and what healthy boy wouldn’t give his immortal soul to
participate in such affairs?
Besides, in saloons I saw reporters, editors, lawyers, judges,
whose names and faces I knew. They put the seal of social
approval on the saloon. They verified my own feeling of
fascination in the saloon. They, too, must have found there that
something different, that something beyond, which I sensed and
groped after. What it was, I did not know; yet there it must be,
for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot. I had
no sorrows, and the world was very bright, so I could not guess
that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and
stale grief.
Not that I drank at that time. From ten to fifteen I rarely
tasted liquor, but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and
drinking places. The only reason I did not drink was because I
didn’t like the stuff. As the time passed, I worked as boy-helper
on an ice-wagon, set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon
attached, and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds.
Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and
Thirty-ninth Street. Here for a year I delivered an evening
paper, until my route was changed to the water-front and
tenderloin of Oakland. The first month, when I collected Josie
Harper’s bill, she poured me a glass of wine. I was ashamed to
refuse, so I drank it. But after that I watched the chance when
she wasn’t around so as to collect from her barkeeper.
The first day I worked in the bowling alley, the barkeeper,
according to custom, called us boys up to have a drink after we
had been setting up pins for several hours. The others asked for
beer. I said I’d take ginger ale. The boys snickered, and I
noticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange, searching
scrutiny. Nevertheless, he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward, back in the alleys, in the pauses between games, the
boys enlightened me. I had offended the barkeeper. A bottle of
John Barleycorn
16
ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam
beer; and it was up to me, if I wanted to hold my job, to drink
beer. Besides, beer was food. I could work better on it. There
was no food in ginger ale. After that, when I couldn’t sneak out
of it, I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so
good. I was always aware that I was missing something.
What I really liked in those days was candy. For five cents I
could buy five “cannon-balls”–big lumps of the most delicious
lastingness. I could chew and worry a single one for an hour.
Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy
for five cents each. It required a quarter of a day properly to
absorb one of them. And many a day I made my entire lunch off one
of those slabs. In truth, I found food there, but not in beer.
CHAPTER VI
But the time was rapidly drawing near when I was to begin my
second series of bouts with John Barleycorn. When I was fourteen,
my head filled with the tales of the old voyagers, my vision with
tropic isles and far sea-rims, I was sailing a small centreboard
skiff around San Francisco Bay and on the Oakland Estuary. I
wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get away from monotony and the
commonplace. I was in the flower of my adolescence, a-thrill with
romance and adventure, dreaming of wild life in the wild man-
world. Little I guessed how all the warp and woof of that man-
world was entangled with alcohol.
So, one day, as I hoisted sail on my skiff, I met Scotty. He was
a husky youngster of seventeen, a runaway apprentice, he told me,
from an English ship in Australia. He had just worked his way on
another ship to San Francisco; and now he wanted to see about
getting a berth on a whaler. Across the estuary, near where the
whalers lay, was lying the sloop-yacht Idler. The caretaker was a
harpooner who intended sailing next voyage on the whale ship
Bonanza. Would I take him, Scotty, over in my skiff to call upon
the harpooner?
Would I! Hadn’t I heard the stories and rumours about the Idler?–
the big sloop that had come up from the Sandwich Islands where it
had been engaged in smuggling opium. And the harpooner who was
caretaker! How often had I seen him and envied him his freedom.
He never had to leave the water. He slept aboard the Idler each
night, while I had to go home upon the land to go to bed. The
harpooner was only nineteen years old (and I have never had
anything but his own word that he was a harpooner); but he had
been too shining and glorious a personality for me ever to address
as I paddled around the yacht at a wistful distance. Would I take
Scotty, the runaway sailor, to visit the harpooner, on the opium-
smuggler Idler? WOULD I!
The harpooner came on deck to answer our hail, and invited us
aboard. I played the sailor and the man, fending off the skiff so
that it would not mar the yacht’s white paint, dropping the skiff
John Barleycorn
17
astern on a long painter, and making the painter fast with two
nonchalant half-hitches.
We went below. It was the first sea-interior I had ever seen.
The clothing on the wall smelled musty. But what of that? Was it
not the sea-gear of men?–leather jackets lined with corduroy,
blue coats of pilot cloth, sou’westers, sea-boots, oilskins. And
everywhere was in evidence the economy of space–the narrow bunks,
the swinging tables, the incredible lockers. There were the tell-
tale compass, the sea-lamps in their gimbals, the blue-backed
charts carelessly rolled and tucked away, the signal-flags in
alphabetical order, and a mariner’s dividers jammed into the
woodwork to hold a calendar. At last I was living. Here I sat,
inside my first ship, a smuggler, accepted as a comrade by a
harpooner and a runaway English sailor who said his name was
Scotty.
The first thing that the harpooner, aged nineteen, and the sailor,
aged seventeen, did to show that they were men was to behave like
men. The harpooner suggested the eminent desirableness of a
drink, and Scotty searched his pockets for dimes and nickels.
Then the harpooner carried away a pink flask to be filled in some
blind pig, for there were no licensed saloons in that locality.
We drank the cheap rotgut out of tumblers. Was I any the less
strong, any the less valiant, than the harpooner and the sailor?
They were men. They proved it by the way they drank. Drink was
the badge of manhood. So I drank with them, drink by drink, raw
and straight, though the damned stuff couldn’t compare with a
stick of chewing taffy or a delectable “cannon-ball.” I shuddered
and swallowed my gorge with every drink, though I manfully hid all
such symptoms.
Divers times we filled the flask that afternoon. All I had was
twenty cents, but I put it up like a man, though with secret
regret at the enormous store of candy it could have bought. The
liquor mounted in the heads of all of us, and the talk of Scotty
and the harpooner was upon running the Easting down, gales off the
Horn and pamperos off the Plate, lower topsail breezes, southerly
busters, North Pacific gales, and of smashed whaleboats in the
Arctic ice.
“You can’t swim in that ice water,” said the harpooner
confidentially to me. “You double up in a minute and go down.
When a whale smashes your boat, the thing to do is to get your
belly across an oar, so that when the cold doubles you you’ll
float.”
“Sure,” I said, with a grateful nod and an air of certitude that
I, too, would hunt whales and be in smashed boats in the Arctic
Ocean. And, truly, I registered his advice as singularly valuable
information, and filed it away in my brain, where it persists to
this day.
But I couldn’t talk–at first. Heavens! I was only fourteen, and
had never been on the ocean in my life. I could only listen to
the two sea-dogs, and show my manhood by drinking with them,
fairly and squarely, drink and drink.
John Barleycorn
18
The liquor worked its will with me; the talk of Scotty and the
harpooner poured through the pent space of the Idler’s cabin and
through my brain like great gusts of wide, free wind; and in
imagination I lived my years to come and rocked over the wild,
mad, glorious world on multitudinous adventures.
We unbent. Our inhibitions and taciturnities vanished. We were