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The Lion Broke Down the Door |
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. . . Those years I worked for all the houses, even Emma Johnsons Circus House, where the guests got everything from soup to nuts. They did a lot of uncultured things there that probably couldn't be mentioned, and the irony part of it, they always picked the youngest and most beautiful girls to do them right before the eyes of everybody. . . . People are cruel, aren't they? A screen was put up between me and the tricks they were doing for the guests, but 1 cut a slit in the screen, as I had become to be a sport now, myself, and wanted to see what anybody else was seeing.
All the highest class landladies had me for "the professor", if they could get me—Willie Piazza, Josie Arlington, Lula White, Antonio Gonzales, Hilma Burt, and Gypsy Schaeffer, the biggest-spending landlady. Their houses were all in the same block on Basin Street, stone mansions with from three to seven parlors and from fifteen to twenty-five women all clad in evening gowns and diamonds galore.* The minute the button was pushed, that meant a new customer was in and the girls came in the parlor looking like queens, "Why hello, boy. Where you from?" Then I would hit the piano and, when rd played a couple of my tunes—"Got some money for the professor?" If the guests didn't come up with a dollar tip apiece, they were told "This is a highclass place. We don't want no poor Johns in here." Matter of fact, no poor men could even get in those mansions. The girls charged high and made from twenty dollars to a hundred a night.
* Jelly Roll added, "There was a Blue Book with all the information about the tenderloin district. My name was in that book which they now call The New Orleans Guide. (See Interlude II, p. 106.)
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