THE CONSTANT SINNER

I BABE GORDON

BABE GORDON leaned against the crumbling red brick wall of the Marathon Athletic Club in Harlem, at 135th Street off Fifth Avenue, and pulled at a cigarette. The Saturday night fight crowd picked its way under the glaring arc lamp in front of the main entrance like a slow moving black beetle. Babe scanned the humans with an eye to business. Babe was eighteen and a prize-fighters’ tart, picking up her living on their hard-earned winnings. Her acquaintances numbered trollops, murderers, bootleggers and gambling den keepers. Two well-modeled bare legs were crossed at the ankles; her waist pressed to the wall rose to voluptuous breasts that almost protruded from the negligible neck of her black dress. Babe waited for Cokey Jenny.

Cokey Jenny had led Babe to her first drink in an apartment speakeasy in Harlem, where a colored woman sold corn whiskey to black and white girls and their gentlemen friends, and where coke peddler and sniffer made their “connection” in safety. As Babe watched the mob push into the fight enclosure, she wondered what the hell was keeping Cokey. A few months ago they had had a run-in with each other. Jenny wanted Babe to get her “hype” customers, and when Babe told her she was a louse to peddle dope, Jenny drew a knife on her in Toni’s. They had a fight in which Jenny fled into the ladies’ toilet and locked the door, but Babe waited till Jenny came out and blacked her eye. They had made it up again. They were useful to each other in keeping up their supply of men. Jenny knew all the sporting roughs who had to have their women and who would spend when their rackets were spinning jack. Jenny knew such men as Eddie Brown, a gangster who specialized in shooting up night clubs that ran in opposition to his Boss’s interests; she knew Wop Russo, who cooked liquor for most of the Harlem dives; the proprietors of the gin mills; the hangers-on of the gambling dens, who came to see the fights and pick a girl for their Sunday drunk. It was Jenny’s dive associations that Babe prospered on.

Babe could pluck a hard-boiled racketeer or gambler for every cent he had on him. They shelled out without her having to ask them. The Harlem magdalens knew she could bring down big money in the high class hook-shops without having to sit around in dark gutter basements all night guzzling cheap drinks while coaxing some lost sailor into a two dollar assignation.