manhood. When, on a morning, my unconscious carcass was
disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I had
stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-
front talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another
drink, I was proud indeed. It was an exploit.
John Barleycorn
40
And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three
solid weeks, I was certain I had reached the top. Surely, in that
direction, one could go no farther. It was time for me to move
on. For always, drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness
something whispered that this carousing and bay-adventuring was
not all of life. This whisper was my good fortune. I happened to
be so made that I could hear it calling, always calling, out and
away over the world. It was not canniness on my part. It was
curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for things
wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What
was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was
something more, away and beyond. (And, in relation to my much
later development as a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the
things at the back of life, must be noted, for it was destined to
play a dire part in my more recent wrestlings with John
Barleycorn.)
But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John
Barleycorn played me–a monstrous, incredible trick that showed
abysses of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o’clock in the
morning, after a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop
at the end of the wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides
sweep through Carquinez Straits as in a mill-race, and the full
ebb was on when I stumbled overboard. There was nobody on the
wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was borne away by the current. I
was not startled. I thought the misadventure delightful. I was a
good swimmer, and in my inflamed condition the contact of the
water with my skin soothed me like cool linen.
And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some
maundering fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me.
I had never been morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my
head. And now that they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid
culminating, a perfect rounding off of my short but exciting
career. I, who had never known girl’s love, nor woman’s love, nor
the love of children; who had never played in the wide joy-fields
of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights of philosophy, nor seen
with my eyes more than a pin-point’s surface of the gorgeous
world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all, lived
all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the
heels of my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.
Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and
it didn’t amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had
lived for months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation
and the old feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best,
and I could see for myself what it was worth. There were all the
broken-down old bums and loafers I had bought drinks for. That
was what remained of life. Did I want to become like them? A
thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet sadness over my
glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not seen the
weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in all
the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their
sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.)
John Barleycorn
41
The water was delicious. It was a man’s way to die. John
Barleycorn changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain.
Away with tears and regret. It was a hero’s death, and by the
hero’s own hand and will. So I struck up my death-chant and was
singing it lustily, when the gurgle and splash of the current-
riffles in my ears reminded me of my more immediate situation.
Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the
Straits widen out into what bay-farers call the “Bight of Turner’s
Shipyard.” I was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano
wharf and on into the bight. I knew of old the power of the suck
which developed when the tide swung around the end of Dead Man’s
Island and drove straight for the wharf. I didn’t want to go
through those piles. It wouldn’t be nice, and I might lose an
hour in the bight on my way out with the tide.
I undressed in the water and struck out with a strong, single-
overhand stroke, crossing the current at right-angles. Nor did I
cease until, by the wharf lights, I knew I was safe to sweep by
the end. Then I turned over and rested. The stroke had been a
telling one, and I was a little time in recovering my breath.
I was elated, for I had succeeded in avoiding the suck. I started
to raise my death-chant again–a purely extemporised farrago of a
drug-crazed youth. “Don’t sing–yet,” whispered John Barleycorn.
“The Solano runs all night. There are railroad men on the wharf.
They will hear you, and come out in a boat and rescue you, and you
don’t want to be rescued.” I certainly didn’t. What? Be robbed of
my hero’s death? Never. And I lay on my back in the starlight,
watching the familiar wharf-lights go by, red and green and white,
and bidding sad sentimental farewell to them, each and all.
When I was well clear, in mid-channel, I sang again. Sometimes I
swam a few strokes, but in the main I contented myself with
floating and dreaming long drunken dreams. Before daylight, the
chill of the water and the passage of the hours had sobered me
sufficiently to make me wonder what portion of the Straits I was
in, and also to wonder if the turn of the tide wouldn’t catch me
and take me back ere I had drifted out into San Pablo Bay.
Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite
sober, and that I didn’t in the least want to be drowned. I could
make out the Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare
Island lighthouse. I started to swim for the Solano shore, but
was too weak and chilled, and made so little headway, and at the
cost of such painful effort, that I gave it up and contented
myself with floating, now and then giving a stroke to keep my
balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their commotion on
the surface of the water. And I knew fear. I was sober now, and
I didn’t want to die. I discovered scores of reasons for living.
And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed that
I was going to drown anyway.
Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a
parlous condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where
the swift ebbs from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were
fighting with each other, and where, at that particular moment,
John Barleycorn
42
they were fighting the flood tide setting up against them from San
Pablo Bay. A stiff breeze had sprung up, and the crisp little
waves were persistently lapping into my mouth, and I was beginning
to swallow salt water. With my swimmer’s knowledge, I knew the
end was near. And then the boat came–a Greek fisherman running
in for Vallejo; and again I had been saved from John Barleycorn by
my constitution and physical vigour.
And, in passing, let me note that this maniacal trick John
Barleycorn played me is nothing uncommon. An absolute statistic
of the per centage of suicides due to John Barleycorn would be
appalling. In my case, healthy, normal, young, full of the joy of
life, the suggestion to kill myself was unusual; but it must be
taken into account that it came on the heels of a long carouse,
when my nerves and brain were fearfully poisoned, and that the
dramatic, romantic side of my imagination, drink-maddened to
lunacy, was delighted with the suggestion. And yet, the older,
more morbid drinkers, more jaded with life and more disillusioned,
who kill themselves, do so usually after a long debauch, when
their nerves and brains are thoroughly poison-soaked.
CHAPTER XIII
So I left Benicia, where John Barleycorn had nearly got me, and
ranged wider afield in pursuit of the whisper from the back of
life to come and find. And wherever I ranged, the way lay along
alcohol-drenched roads. Men still congregated in saloons. They