was insane enough not to consider that he might just wait his chance to kill me. For perhaps a
month I kept the machine gun at Shorty's before I was broke and sold it.
When Reginald came to Roxbury visiting, he was shocked at what he'd found out upon returning
to Harlem. I spent some time with him. He still was the kidbrother whom I still felt more "family"
toward than I felt now even for our sister Ella. Ella still liked me. I would go to see her once in a
while. But Ella had never been able to reconcile herself to the way I had changed. She has since
told me that she had a steady foreboding that I was on my way into big trouble. But I always had
the feeling that Ella somehow admired my rebellion against the world, because she, who had so
much more drive and guts than most men, often felt stymied by having been born female.
Had I been thinking only in terms of myself, maybe I would have chosen steady gambling as a
hustle. There were enough chump gamblers that hung around John Hughes' for a good gambler
to make a living off them; chumps that worked, usually. One would just have to never miss the
games on their paydays. Besides, John Hughes had offered me a job dealing for games; I didn't
want that.
But I had come around to thinking not only of myself. I wanted to get something going that could
help Shorty, too. We had been talking; I really felt sorry for Shorty. The same old musician story.
The so-called glamor of being a musician, earning just about enough money so that after he paid
rent and bought his reefers and food and other routine things, he had nothing left. Plus debts.
How could Shorty have anything? I'd spent years in Harlem and on the road around the most
popular musicians, the "names," even, who really were making big money for musicians-and they
had nothing.
For that matter, all the thousands of dollars I'd handled, and I had nothing. Just satisfying my
cocaine habit alone cost me about twenty dollars a day. I guess another five dollars a day could
have been added for reefers and plain tobacco cigarettes that I smoked; besides getting high on
drugs, I chain-smoked as many as four packs a day. And, if you ask me today, I'll tell you that
tobacco, in all its forms, is just as much an addiction as any narcotic.
When I opened the subject of a hustle with Shorty, I started by first bringing him to agree with my
concept-of which he was a living proof-that only squares kept on believing they could ever get
anything by slaving.
And when I mentioned what I had in mind-house burglary Shorty, who always had been so
relatively conservative, really surprised me by how quickly he agreed. He didn't even know
anything about burglarizing.
When I began to explain how it was done, Shorty wanted to bring in this friend of his, whom I had
met, and liked, called Rudy.
Rudy's mother was Italian, his father was a Negro. He was born right there in Boston, a short,
light fellow, a pretty boy type. Rudy worked regularly for an employment agency that sent him to
wait on tables at exclusive parties. He had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to
the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston
blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old
man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum
powder, Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.
I told him and Shorty about some of the things I'd seen. Rudy said that as far as he knew, Boston
had no organized specialty sex houses, just individual rich whites who had their private specialty
desires catered to by Negroes who came to their homes camouflaged as chauffeurs, maids,
waiters, or some other accepted image. Just as in New York, these were the rich, the highest
society-the predominantly old men, past the age of ability to conduct any kind of ordinary sex,
always hunting for new ways to be "sensitive."