are the hoboes, bums and tramps who get their morning’s coffee and their night’s sleep on the benches of a gospel shop nearby on H Street, in return for listening to a “Come to the Lord” sermon. Mission Row is the best-looking Skid Row in the country. The streets are broad, with grass and trees, and most of the set-back buildings are reconverted residences with stoops and a surviving air of charm. We have been assured it is refreshing to wake up in the gutter here with a smoke hangover.
You find no brassy newcomers in these quarters. Young tramps abhor missions. They prefer 9th Street, with its zip and excitement. The mission stiff, almost an extinct species, is on in years and no longer troubled by dames. His animal needs are taken care of by a bowl of soup and as much red-eye as he can drink. If only one of the two is available, the former can be dispensed with. Some of these mission-moochers are junkies. But dope, like everything else, is suffering from inflation, and the wherewithal is forbidding.
The Greek colony, large for the size of the town, runs into this Bowery. Many Hellenes are gamblers. Hecht’s Hotel, at 6th and G, where girls take their men, was owned by a Greek arrested last month in New York on narcotics charges. The Hellenic Social Club, next door, is a gambling house.
There’s one Skid Row no visitors and few Washingtonians ever see. That’s Sailors’ Row. Unlike the other two, which are in NW, this is in SE--8th Street, down near the Navy Yard. After Chicago we thought nothing could make us blink. But some of the dives on 8th Street made it. At the northern approach of this stretch of howling hell are a couple of Filipino joints where bus-boys, house-boys and valets pick up white whores. Eighth Street runs into Sailors’ Row proper, a line of groggeries and lunch-rooms that hit bottom.
The undermanned Washington cops can do little to keep it orderly. The Navy’s shore patrol takes over most of the policing. We saw Navy paddy-wagons in front of Guy’s, the Ship’s Cafe and the Penguin. But the SP’s seldom make a pinch unless there are fights. We visited four or five of the bars--not alone, because hereabouts, even in the shadow of the Capitol’s dome, outsiders who travel in parties of less than four are crazy.
We saw hustlers working in the Band Box, the Ship’s Cafe, Guy’s and the Penguin. These were the frowsiest broads we have ever seen, dilapidated, toothless, drunk, swinging the shabby badge of their shoddy trade, long-looped handbags.
The worst and the cheapest were in the Ship’s Cafe, where two girls--call them that in charity--offered themselves to us at $3. The going price in the other places was $5. They circulated along the bar and from booth to booth and from table to table. They do not work in these saloons as B girls or house prostitutes. They use them as points of contact with their trade, apparently with connivance of the management for the business they bring in. In these Sailors’ Row joints we saw many amateurs, typical sailor-crazy bobby-soxers, servant girls and Victory girls. These may ask for money but can be talked out of it. There are many cheap hotels and rooming-houses close by. But the dark streets or alleys are free and busy.
