It wasn’t strictly a question of money although that never hurt. You could be a millionaire ten times over and still be a bum. Or you could be a gentleman without a large roll at all, just so long as you dressed well and had a certain amount of leisure time. What made you a gentleman or a bum was less what you were than what kind of an effect you had on people. You could be a gigolo and a gentleman at the same time, because there was no contradiction in terms there.
Most of the other pretty boys who’d been in the Vermillion Room that night weren’t gentlemen. They were bums, no matter how nicely they were dressed or how well they spoke. They fawned over their women and acted as a sort of cross between a butler and a puppy dog. The result was disgusting. And Johnny was fairly certain that this only cramped their style.
The next morning he made love to the woman, then had breakfast with her. He left her apartment without making any attempt for another date with her, and he didn’t look in his wallet until he was back in his own room at the Ruskin.
There was a fifty dollar bill in his billfold that hadn’t been there before.
The next three weeks were devoted strictly to the pursuit of the status of gentleman. For the first time in his life he became a compulsive reader. Before, a comic book or a men’s magazine had been an occasional time killer at best. Now, however, he settled down to a steady routine that placed reading at the very top of the list.
He awoke every morning at nine or ten. If he was in his room at the Ruskin, as was generally the case, since most of the women wanted him to be gone when they woke up, he had a quick breakfast at the luncheonette a block away and then went directly to the main public library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. If he awoke in a woman’s apartment, which happened occasionally, he got away as quickly after breakfast as he could and went back to his own room to shower and shave and change clothes — then he hurried over to the library.
He never bothered with lunch. He read continuously from the time he arrived until five-thirty or six. He read everything. He concentrated at first on art and literature, racing through several general works on the subject to give himself a good background. He found out that he could remember everything of importance from what he read and that his reading speed was very high. He learned who had written what books and what in general they had to say. He found out what pictures belonged in which schools of art, and learned how to tell who had painted a certain picture. He soaked up a presentable background in these subjects in a very brief amount of time.
There was one problem. Frequently he came across words that he didn’t understand. At first he would get the meaning from context, but he quickly saw that wasn’t doing his vocabulary much good. Next he tried looking up each unfamiliar word as he came across it, checking meaning and pronunciation. That was a help, but it cut his reading speed to the bone and slowed him down, killing his comprehension as well. He would lose the whole thread of a paragraph or page or chapter if he had to stop and thumb through the dictionary.
He soon found the best method. He read with pen and notebook at his side, and he wrote down each unfamiliar word in the notebook without looking it up. He bought a decent dictionary which he kept in his room at the Ruskin. When he was done studying each day he went home and went through the list of new words, looking up each in turn in the dictionary and memorizing the word and its spelling and pronunciation. He tried using each word in a sentence so that it would become a part of his vocabulary. That procedure worked best for him. At first the word lists for each day were very long. Gradually they became shorter and his vocabulary increased at a rapid pace.
Gradually his reading interests spread to cover wider and wider areas. He raced through a basic text on Grecian civilization, another on the Roman world. This led him in two directions. He poured over two books on other ancient civilizations and several on medieval and renaissance history and culture. He found other books on more contemporary history, working his way right up to the present time.
The more he learned, the more he found himself not knowing. A short history of colonial America made him realize that he had to know some economics in order to understand what he was reading about, and he burned his way through two fundamental economics texts and got the knowledge he wanted. Another history book led him into sociology.
The sociological jargon was almost impenetrable until he discovered Thorstein Veblen and read all of Veblen in three days. The style was hard until he got used to it. Then it read quickly and he soaked up more theories and doctrines.
At the same time he realized that he was learning in a vacuum. He took to checking through the Times every morning with his breakfast until he had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world. This helped round him out. It gave him a better picture of what people were doing, of what was happening, and his mental image of a gentleman was taking more solid shape.
That’s how he spent his days. His nights, of course, were used to different purpose — that of survival. He stuck with 59th Street for a week, then switched his hunting grounds east to Lexington Avenue in the fifties. The women there seemed to have more polish and just as much money.
He made the scene at the bars four and sometimes five times a week. There were occasions when no woman seemed interested in him, but those occasions were relatively few and far between. His appearance certainly didn’t hurt him, and neither, he was pleased to discover, did his increasing ability to converse intelligently. The women were not disappointed to find a young man who could find a more stimulating topic of discourse than clothes and food and sex.
When he went looking for a woman he usually wound up with her at her apartment, or at a hotel which she chose. Once or twice the woman had insisted upon coming up to his apartment, which annoyed him. But the room was more than presentable and the hotel staff did not seem to object if he brought a woman to his room. He was an ideal tenant. He paid his rent before it was due, kept his room immaculate, and never was drunk or disorderly. And the women he brought with him always behaved themselves. They were not tramps.
Some of the women had unusual tastes. One, whom he had been with twice, did not want him sexually at all. She was content to sit and talk with him, or merely to have him around. Her kick, he discovered, was simply to be seen in the company of a good-looking and intelligent young man. On their second date, which she had arranged over the telephone, he was only required to escort her to and from a party in a plush suite at a Park Avenue hotel. At the party he acted not like a domesticated gigolo but like a human being, which was what the woman wanted. He mingled with the other people there, used his newly-acquired knowledge in several enjoyable conversations, and enjoyed himself tremendously.
Another woman liked to be skillfully and painstakingly seduced. Another was virtually insatiable and left him totally exhausted — he made love to her a staggering total of six times in a single night and felt that he had more than earned the hundred dollars she gave him. Such women he very carefully avoided in the future.
There was one thing he had not done. He had not made anything resembling a permanent connection with a woman. Several of them knew his address and could call him on the phone if they wanted him for one reason or another, but no single woman was keeping him.
He had received an offer or two, vague ones that he could and did pass up easily. He both wanted and didn’t want a permanent alliance. It was security, and more money generally, and a better introduction into the world of the gentleman. But something inside him made him pass up those offers that he’d had. He wasn’t sure what it was.