snow squalls in a driving gale off Cape Jerimo. There were
nineteen of us, and it was to be our last drink together. With
John Barleycorn
59
seven months of men’s work in the world, blow high, blow low,
behind us, we were looking on each other for the last time. We
knew it, for sailors’ ways go wide. And the nineteen of us, drank
the sailing master’s treat. Then the mate looked at us with
eloquent eyes and called another round. We liked the mate just as
well as the sailing master, and we liked them both. Could we
drink with one, and not the other?
And Pete Holt, my own hunter (lost next year in the Mary Thomas,
with all hands), called a round. The time passed, the drinks
continued to come on the bar, our voices rose, and the maggots
began to crawl. There were six hunters, and each insisted, in the
sacred name of comradeship, that all hands drink with him just
once. There were six boat-steerers and five boat-pullers and the
same logic held with them. There was money in all our pockets,
and our money was as good as any man’s, and our hearts were as
free and generous.
Nineteen rounds of drinks. What more would John Barleycorn ask in
order to have his will with men? They were ripe to forget their
dearly cherished plans. They rolled out of the saloon and into
the arms of the sharks and harpies. They didn’t last long. From
two days to a week saw the end of their money and saw them being
carted by the boarding-house masters on board outward-bound ships.
Victor was a fine body of a man, and through a lucky friendship
managed to get into the life-saving service. He never saw the
dancing-school nor placed his advertisement for a room in a
working-class family. Nor did Long John win to navigation school.
By the end of the week he was a transient lumper on a river
steamboat. Red John and Axel did not send their pay-days home to
the old country. Instead, and along with the rest, they were
scattered on board sailing ships bound for the four quarters of
the globe, where they had been placed by the boarding-house
masters, and where they were working out advance money which they
had neither seen nor spent.
What saved me was that I had a home and people to go to. I
crossed the bay to Oakland, and, among other things, took a look
at the death-road. Nelson was gone–shot to death while drunk and
resisting the officers. His partner in that affair was lying in
prison. Whisky Bob was gone. Old Cole, Old Smoudge, and Bob
Smith were gone. Another Smith, he of the belted guns and the
Annie, was drowned. French Frank, they said, was lurking up
river, afraid to come down because of something he had done.
Others were wearing the stripes in San Quentin or Folsom. Big
Alec, the King of the Greeks, whom I had known well in the old
Benicia days, and with whom I had drunk whole nights through, had
killed two men and fled to foreign parts. Fitzsimmons, with whom
I had sailed on the Fish Patrol, had been stabbed in the lung
through the back and had died a lingering death complicated with
tuberculosis. And so it went, a very lively and well-patronised
road, and, from what I knew of all of them, John Barleycorn was
responsible, with the sole exception of Smith of the Annie.
CHAPTER XVIII
John Barleycorn
60
My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead. I
didn’t like the looks of it, nor the life. I didn’t care for the
drinking, nor the vagrancy of it, and I wandered back to the
Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater
understanding. Then, too, my mother said I had sown my wild oats
and it was time I settled down to a regular job. Also, the family
needed the money. So I got a job at the jute mills–a ten-hour
day at ten cents an hour. Despite my increase in strength and
general efficiency, I was receiving no more than when I worked in
the cannery several years before. But, then, there was a promise
of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months. And
here, so far as John Barleycorn is concerned, began a period of
innocence. I did not know what it was to take a drink from month
end to month end. Not yet eighteen years old, healthy and with
labour-hardened but unhurt muscles, like any young animal I needed
diversion, excitement, something beyond the books and the
mechanical toil.
I strayed into Young Men’s Christian Associations. The life there
was healthful and athletic, but too juvenile. For me it was too
late. I was not boy, nor youth, despite my paucity of years. I
had bucked big with men. I knew mysterious and violent things. I
was from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men
I encountered in the Y.M.C.A. I spoke another language, possessed
a sadder and more terrible wisdom. (When I come to think it over,
I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.) At any rate, the
Y.M.C.A. young men were too juvenile for me, too unsophisticated.
This I would not have minded, could they have met me and helped me
mentally. But I had got more out of the books than they. Their
meagre physical experiences, plus their meagre intellectual
experiences, made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced
their wholesome morality and healthful sports.
In short, I couldn’t play with the pupils of a lower grade. All
the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me–
thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn. I knew too
much too young. And yet, in the good time coming when alcohol is
eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men, it will be
the Y.M.C.A., and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more
virile congregating-places, that will receive the men who now go
to saloons to find themselves and one another. In the meantime,
we live to-day, here and now, and we discuss to-day, here and now.
I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills. It was hum-drum
machine toil. I wanted life. I wanted to realise myself in other
ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour. And yet I had had
my fill of saloons. I wanted something new. I was growing up. I
was developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.
And at this very stage, fortunately, I met Louis Shattuck and we
became chums.
Louis Shattuck, without one vicious trait, was a real innocently
devilish young fellow, who was quite convinced that he was a
sophisticated town boy. And I wasn’t a town boy at all. Louis
was handsome, and graceful, and filled with love for the girls.
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61
With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit. I didn’t
know anything about girls. I had been too busy being a man. This
was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me. And
when I saw Louis say good-bye to me, raise his hat to a girl of
his acquaintance, and walk on with her side by side down the
sidewalk, I was made excited and envious. I, too, wanted to play
this game.
“Well, there’s only one thing to do,” said Louis, “and that is,
you must get a girl.”
Which is more difficult than it sounds. Let me show you, at the
expense of a slight going aside. Louis did not know girls in
their home life. He had the entree to no girl’s home. And of
course, I, a stranger in this new world, was similarly
circumstanced. But, further, Louis and I were unable to go to
dancing-schools, or to public dances, which were very good places
for getting acquainted. We didn’t have the money. He was a
blacksmith’s apprentice, and was earning but slightly more than I.
We both lived at home and paid our way. When we had done this,
and bought our cigarettes, and the inevitable clothes and shoes,
there remained to each of us, for personal spending, a sum that
varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week. We
whacked this up, shared it, and sometimes loaned all of what was
left of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-
adventure, such as car-fare out to Blair’s Park and back–twenty
cents, bang, just like that; and ice-cream for two–thirty cents;
or tamales in a tamale-parlour, which came cheaper and which for
two cost only twenty cents.
I did not mind this money meagreness. The disdain I had learned
for money from the oyster pirates had never left me. I didn’t
care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification; and in my