Twenty-Third Street department store, and a feeder for a stage ventriloquist, and a chicken-stall for a successful gentleman adventurer, that I was nothing but a rabbit thrown back into the brier-patch. And I found out that I was mistaken.
Yet I hadn't been born and brought up in Minetta Lane for nothing. The city hadn't been a stepmother to me for eighteen long years without at least leaving me wise to a few of her ways. I knew how to pinch bananas from Dago Charley's fruit-stand on Fourth Street before I was knee high to a grasshopper. And at eight I was crabbing drop-cakes from the Greenwich House cooking-class. At sixteen I was hitting the Harmony Club outings and not shying at even the thought of two-stepping with a gangster who'd croaked a cop. At seventeen I could down my second glass of suds and not miss a step on the Steeplechase floor at Coney. Things like that, in fact, made up the splendor of life for me in those foolish old days. Yet the city had taught me to be cautious. You can't float for long about the neighborhood of Minetta Lane and not learn to look out for yourself—or go under. And I never intended to go under. I don't know why. But I intended to keep on top. Bud once told me something about Indian children being thrown in
