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separate dwelling of hers; and that she would take business trips to other cities and return with girls from age thirteen to seventeen, having promised them jobs as actresses. The act Anna had in mind was a predictable one. though her variation wasn't. A girl would be locked in a room without clothing and raped by the colored gentlemen. In this way a airl became accustomed to "the life" and soon was having wine for breakfast. So it was said, at any rate.
    My father didn't like his aunt; he didn't like her house or the way she slapped the drunken "chippies" (as she constantly called them) or the way she hoarded the money her girls made her. And
she
didn't like the way my father looked at her. a look of silent unveiled contempt (which my father was good at), and so my father got slapped a lot, too.
    Anna and my uncle Louis got along fine. The parlor wasn't a fancy one, but it was upper-grade enough to occasionally attract a clientele that included ward politicans and successful businessmen, bankers and the like, and Louis must have liked the life these men led. or seemed to lead, and got a taste for capitalism. Of course Aunt Anna was a hell of a capitalist herself, so maybe that was where he picked it up. He probably learned to kiss ass watching Anna deal with the politicos and the posher types who occasionally showed up, and he put the skill to good effect by using it back on Anna, playing upon her pockmarked vanity. While Anna made my father stop school after the third grade, making him the bordello's janitor, Louis was attending a boarding school out east.
    My father didn't like Louis much either, by this point. Louis didn't seem to notice, or care. When he was home from school out east, that is. If you called that house a home. Anna and my father did have one thing in common, though: a hatred of cops. Pa hated the sight of the patrolmen arriving for their weekly two dollars and fifty cents each, plus booze and food and girls anytime they were in the mood, which was every time. And Anna hated paying the two-fifty, and providing the booze, food, and girls. The beat cops weren't the only freeloaders: inspectors and captains from the Harrison Street police station held out a helping-themselves hand, as did the ward politicians, for whom my father also built a dislike. These were the same politicians, of course, who were among those my uncle Louis looked up to.
    After eastern prep school, Louis returned to Chicago, and Aunt Anna sent him promptly off to Northwestern. And it was about then that she started taking her favorite nephew to the annual First Ward Ball, where Louis would not only see those admired politicians, but rub shoulders with them, and more important ones than just the First Ward ward heelers: Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John themselves, and most every other alderman in town, and bankers and lawyers and railroad executives and prominent businessmen, and police captains and inspectors and maybe even the commissioner: and pimps, madams, streetwalkers, pickpockets, burglars, and dope fiends. Everyone in costume, the men running to knights, gladiators, and circus strongmen, the ladies (most of whom were of the evening) to Indian maidens, Little Egypts, and geisha girls (costumes the newspapers understatedly described as "abbreviated"). The ball filled the Chicago Coliseum every year, a few days before Christmas, and added twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars to the Hinky Dink-Bathhouse John campaign fund.
    "Bathhouse" John Coughlin, former rubber in a bathhouse. Democratic alderman from the First Ward, was the showman: he recited (his own) lousy poetry, wore outlandish clothes (lavender cravat and a red sash), and blew a fortune or two on the horses. "Hinky Dink" (Michael) Kenna was the brains, a little man who chewed on his cigars and accumulated a fortune or two while running the Workingmen's Exchange, a landmark Levee saloon; among his contributions to Chicago was establishing the standard rate for a vote: fifty