the fight. Scotty protested and reached for French Frank, who
whirled upon him and fell on top of him in a pummelling clinch
after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In the course of
separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst the rest
of us. These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we
separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup
Kennedy fought on. Occasionally we returned to them and gave
advice, such as, when they lay exhausted in the sand, unable to
strike a blow, “Throw sand in his eyes.” And they threw sand in
each other’s eyes, recuperated, and fought on to successive
exhaustions.
And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial,
try to think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning
with the spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of
buccaneers and sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed
men, and imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk. It was
life raw and naked, wild and free–the only life of that sort
which my birth in time and space permitted me to attain. And more
than that. It carried a promise. It was the beginning. From the
sandspit the way led out through the Golden Gate to the vastness
of adventure of all the world, where battles would be fought, not
for old shirts and over stolen salmon boats, but for high purposes
and romantic ends.
And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man
like French Frank get away with him, we, too, brawled and added to
the festivity of the sandspit. And Scotty threw up his job as
crew, and departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging
to me. During the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied
in their bunks, the schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high
water and swung about to their anchors. The salmon boat, still
filled with rocks and water, rested on the bottom.
In the morning, early, I heard wild cries from the Reindeer, and
tumbled out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the
water-front laugh for days. The beautiful salmon boat lay on the
hard sand, squashed flat as a pancake, while on it were perched
French Frank’s schooner and the Reindeer. Unfortunately two of
the Reindeer’s planks had been crushed in by the stout oak stem of
the salmon boat. The rising tide had flowed through the hole, and
just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with him. I lent a
hand, and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the damage.
John Barleycorn
38
Then Nelson cooked breakfast, and while we ate we considered the
situation. He was broke. So was I. The fifty dollars reward
would never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand
beneath us. He had a wounded hand and no crew. I had a burned
main sail and no crew.
“What d’ye say, you and me?” Nelson queried. “I’ll go you,” was
my answer. And thus I became partners with “Young Scratch”
Nelson, the wildest, maddest of them all. We borrowed the money
for an outfit of grub from Johnny Heinhold, filled our water-
barrels, and sailed away that day for the oyster-beds.
CHAPTER XII
Nor have I ever regretted those months of mad devilry I put in
with Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man
that sailed with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or
an instant was his joy. To do what everybody else did not dare
attempt to do, was his pride. Never to reef down was his mania,
and in all the time I spent with him, blow high or low, the
Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she ever dry. We strained her
open and sailed her open and sailed her open continually. And we
abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider afield for our
adventures.
And all this glorious passage in my life was made possible for me
by John Barleycorn. And this is my complaint against John
Barleycorn. Here I was, thirsting for the wild life of adventure,
and the only way for me to win to it was through John Barleycorn’s
mediation. It was the way of the men who lived the life. Did I
wish to live the life, I must live it the way they did. It was by
virtue of drinking that I gained that partnership and comradeship
with Nelson. Had I drunk only the beer he paid for, or had I
declined to drink at all, I should never have been selected by him
as a partner. He wanted a partner who would meet him on the
social side, as well as the work side of life.
I abandoned myself to the life, and developed the misconception
that the secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks,
rising through the successive stages that only an iron
constitution could endure to final stupefaction and swinish
unconsciousness. I did not like the taste, so I drank for the
sole purpose of getting drunk, of getting hopelessly, helplessly
drunk. And I, who had saved and scraped, traded like a Shylock
and made junkmen weep; I, who had stood aghast when French Frank,
at a single stroke, spent eighty cents for whisky for eight men, I
turned myself loose with a more lavish disregard for money than
any of them.
I remember going ashore one night with Nelson. In my pocket were
one hundred and eighty dollars. It was my intention, first, to
buy me some clothes, after that, some drinks. I needed the
clothes. All I possessed were on me, and they were as follows: a
pair of sea-boots that providentially leaked the water out as fast
John Barleycorn
39
as it ran in, a pair of fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton
shirt, and a sou’wester. I had no hat, so I had to wear the
sou’wester, and it will be noted that I have listed neither
underclothes nor socks. I didn’t own any.
To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass
a dozen saloons. So I bought me the drinks first. I never got to
the clothing stores. In the morning, broke, poisoned, but
contented, I came back on board, and we set sail. I possessed
only the clothes I had gone ashore in, and not a cent remained of
the one hundred and eighty dollars. It might well be deemed
impossible, by those who have never tried it, that in twelve hours
a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for drinks.
I know otherwise.
And I had no regrets. I was proud. I had shown them I could
spend with the best of them. Amongst strong men I had proved
myself strong. I had clinched again, as I had often clinched, my
right to the title of “Prince.” Also, my attitude may be
considered, in part, as a reaction from my childhood’s meagreness
and my childhood’s excessive toil. Possibly my inchoate thought
was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a prince than to toil
twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an hour. There are
no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending of one
hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn’t a purple passage,
then I’d like to know what is.
Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John
Barleycorn during this period, and shall only mention events that
will throw light on John Barleycorn’s ways. There were three
things that enabled me to pursue this heavy drinking: first, a
magnificent constitution far better than the average; second, the
healthy open-air life on the water; and third, the fact that I
drank irregularly. While out on the water, we never carried any
drink along.
The world was opening up to me. Already I knew several hundred
miles of the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and
fishing hamlets on the shores. Came the whisper to range farther.
I had not found it yet. There was more behind. But even this
much of the world was too wide for Nelson. He wearied for his
beloved Oakland water-front, and when he elected to return to it
we separated in all friendliness.
I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my
headquarters. In a cluster of fishermen’s arks, moored in the
tules on the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and
vagabonds, and I joined them. I had longer spells ashore, between
fooling with salmon fishing and making raids up and down bay and
rivers as a deputy fish patrolman, and I drank more and learned
more about drinking. I held my own with any one, drink for drink;
and often drank more than my share to show the strength of my