“As far as being uptight about the queer stuff at the reformatory, I had no trouble getting used to it. All I could see was that I was stuck in that place and these were kids with the same hassles that I had, and the way to make it there was to be cool and fit in. And don’t make waves and don’t piss anybody off.
“The first time I got cornholed I cried like a baby. The second time it hurt like hell but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to cry and I didn’t. The third or fourth time I didn’t particularly enjoy it but I didn’t mind it either, and to my surprise I came. There’s a gland there and pressure on it will make you come even if you’re not excited. Not always but some of the time. It’s a physical thing.
“And by the end of the first week I was getting it both ways, doing one thing or another to kids and having the same things done to me. With a very few exceptions everybody was into this. There were older kids who didn’t want either end of it, and they were tough enough to make it stand up. But the thing is that with all of the sex that was going down, there were only a few kids who were into it for its own sake, who were getting more than sex kicks out of it. These two would be in love with each other, or one young kid would have a big crush on the jock who was punking him, but those were few and far between. The rest of us, we would talk about girls before doing things to each other, and sometimes think about girls while we were doing them.
“So I never worried about being queer or anything.
“The main thing about reformatory is that you learn things there. I consider myself very lucky being that I learned the one thing you’re supposed to learn and which not many kids did, and that was to stay out of jail. I really learned this. Don’t do things that they’ll put you away for. Don’t get caught.
“Now this doesn’t mean it became my religion, because obviously I’ve broken a lot of laws since then. There’s hardly ever a day that I don’t smoke grass, for example, and according to the law they can put you away for that. For that matter, hustling is also illegal. And I’ve boosted things occasionally. Let’s face it, I’ve done a lot of things.
“But I’m cool about it. When I walked out of that reformatory I was not about to hotwire a car and take it for a spin. No way. And I don’t smoke on the steps of the police station, and I never deal any kind of drugs to anybody I haven’t known a long long time. When I see trouble I walk across the street. That’s what they taught me inside.
“The other things I learned are the real education of reform school. It’s really out of sight. They take a kid who has this crazy kid thing for cars that he can’t control and they put him in a place where he learns how to be a criminal. Just from rapping I had a real education. How to rip off stores. How to get into an apartment. How to hustle queers. How to find a fence when you wanted to sell something you stole. How to get stoned on a hundred different things you never heard of before you went to the slam.
“There’s a crazy way that the whole reformatory system makes a kind of weird sense. Like there are these guys who run everything, and they look down and say, ‘Here’s a kid who’s going bad. Here’s a kid who is committing these little crimes, which means he’s going to grow up to be a criminal. Now this kid doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and if we just let him go on trying to be a criminal the poor bastard is going to starve to death. So we’ll send him to reform school, so that he can really learn how to be a criminal. I mean, if the punk’s going to be a crook, the least we can do is teach him how to be a good one.’
“I was inside for two years. Two miserable years, but when I came out it was like I had gone to college. Not that I was all set to be Dillinger and Al Capone rolled into one, because that was never my ambition, I was too set on never being inside again. But that I had all this store of criminal knowledge.”
At sixteen, Flip was released from the reformatory (or escaped — it’s hard to be certain). He came directly to New York and drifted automatically to Times Square.
“I had a crew cut then. And no beard. I only had to shave like once a week at the time so I couldn’t have grown a beard if I wanted to. And at the time I thought hippies were weird. I would see some on the street and I thought they were, I don’t know, crazy.”
He had already decided to make money by hustling homosexuals. His original plan, developed from information gleaned at the reformatory, was to let himself be picked up by homosexuals and demand money at knife point.
“This was supposed to be very easy because the word was that queers were sissies who would just about faint if you waved a fist at them, let alone a blade. And that they couldn’t go to the cops because they were queers. And especially if you were underage.
“I scored within maybe two hours of hitting Times Square. I had a knife on me at the time but I never even took it out of my pocket. The guy who picked me up, Jesus Christ, I can still remember what he looked like. Built like a house. Really a huge dude, he must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. As a matter of fact when he came on to me my first thought was that he was a really tough cop and I was in for a bust two hours after I was off the bus. And when he got to talking and offered to take me to his place for dinner I wasn’t really sure if he was queer or not. I figured he had to be, but I also figured there was a chance that he was just a nice guy who was feeling sorry for me because I was on the street without any bread.
“Of course when we got to his place and he gave me a friendly little pat on the ass I gave up that thought.
“We had some drinks and then went to bed. I was a little uptight about him corning me because of the size of him, but it turned out that his dick was the one thing small about him. Really small, as a matter of fact. He commented on this and said for this reason he couldn’t get any satisfaction with a woman. I don’t know if this was true or if it was an excuse he used because he happened to like it with boys. Maybe he was embarrassed with women, or he thought he couldn’t satisfy a woman with anything that small. I don’t know what he was really all about.
“Anyway, he got his kicks, and I was standing around trying to figure out what in hell I was going to do now. I mean, I didn’t feature going up against the cat with a gun, let alone a knife. I figured he would take the knife away from me and feed it to me through my ass. It wasn’t just the size of him but that he seemed like the kind of person who could take care of himself. The type who wouldn’t faint at the sight of a knife.
“So I thought, shit, some dynamite hustler I am. Like I made it with him and I got nothing. And while I’m still thinking this he says it looks as though we never did get around to having dinner, and he doesn’t feel up to going out, he just wants to go to sleep, so here’s a couple of bucks and I should get myself something to eat. And hands me a ten-dollar bill.
“I never wound up pulling the knife on anybody. I carried it for maybe a month after that until one day I lost it somewhere and never bothered getting another one. Because why have all that hassle if you could make money without it? Why take the chance of getting beat up yourself, or maybe hurting somebody badly or even killing them and having all that heat?
“What it is, at least according to what I’ve picked up here and there, is that cats will get into this set that it’s a manly thing to beat up a queer or force him to give you money. Or that you can get out of having sex with them that way. But I didn’t really mind the sex and I didn’t have to prove anything with a knife. And I’m not really into stealing, to taking something off another person. From a big store is different, because it’s not from a person, it’s from some fucking company that is ripping off the public in the first place, so all you’re doing is getting a little of your own back. I’m hip that either way it’s a case of stealing but how it goes down inside your head is a different thing.”