_Wherein Our Hero Falters_
Next day I kept it up, varying the first day's menus slightly, but keeping
the bulk consumption down, roughly, to about one-half or possibly
one-third what my rations formerly had been. Before night of the second
day that all-gone sensation had vanished. Already I had made the agreeable
discovery that I could get along and be reasonably happy on from 35 to 50
per cent of what until then I had deludedly thought was required to
nourish me. Before the week ended I felt fitter and sprier in every way
than I had for years past; more alive, more interested in things, quicker
on my feet and brisker in my mental processes than in a long time. The
chronic logy, foggy feeling in my head disappeared and failed to return.
I may add that to date it still has not returned. Relieved of pressure
against its valves--at least I assume that was what came to pass--my heart
began functioning as I assume a normal heart should function, and at once
the sense of oppression in the neighborhood of the heart was gone.
Within the same week I took most joyful note of the fact that I was losing
flesh in the vicinities where mainly I craved to lose it amidships and at
the throat. I still had a double chin in front, but the third one, which I
carried behind as a spare--the one which ran all the way round my neck and
lapped at the back like a clergyman's collar--was melting away. And unless
I was woefully mistaken, I no longer had to fight so desperate a battle
with the waistband of my trousers when I dressed in the mornings.
I was not mistaken. Glory be and likewise selah! My first and second
mezzanines were visibly shrinking. By these signs and portents was I
stimulated to continue the campaign so auspiciously launched and so
satisfactorily progressing.
I shall not deny that in the second week I did some backsliding. The swing
of the tour carried me into the South. It was the South in the splendor of
the young springtime when the cardinal bird sang his mating song. With
brocading dandelions each pasture gloriously became even as the Field of
the Cloth of Gold; and lo, the beginning of the strawberry shortcake
season overlapped the last of the smoked-hog-jowl-and-turnip-greens
period, and the voice of the turtle was heard in the land.
Figuratively, I was swept off my feet when a noble example of Southern
womanhood put before my famished eyes the following items, to wit: About
half a bushel of newly picked turnip greens, rearing islandwise above a
sloshing sea of pot licker and supporting upon their fronded crests the
boiled but impressive countenance of a hickory-cured shote, the whole
being garnished with paired-off poached eggs like the topaz eyes of
beauteous blond virgins turned soulfully heavenward; and set off by
flankings of small piping-hot corn pones made with meal and water and salt
and shortening, as Providence intended a proper corn pone should be made.
Then the years rolled away like a scroll and once again was I back in the
Kentucky foothills, a lean and lathy sprout of a kid, a limber six-foot
length of perpendicular appetite; and it was twelve o'clock for some
people, but it was dinner time for me!
My glad low gurgle of anticipatory joy smothered the small inner voice of
caution as I leaped, as it were, headlong into that bosky dell of young
turnip greens. So, having set my feet on the downward path I backslode
some more--for behold, what should come along then but an old-fashioned
shortcake, fashioned of crisp biscuit dough, with more fresh strawberries
bedded down between its multiplied and mounting layers than you could buy
at the Fritz-Charlton for a hundred and ninety dollars.
Right then and there was when and where I lost all I had gained in a
fortnight of stalwart self-disciplining; rather it was where I regained
all I haply had lost. When, gorged and comatose, I staggered from that
fair matron's depleted table I should never have dared to trundle over a
wooden culvert at faster than four miles an hour. Either I should have
slowed down or waited until they could put in some re-enforced-concrete
underpinnings.
I was right back where I had started, and for the moment didn't care a
darn either. Sin is glorious when you sin gloriously.
But I rallied. I retrieved myself. However, I do not take all the credit
to myself for this; circumstances favored me. Shortly I quitted the land
of temptation where I had been born, and was back again up North living on
dining cars and in hotels, with nothing more seductive to resist than
processed pastry and machine-made shortcakes and Thousand Islands
dressing; which made the fight all the easier to win, especially as
regards the last named. I sometimes wonder why, with a thousand islands to
choose from, the official salad mixer of the average hotel always picks
the wrong one.
I kept on. The thing proved magically easy of accomplishment. By the fit
of my clothing, if by nothing else, I could have told that several of my
more noticeable convexes were becoming plane surfaces and gave promise in
due season of becoming almost concave, some of 'em. But there was other
and convincing testimony besides. I could tell it by my physical feelings,
by my viewpoint, by my enhanced zest for work and for play.
Purposely, for the first month I refrained from weighing myself. When I
did begin weighing at regular intervals I found I was losing at a rate of
between two and three pounds a week. Moreover, I had now proved to my own
satisfaction that within sane reasonable limitations I could resume eating
most of the things which formerly I ate to excess and which I had
altogether eliminated from my menus during the initiatory stages of
dieting.
About the time I emerged from the novitiate class I discerned yet one more
gratifying fact. If I were in the woods, camping and fishing, or hunting
or tramping or riding or taking any fairly arduous form of exercise, I
could eat pretty much anything and everything, no matter how fattening it
might be. Work in the open air whetted my appetite, but the added exertion
burned up the waste matter so that the surplus went into bodily strength
instead of into fatty layers. Consumption was larger, but assimilation was
perfect.
For my daily life at home, where I am writing this, I have cut out these
things: All the cereals; nearly all the white bread; all the hot bread;
practically all pastries except very light pastries; white potatoes
absolutely; rice to a large extent; sausages and fresh pork and nearly all
the ham; cream in my coffee and on fruits; and a few of the starchier
vegetables.
Of butter and of cheese and of nuts I eat perhaps one-third the amount I
used to eat, and of meats, roughly, one-half as much as before the dawn of
reason came. Of everything except the items I just have enumerated I eat
as freely as I please. And when a person begins to reckon up everything
else among the edibles--flesh, fowl, fish, berries, fruits, vegetables and
the rest he finds quite a sizable list.
I shall not pretend that I do not pine often for sundry tabooed things.
Take pies, now--if there is any person alive who likes his pie better than
I do he's the king of the pie likers, that's all. And I am desolated at
being compelled to bar out the rice--not the gummy, glued-together,
sticky, messy stuff which Northerners eat with milk and sugar on it, but
real orthodox rice such as only Southerners and Chinamen and East Indians
know how to prepare; white and fluffy and washed free of all the lurking
library paste; with every grain standing up separate and distinct like
well-popped corn and treated only with salt, pepper and butter, or with
salt, pepper and gravy before being consumed.
And as for white potatoes--well, it distresses me deeply to think that
hereafter the Irish potato, except when I'm camping out, will be to me
merely something to stopper the spout of a coal-oil can with, or to stab
the office pen in on the clerk's desk in an American-plan hotel. For I
have ever cherished the Irish potato as one of Nature's most succulent
gifts to mankind. I like potatoes all styles and every style, French
fried, lyonnaise, O'Brien, shoestring shape, pants-button design, hashed
brown, creamed, mashed, stewed, soufflé--if only I knew who blew 'em
up--and most of all, baked _au naturel_ in the union suit. And I miss them
and shall keep on missing them. But no longer do I yearn for cream in my
coffee, now that it is out of it, and I am getting reconciled to dry toast
for breakfast, where once upon a time only members of the justly famous
Flap Jackson family seemed to satisfy.
Of course I imbibe alcoholic stimulant when and where procurable. From the
standpoint of one intent upon cutting a few running feet off the waistline
measurements this distinctly is wrong, as full well I know. But what would
you? I do not wish to pose as an eccentric. I have no desire to be pointed
out as a person aiming to make himself conspicuously erratic by behaving
differently from the run of his fellows. Since the advent of Prohibition
nearly everybody I meet is drinking with an unbridled enthusiasm; and when
not engaged in the act of drinking is discussing the latest and most
approved methods of evading, circumventing and defying the Federal and
State statutes against drinking. Therefore I drink, too. Even so, I have
not yet succeeded in accustoming my palate to strong waters
indiscriminately swallowed. I confess to a fear that I shall never make a
complete success of the undertaking.
I suppose the trouble with me is lack of desire. Prior to the attempted
enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment potable and vatted mixtures had
but small lure for my palate, or my stomach, or my temperament. An
occasional mild cocktail before a dinner, and perhaps twice a week a
bottle of light beer or a glass of light wine with the dinner--these, in
those old wild wicked days which ended in January, 1920, practically made
up the tally of my habitual flirtations with the accursed Demon. In the
springtime I might chamber an occasional mint julep, but this, really, was
a sort of rite, a gesture of salute to the young green year. Likewise at
Christmas time I partook sparingly of the ceremonial and traditional
egg-nog. And once in a great while, on a bitter cold night in the winter,
a hot apple toddy was not without its attractions. But these indulgences
about covered the situation, alcoholically speaking, so far as I was
concerned. For me the strong, heady vintages, whether still or sparkling,
and the more potent distillations had mighty little appeal. Champagne, to
me, was about the poorest substitute for good well-water that had ever
been proposed; and the Messrs. Haig & Haig never had to put on a night
shift at the works on my account.
Yet I came from a mid-section of the republic where in the olden days
Bourbon whiskey was regarded as a proper staff of life. The town where I
was born was one of the last towns below Mason & Dixon's Line to stand out
against the local option wave which had swept the smaller interior
communities of America; and my native state of Kentucky was one of the two
remaining states of the South, Louisiana being the other, which had not
officially gone dry by legislative action up to the time when Br'er
Volstead's pleasant little act went over nationally.
While I was growing up, through boyhood, through my youth and on into
manhood, I had the example of whiskey-drinking all about me. Many of our
oldest and most respected families owned and operated distilleries. Some
of them had been distillers for generations past; they were proud of the
purity of their product. Men of all stations in life drank freely and with
no sense of shame in their drinking. Mainly they took their'n straight or
in toddies; in those parts, twenty years ago, the high-ball was looked
upon with suspicion as a foreign error which had been imported by
misguided individuals up North who didn't know any better than to drown
good liquor in charged water. There were decanters on the sideboard; there
were jimmy-johns in the cellar; and down at the place on the corner twenty
standard varieties of bottled Bourbons and ryes were to be had at an
exceedingly moderate price. Bar-rail instep, which is a fallen arch
reversed, was a common complaint among us.
Even elderly ladies who looked with abhorrence upon the drinking habit
were not denied their wee bit nippy. They got it, never knowing that they
got it. Some of them stayed pleasantly corned year in and year out and
supposed all the time they merely were enjoying good health. For them
stimulating tonics containing not in excess of sixty per cent of pure
grain alcohol were provided by pious patent-medicine manufacturers in
Chattanooga and Atlanta and Louisville--earnest-minded, philanthropic
patriots these were, who strongly advocated the closing-up of the Rum
Hole, which was their commonest pet name for the corner saloon, but who
viewed with a natural repugnance those provisions of the Pure Food Act
requiring printed confession as to fluid contents upon the labels of their
own goods. It was no uncommon thing in the Sunny Southland to observe a
staunch churchgoer who was an outspoken advocate of temperance rising up
and giving three rousing hiccups for good old Dr. Bunkum's Nerve Balm. And
distinctly I recall the occasion when a stalwart mother in Israel,
starting off to attend a wedding and feeling the need of a little special
toning-up beforehand, took three wineglassfuls of her favorite Blood
Purifier instead of the customary one which she took before a meal; and,
as a consequence, on her arrival at the scene of festivities was with
difficulty dissuaded from snatching down the Southern smilax and other
decorations that she might twine with them a wreath to crown herself. She
somehow had got the idea that she was the queen emeritus of the May. It
was reported about town afterward that she tried to do the giant swing on
the parlor chandelier. But this was a gross exaggeration; she only tried
to hang by her legs from it.
Reared, as I was, amid such surroundings and in a commonwealth abounding
in distilleries, rectifying works, blending establishments, bottle-houses,
barrel-houses, and saloons, I should have been a hopeless inebriate long
before I came of age. The literature of any total abstinence society
would prove conclusively that I never had a chance to avoid filling a
drunkard's grave. Yet somehow I escaped the fate ordained for me. As I
say, I drank sparingly and for long periods not at all, until Prohibition
came. Then I began doing as about ninety per cent of my fellow-adult
Americans began doing--which was to take a drink when the opportunity
offered. As I diagnose it, we nearly all are actuated now by much the same
instinct which causes a small boy to loot a jam closet. He doesn't
particularly want all that jam but he takes the jam because it is
summarily denied him and because he's afraid he may never again get a
whack at unlimited jam.
To my way of thinking, the main result of the effort drastically to
enforce Prohibition, aside from making us a nation of law-breakers,
law-evaders, sneaks, bribers, boot-leggers, bigots, corruptionists and
moral cowards, has been to transfer the burden of inebriety from one set
of shoulders to another set of shoulders. Men who formerly drank to
excess have sobered up, against their will, for lack of cash or lack of
chance to buy hard liquor. They cannot rake together enough coin to
purchase the adulterated stuff at ten times the price they had paid for
better liquor before the law went into effect. On the other hand, men--and
women--who formerly drank but little are now drinking to excess, some of
them being prompted, I think, by a feeling of protest against what they
regard as an invasion of their personal liberties and some, no doubt,
inspired by a perfectly understandable impulse to do a thing which is
forbidden when the doing of it gives them a sense of adventure and daring.
Far be it from an humble citizen to criticise our national law-making
body. Far be it from him, as he contemplates the spectacle frequently
presented under the dome of the Capitol at Washington, to paraphrase Ethan
Allen's celebrated remark when he took Fort Ticonderoga in the name of
Jehovah and the Continental fathers and exclaim: "Congress--oh, my God!"
Far be it, I repeat, from such a one to do such things as these. But I
trust I may be pardoned for venturing the statements that excessive
drinking already was going out of fashion in this country, that the
treating evil was in a fair way to die a natural death anyhow, and that
the present sumptuary attempt to cure us overnight of a habit which has
been ingrained in the very fibre of the race for so far back as the
history of the race runs, has only had the effect of making a bad thing
worse.
At that, I hold no brief for the brewer and the distiller. They got
exactly what was coming to them. Had they, as a class, been content to
obey the existing laws, instead of conniving to break them; had they kept
their meddling fingers out of local politics; had they realized more fully
their responsibilities as manufacturers and purveyors of potentially
dangerous products; had they been willing to cooperate with right-thinking
men in a sane and orderly campaign for the cleaning-up and the proper
regulation of the liquor traffic; had they seen that the common man's
inarticulate but very definite resentment against the iniquities of the
corner saloon system was tending to the legal abolition of the whole
business of licensed drinking, I believe we should have had no Eighteenth
Amendment saddled upon us and no Volstead act to bridle us.
In the final analysis, and stripping aside the lesser contributory causes,
I maintain there were just two outstanding reasons why this country went
dry after the fashion in which it did go dry: One reason was the
Distiller; the other was the Brewer. And for the woes of either or both I,
for one, decline to shed a single tear.
How a fellow does run on when he gets on the subject which is uppermost in
the minds of the American people this year! All I intended to say, when I
started off on this tack, a few pages back, was that if I absolutely and
completely cut out all alcoholic stimulant no doubt I should be reducing
my weight much faster than is the case at this writing. To-day practically
all the members in good standing of the Order of Friendly Sons of the
Boiled Spinach--I mean the dietetic sharps--agree that he or she who is
banting will be well-advised to drink not at all. For the most part they
do not make a moral issue of this detail. Some of them refuse to concede
that a teetotaler is necessarily healthier or happier or more useful to
the world than the moderate imbiber is. They merely point out that
whiskies and beers are, for the majority of humans, fattening things and
should therefore be eliminated from the diet of those wishful to lose
their superfluous adipose tissue. Here, again, they disagree with their
professional forebears. The experts of the preceding generations, being
mainly Englishmen and Germans, could not conceive of living without
drinking. Some advocated wines, some ales, some a mixture of both with an
occasional measure of spirits added for the sake of digestion. But among
the dependable dietetic authorities of the present day there appears to
be no wide range of argument on this point. They pretty generally agree
that even a casual indulgence in beverages is not indicated for those who
seek to reduce. I am sure they are right. But as I remarked just now, what
can you do when you are encompassed about by the bottle-toting,
sop-it-up-behind-the-door custom which has sprung up since Prohibition was
slipped over on us by the Anti-Saloon League?
I confess that I have not the strength of character to swim, almost alone,
against the social current. So I partake of the occasional snort and to
that extent stand a self-admitted apologist for an offense which no true
reductionist should commit.
But I claim that otherwise--that in so far as the solid foodstuffs are
concerned--I have, for my own individual case, exactly the right idea
about it.