Beauties, Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted
Actors, Champion Prize Fighters, etc. And each series I had three
different ways: in the card from the cigarette package, in the
poster, and in the album.
Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I
traded for other things that boys valued and which they usually
bought with money given them by their parents. Naturally, they
John Barleycorn
29
did not have the keen sense of values that I had, who was never
given money to buy anything. I traded for postage-stamps, for
minerals, for curios, for birds’ eggs, for marbles (I had a more
magnificent collection of agates than I have ever seen any boy
possess–and the nucleus of the collection was a handful worth at
least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty cents
I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before
he could redeem them).
I’d trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it
over in a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something
that was worth something. I was famous as a trader. I was
notorious as a miser. I could even make a junkman weep when I had
dealings with him. Other boys called me in to sell for them their
collections of bottles, rags, old iron, grain, and gunny-sacks,
and five-gallon oil-cans–aye, and gave me a commission for doing
it.
And this was the thrifty, close-fisted boy, accustomed to slave at
a machine for ten cents an hour, who sat on the stringer-piece and
considered the matter of beer at five cents a glass and gone in a
moment with nothing to show for it. I was now with men I admired.
I was proud to be with them. Had all my pinching and saving
brought me the equivalent of one of the many thrills which had
been mine since I came among the oyster pirates? Then what was
worth while–money or thrills? These men had no horror of
squandering a nickel, or many nickels. They were magnificently
careless of money, calling up eight men to drink whisky at ten
cents a glass, as French Frank had done. Why, Nelson had just
spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us.
Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave
decision. I was deciding between money and men, between
niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my
old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung
about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my comradeship with
these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong drink.
I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson
still stood outside. “Come on and have a beer,” I invited. Again
we stood at the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I
who paid ten cents! a whole hour of my labour at a machine for a
drink of something I didn’t want and which tasted rotten. But it
wasn’t difficult. I had achieved a concept. Money no longer
counted. It was comradeship that counted. “Have another?” I
said. And we had another, and I paid for it. Nelson, with the
wisdom of the skilled drinker, said to the barkeeper, “Make mine a
small one, Johnny.” Johnny nodded and gave him a glass that
contained only a third as much as the glasses we had been
drinking. Yet the charge was the same–five cents.
By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance
didn’t hurt me much. Besides, I was learning. There was more in
this buying of drinks than mere quantity. I got my finger on it.
There was a stage when the beer didn’t count at all, but just the
spirit of comradeship of drinking together. And, ha!–another
thing! I, too, could call for small beers and minimise by two-
John Barleycorn
30
thirds the detestable freightage with which comradeship burdened
one.
“I had to go aboard to get some money,” I remarked casually, as we
drank, in the hope Nelson would take it as an explanation of why I
had let him treat six consecutive times.
“Oh, well, you didn’t have to do that,” he answered. “Johnny’ll
trust a fellow like you–won’t you, Johnny!”
“Sure,” Johnny agreed, with a smile.
“How much you got down against me?” Nelson queried.
Johnny pulled out the book he kept behind the bar, found Nelson’s
page, and added up the account of several dollars. At once I
became possessed with a desire to have a page in that book.
Almost it seemed the final badge of manhood.
After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson
decided to go. We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the
wharf to the Razzle Dazzle. Spider was just building the fire for
supper.
“Where’d you get it?” he grinned up at me through the open
companion.
“Oh, I’ve been with Nelson,” I said carelessly, trying to hide my
pride.
Then an idea came to me. Here was another one of them. Now that
I had achieved my concept, I might as well practise it thoroughly.
“Come on,” I said, “up to Johnny’s and have a drink.”
Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down. Clam was Nelson’s
partner, and he was a fine, brave, handsome, moustached man of
thirty–everything, in short, that his nickname did not connote.
“Come on,” I said, “and have a drink.” He came. As we turned into
the Last Chance, there was Pat, the Queen’s brother, coming out.
“What’s your hurry?” I greeted him. “We’re having a drink. Come
on along.” “I’ve just had one,” he demurred. “What of it?–we’re
having one now,” I retorted. And Pat consented to join us, and I
melted my way into his good graces with a couple of glasses of
beer. Oh! I was learning things that afternoon about John
Barleycorn. There was more in him than the bad taste when you
swallowed him. Here, at the absurd cost of ten cents, a gloomy,
grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy, was made
into a good friend. He became even genial, his looks were kindly,
and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and
oyster-bed gossip.
“Small beer for me, Johnny,” I said, when the others had ordered
schooners. Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker,
carelessly, casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had
just occurred to me. Looking back, I am confident that the only
one there who guessed I was a tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny
John Barleycorn
31
Heinhold.
“Where’d he get it?” I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny.
“Oh, he’s been sousin’ here with Nelson all afternoon,” was
Johnny’s answer.
I never let on that I’d heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper
was giving me a recommendation as a man. “HE’S BEEN SOUSIN’ HERE
WITH NELSON ALL AFTERNOON.” Magic words! The accolade delivered by
a barkeeper with a beer glass!
I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought
the Razzle Dazzle. The glasses were filled and we were ready to
drink. “Have something yourself, Johnny,” I said, with an air of
having intended to say it all the time, but of having been a
trifle remiss because of the interesting conversation I had been
holding with Clam and Pat.
Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive,
the strides I was making in my education, and poured himself
whisky from his private bottle. This hit me for a moment on my
thrifty side. He had taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us
were drinking five-cent drinks! But the hurt was only for a
moment. I dismissed it as ignoble, remembered my concept, and did
not give myself away.
“You’d better put me down in the book for this,” I said, when we
had finished the drink. And I had the satisfaction of seeing a
fresh page devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round
of drinks amounting to thirty cents. And I glimpsed, as through a
golden haze, a future wherein that page would be much charged, and
crossed off, and charged again.
I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny
redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink. He treated
us around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had
arithmetically evened things up handsomely.
“Let’s go around to the St. Louis House,” Spider suggested when we
got outside. Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone
home, and Clam had gone upon the Reindeer to cook supper.
So around Spider and I went to the St. Louis House–my first
visit–a huge bar-room, where perhaps fifty men, mostly
longshoremen, were congregated. And there I met Soup Kennedy for
the second time, and Bill Kelley. And Smith, of the Annie,
drifted in–he of the belt-buckled revolvers. And Nelson showed