Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781590774670
Publisher: M. Evans & Company
Published: 2014-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

I WAS glad to be back in Chicago. I was fed up with Greenwich Village and its intellectuals and drunkards. I needed a change. I had enough money to do it, and I went to a north shore hotel, a big one, which I knew was a hangout for racket people. Soon I was aware that there were a number of prostitutes living there with their pimps. None of them hustled in that particular hotel, however. In fact, most girls who hustle in a joint live some place else.

The room right across from mine was occupied by a pretty little blonde called Ethel. She was a “baboon,” always on the go, always talking and quarreling with her man, Bill Steward. When the transoms were open I could hear them. Bill would always start it.

“Now, listen, baby,” he would say, truculently, “try and get more money. You know I got those notes on the car, and I want to put away a double saw-buck every week so that we can get out of the racket and buy a little hotel of our own.”

Then Ethel’s voice would rise in a high, scornful crescendo.

“You’re a liar. You’re giving my jack to these other broads of yours!”

They argued and they cursed, but the sessions always ended by Ethel giving Bill her money.

I liked Ethel. She was small and wiry in build, with platinum-blonde hair and washy blue eyes. Her face was thin. She had plenty to say about everything. She was raised in Duluth, a police lieutenant’s daughter, and like so many other girls I have known in one racket or another, she had earlier hitch-hiked her way from this place and that until she got to Chicago. Just got tired of high school, she said, and went off in a friend’s car as far as St. Paul, where she managed to pick up rides from acquaintances of friends the rest of the way. She stayed straight all that time, she said, and got a job as a stenographer in the Loop and lived at the near north side “Y.” Here she met another girl who took her along on parties. Everybody drank too much. One morning she woke up in a room with Bill. Later she learned that she was pregnant. He got her out of that. And, by that time, she did what he wanted her to do, hustle for him.

She told me plenty about Bill. So did his other girls. I had all their stories, and finally got Bill’s own story from him.

He was twenty-nine, lean, sallow, quietly and beautifully dressed. When he was fourteen he got into trouble in Pennsylvania, where he was born, and did a bit in the pen for a hoist (theft). About five years before I knew him he had drifted into Chicago and got to hanging around the gamblers and the racket men on Twenty-Sixth and State Streets. He picked up a little waitress there, and soon she was hustling for him. In five years he had thirty different women.

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