The night life fascinated me. Grant Avenue, now filled with the best shops, was a part of the Tenderloin, and all the narrow streets or alleys off it were crowded with cribs and small saloons with a dance floor in the back room. Many of them had only the short, swinging doors, and never closed from one year’s end to another. The Tenderloin was saturated with opium. The fumes of it, streaming out of the Baltimore House at the corner of Bush and Grant, struck the nostrils blocks away. Every room in it was tenanted by hop smokers. The police did not molest them. The landlord asked only that they pay their rent promptly. If it was not paid on the hour, he took the door of the room off its hinges and put it behind the counter, leaving the occupant’s things at the mercy of his fellow lodgers.

Dupont Street, now Grant Avenue, began at Bush and carried the Tenderloin over into Chinatown, where old St. Mary’s Church rose from the heart of it, brooding over it all. It was a colorful Tenderloin⁠—loud, drunken, odorous, and stupid from hop. Its bad wine, ill women, and worse song have gone to join the Indian, the buffalo, the roulette wheel, and the faro box. Deeply and securely dug in, it yielded slowly, inch by inch, and with scant grace, to the sledgehammer blows of the militant Father Caraher.

I made a few acquaintances around the dance halls and found my way into the hop joints. Curiosity was my only excuse for my first smoke. It made me very sick, and although I became a smoker after, it was years before I touched the pipe again.

Sanc spent his time in his own way, and there were times when I wouldn’t see him for a week. One night when he appeared at our eating place, he handed me a sheet of paper.