INTRODUCTION My introduction to Jerry Thomas wasn’t nearly as dramatic as Dale’s—characteristically, I read about him in a book, one or another of the various histories of American lowlife Herbert Asbury published in the 1920s and ’30s. It was the early 1990s, and I was in graduate school, keeping my head down and anticipating a somewhat dull but (I hoped) pleasant life in academia. Asbury’s raffish accounts of old New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans—I read them all—and their various thugs, crooks, players, and sports were a lot more colorful than the Latin scientific poems I was studying. But work is work, so I reluctantly shelved Gallus Mag and Bill the Butcher, Bathhouse John, Belle Cora, and the bartender known as “the Professor” (who seemed to be in every book) and got back to my Manilius and Martianus Capella. But funny things happen sometimes. Toward the end of 1999, I found myself working as an assistant professor of English at a Catholic college on Staten Island, and my place in academia fully as dull, but not nearly so pleasant, as I had pictured it.
