In the muzzy pre-dawn haze of an April morning on F Street, a tumultuous uproar was heard. Down the rattling cast iron stairs of the Ritz Hotel, located in what once was the “Ben Schwartz Building” at Number 920 F, a ragtag band of hoodlums and hustlers clattered towards the thin source of light: cracked double doors, single paned, beneath an auncient transom. Words limned in gold and red, “ROOMS,2.50 Weekly.”
Oddly, that rate still held, some fifty years down the road .Ferret, the ringleader of these questionable, unshaven young dudes, was bellowing off a gin dream from the night before. “Gum tree Bingo, Shades of Blood, Pains of Bones, Rip yer neck open and DRINK YE!!”
Once scattered on the pitted, purple skylit vault sidewalks in front of the gnarly and crumbling Atlantic Building, or “Atlantis,” as the denizens referred to it, the mob dispersed to their survival “slaves,” or jobs. Ferret ran herky-jerky, half a block ahead of his handler, Cholo.
The two couldn’t have been more widely disparate. Cholo was about 5’6″, and squat as a toad. Ferret, who liked to call himself ‘Apache,’ was little more than a ninety-pound skell. He favored a ripped leather jacket over a T-shirt and moldy-looking jeans. This pair ran the Heaven pornographic bookshop, in the basement of the Astoria rooming house at Fourteenth and H.
At this moment, Billy sat on the edge of the ecdysiast Elaine’s swaybacked iron bed, pondering his next move. “Those pancakes were good,” he mumbled appreciatively.
Elaine snickered back, adjusting her nightdress with the baby blue bows. “You ain’t no short stack.”
Billy attempted a laugh, but fell back. Elaine made her way around to his end, standing over him triumphantly. “Billy, rooms are at a premium, even in this slime hole neighborhood, so I suggest you stay right here. Cholo downstairs, he kin give you a spot humpin’ stacks of magazines. So whaddya think?”
Billy gazed up to the cracked and cobweb-bedecked light socket with the dusty 15-watter.
“Guess I’d better settle in, Elaine, you’ve been kinda nice to me so far…”
