During Sanc’s absence I worked industriously, bettering his instructions
by renting two rooms a day and making the duplicate keys. In most
instances the clerks returned my money when I told them I was called
away and could not occupy the rooms. My days were well filled with work,
renting two rooms, making two keys, trying to get my room money refunded
and visiting the safety box twice a day, sometimes following a depositor
out and around the streets to see what he did with his money.
My evenings were my own and I spent them on the Barbary Coast or the
water front. With an old suit on and a dollar or two in silver I loved
to go to the sailors’ boarding houses where seafaring men, brawny,
brown, and tattooed, speaking all languages, ate, drank, fought, sang
their strange sea songs, and told tales of hardship and adventure on all
the seas. Here I learned to beware the crafty shanghaier with his
knockout drops, lying in wait for strong young fellows from the country.
The cowardly and unscrupulous thieves who later used chloral so
indiscriminately and murderously learned its stupefying effects from the
busy shanghaier on San Francisco’s water front.
The wine dumps, where wine bums or “winos” hung out, interested me.
Long, dark, dirty rooms with rows of rickety tables and a long bar
behind which were barrels of the deadly “foot juice” or “red ink,” as
the winos called it. Sometimes the dump was equipped with a small lunch
counter in the back where the winos could buy for a nickel a big plate
of something that looked like stew, and a hunk of stale bread. The stew
was served from a big pot that was always boiling. Several times a day
the porter, who was also cook and waiter and wino as well, threw a box
of mixed vegetables, discarded from the commission houses, unwashed and
unpeeled, into the pot. Then followed a box of bones, pieces of tallow,
scraps of meat trimmings, odds and ends of meat covered with sawdust
from the floor of the market near by.
The patrons of the wine dumps were recruited from every walk of life.
Scholars, quoting Greek and Latin poets, lawyers dissecting Blackstone,
writers with greasy rolls of manuscript fraternized with broken bums
from the road, sailors too old for the sea, and scrapped mechanics from
the factories—all under the lash of alcohol. They sat in groups at the
tables drinking the wine, alcohol in its cheapest and deadliest form,
from every conceivable kind of vessel: tin cans, pewter mugs, beer
glasses, steins, and cracked soup bowls—anything unbreakable that the
boss could buy from a junkman. They talked volubly. They seldom laughed
and never fought—too far gone for laughing or fighting. When they could
drink no more or buy no more, they staggered or crawled to a bare space
on the floor in the back of the room where they lay on their backs in a
row with their heads to the wall, each with his hat over his hideous,
bloated, purple face. The porter-cook-wino watched the sleepers
carefully. When he thought they had “slept it off” enough to stand up,
he roughly kicked them to their feet and herded them out into the
streets to beg, borrow, or steal enough small silver for another bout.
Too often they failed to respond to his kicks; he would lift the
battered hat, take one look at the purple-blue face, and ring for the
morgue wagon.
This pitiful crew, gathered from the four corners of the earth and from
every stratum of society, whipped beyond resistance by that mysterious
and irresistible craving for alcohol, drank themselves purple in the
wine dumps and died on the floors or under the city sidewalks. The wine
dumps are gone; can any man regret their passing? And so are the winos
gone. In their places have appeared the Jamaica ginger fiend, the
canned heat and wood alcohol drinker. It is difficult to study and
classify them; their lives are too short.
The most disreputable wine dump in the city was in Clay Street, below
Kearny, and I never failed to visit it when in the neighborhood. I had
no more than stepped into the place one night when a wino at the door
shouted, “Here comes the wagon,” and dashed out wildly. Some of the
soberest ran out the back and disappeared. I started to the front door,
but the cops were coming in. I was the first one they got, and as the
cop threw me into the wagon, in the middle of my explanation, he said:
“Oh, tell the judge about it, I’m no court. I’m a hundred-dollar-a-month
cop, and it serves me right for being one if I get lousy throwing all
you wine bums in and out of the wagon.” He seemed discouraged.
I had got calloused about getting locked up and didn’t worry, knowing
they couldn’t do much to me. But going over in the wagon my mind turned
to the burglary of the week before. I felt uncomfortable and thought of
my room and was thankful that it was “clean,” and of the safety box and
the keys I had made, and every other crooked transaction in my short
life of outlawry. “No danger,” I thought as the wagon rattled over the
blocks, “if I cover myself up. My name is William Brown, I am nineteen
years old. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho. My parents died when I was
fourteen. I have supported myself since, selling papers, washing dishes,
and working on farms. I came to this city this morning and am going to
get a job. I went into that place out of curiosity.”
I just had this short biography put together when we got to the city
prison. It was in the basement of a building that stood where the Hall
of Justice now is, and it was the foulest I ever saw, worse than the
first one at home. There was a busy spot, that corridor in the city
prison! Officers hurrying in and out, lawyers haggling at the desk about
releases for prisoners, “fixers,” hawk-eyed and rapacious, lurked about,
cheap bail bondsmen coining misery, ignorance, and crime into thick
nickels and thin dimes, and on the long bench by the wall sat a thin,
wrinkled, poorly dressed woman of fifty, holding a boy’s hand in hers.
He sat beside her, silent and stubborn. She was crying.
Ten of us from the wine dump were lined up at the desk. The officer in
charge said to the man at the desk. “We’ll vag the chronics and charge
the new ones with drunk.” The chronic winos gave their names, etc., and
were hurried away down the corridor. Another chap and I were the only
“new ones.” We answered all questions without angering anybody and
getting knocked down. I protested that I wasn’t drunk. The desk man
said: “Oh, that’s all right, you can go out in the morning at five
o’clock on the broom.” They searched me, but took nothing except a
pocketknife.
We were put in a large cell about twenty feet square, directly across
the corridor from the desk where prisoners were received and registered.
The front of this cell was of upright iron bars and admitted plenty of
light from the corridor. The cell was foul smelling from a fixture in
one corner that seemed to connect directly with a sewer. A broken water
faucet leaked continually, with a hissing sound. About ten men were
there, some sleeping on the damp asphalt floor, some on the benches that
lined the wall; some stood expectantly at the front waiting to be
released, others squatted on their haunches in the corners, staring
vacantly at the floor.
I sat on the bench and wondered about “going out on the broom” in the
morning. I could have asked my cellmates. I looked for the other “new
one” that came with me from the wine dump; he was asleep on the floor. I
decided not to ask, but to wait till morning and find out for myself.
Even at that age I had stumbled upon one truth, and that is, The best
way to get misinformed is to ask a lot of questions. Nearly all my life
has been spent in the company of unfortunate people, and while I never
looked upon myself as an unfortunate, I was always accepted as one of
them. Whatever knowledge I have of them was gleaned by looking and
listening, and it is much more accurate than any I could have got by
asking impertinent and close-up questions. Your best friend would give
you a surly answer if you were to ask him the time of day an hour after
his watch had been stolen. Ask any one-legged stranger how he lost his
limb, and you will get something like this: “Well, you see, it was this
way—I got run over by a ferryboat.”
Of all the many friends I have made since I gave up my larcenous life,
“Shorty” is one of the most respected and highly prized. His friends are
legion, and in every state in the Union; not that Shorty has traveled
there and made friends of them, but that they have traveled here and
made a friend of him.
Shorty’s news stand is on a busy corner in the shadow of a skyscraper
owned by ex-Senator Phelan, one of California’s most distinguished men,
and there, under his patronage and protection, he stands on his stumps
(“cut-down legs” he calls them), early and late, serving thousands with
papers and periodicals. He hobnobs with doctors, lawyers, business men,
and politicians. He finds lost children and dogs, and returns them to
their owners. Shopgirls and strangers ask him which is the best show of
the week. Men around town consult him about the chances of a horse in
to-morrow’s race. He can borrow more money on his I.O.U. than many
business men in his block and pays on the minute. He is no stranger at
the banks on the opposite corners. His reputation for truth and veracity
is such that if he were to tell me the water had all disappeared from
the bay I wouldn’t go down to look.
Traveling in search of adventure when young, he lost his legs under a
train, but instead of despairing and sinking under this terrible
misfortune, he braced himself and, picking out a bare corner on the
street, built up, day by day, year by year, a business that has made him
independent and respected. I stopped one day at his stand, and, looking
at his massive chest, broad shoulders, and fine head, I saw him in fancy
a splendid figure of a man towering ruggedly above his fellows.
“Shorty,” I asked, “how tall were you before you lost your legs?”
He flashed me a savage look; then remembering we were friends his eyes
fell to his stumps and he said with a laugh, “Oh, I was taller by two
feet.”
That’s all one gets by asking questions that wake painful memories.
From my position on the bench I could see every prisoner brought to the
desk. About ten o’clock there was a stir in the hall and several
policemen came in with Chinamen from a gambling-house raid. This was
before they had cut off their queues, and instead of handcuffing their
prisoners the cops came in driving the silent, stolid Chinese before
them like charioteers. Each cop had the tails of three Chinamen’s
queues in each hand. Ahead of the procession walked a white man with a
heavy bag of gold in his hand which he put on the desk, and waited till
the names of the prisoners had been taken. Then they all went back up
the corridor out of my sight—the Chinamen back to Chinatown to their
gambling, and the bag of gold into the bond-and-warrant clerk’s office
to insure their appearance in court.
Several times during the night men were brought in, questioned at great
length, searched thoroughly, and led away to another part of the
prison—felony cases. About midnight two young fellows about my age were
brought in by a copper and stood up before the desk.
“Vag these two ‘hypos,’” said the cop to the desk man. He searched them
most carefully, finding a small package in the torn lining of one’s
coat. The boy begged for it piteously. “I’ll croak, officer, if you take
it away from me.” The cop gave him to the waiting trusty. “Throw him
in.” He was put in with us. Nothing was found on the other hypo, and he
was “thrown in” too.
They immediately began comparing notes and taking stock, walking up and
down the center of the cell nervously. They were in rags and unwashed,
their shoes were broken and had no laces, and the tops flapped open
showing their bare ankles. They seemed utterly unconscious of their sad
condition and walked and talked as briskly as two brokers on Montgomery
Street discussing the markets.
“He got my plant, Georgie,” said the first one, “but you saved yours,
didn’t you, Georgie? Gee, Georgie, but you’re a fox.” His tones were
honey.
“Never mind that,” the other replied; “you don’t have to ‘Georgie’ me.
You’re in with what ‘gow’ I’ve got. Let’s bang it up before they come in
and take it away from us. See if you can hustle some matches.”
The match seeker glanced sharply around him. When his eye fell on me I
produced some matches. “Got any smokes?” I handed him a pack of
cigarettes. He took two, gave one to his partner, Georgie, and returned
the pack. His mind seemed detached from the cell. He took the matches
and cigarettes from me without a word, as if he had reached up to a
mantel and taken them off it. Georgie fished about the front of his
trousers and brought up a tobacco sack that had been hanging suspended
from a button. The sack contained his “plant,” an eye dropper with a
hypodermic needle soldered to it with sealing wax, and a small paper of
morphine in a little tin box.
They went to a back corner of the cell and prepared their shot. About a
spoonful of water and some of their meager store of “morph” were put in
the tin box and matches were burned under it till it boiled, completely
dissolving the morphine. It was then drawn up into the eye dropper, and
Georgie injected his portion into his arm. The other boy did the same
with his portion. Their outfit was carefully put away in the tobacco bag
and suspended again from a button down inside the front of Georgie’s
trousers. Nobody paid any attention to them. They took their shot as
coolly as if they had been in their room, or under a sidewalk. They
seemed a little more interested in their surroundings in a few minutes.
The one I gave the cigarettes to came over to me rubbing his hands
briskly, smiling.
“Give us a couple more of them smokes, young fellow.”
“I’d like to buy some,” I said, “if I could.”
“Got money?”
“Yes, a couple of dollars.”
“I’ll fix it for you,” he said most condescendingly. He went over to
the bars and shouted, “Hey, Finnerty!”
In a minute the head trusty, a thin, weazened, rat-eyed, undersized
character, came up.
“Cigarettes, matches? Sure. Anything else?”
I produced a dollar.
“What’s the matter with a can of coffee and some snails?” said the hypo.
“Get whatever you can,” I said, giving him the dollar.
Finnerty disappeared, and in a surprisingly short time came back with
cigarettes, a gallon fruit tin half full of splendid coffee, and a bag
of snails. The two young fellows took charge of the coffee and snails,
spread a newspaper on the floor, and very cordially invited me to help
myself.
While we were having our lunch the talk was diplomatically turned to
dope and the shortage that menaced my two hypo friends and the
sufferings they would undergo when there was no more and the “habit”
came on, and the necessity for a shot in the morning as a bracer for
them when they faced the judge. They grew so despondent over their
plight that when we were done eating they decided to “shoot up” the
small portion of white stuff they had left. They brightened up after
this operation was over, and things looked rosier.
“Just think, Georgie,” said the talkative one, looking at me, “what a
four-bit piece would do for us. What a life-saver! We’ll both get a
‘sixer’ in the morning if we go in front of the judge with our teeth
rattlin’ so we can’t put up a talk. If I had a decent shot for the
morning I could talk him out of it.
“And that rat, Finnerty, the trusty,” the talker spoke to me now, “has
got a ton of it out there to sell, but he wouldn’t give us a jolt if we
had the horrors.”
“Can you buy it from Finnerty?” I asked him, interested.
“Can you? Why, that guy Finnerty would peddle you a six-shooter and a
road map if you had the coin, and then snitch on you to the desk
sergeant, the rat,” he finished.
At that time morphine and opium were almost as cheap as tobacco. Fifty
cents’ worth would last them a day. I hastily dug up a half dollar and
gave it to him. In answer to his call Finnerty appeared, took the half
dollar, and from his shirt pocket drew a bundle of neatly folded packets
of morphine. In plain sight of the desk sergeant he counted out the
required number of parcels and put them into the purchaser’s hand
extended through the bars. They were divided at once.
Georgie said to his partner. “I think we’d better cook up a shot just to
see if the stuff is all right. That Finnerty would peddle you chloride
of lime if he happened to run out of ‘morph.’” This seemed to be a very
rational reason for taking another shot, and they did.
Given a sufficient quantity of hop, no fiend is ever at a loss for a
sound reason for taking a jolt of it. If he is feeling bad he takes a
jolt so he will feel good. If he is feeling good, he takes one to make
him feel better, and if he is feeling neither very bad nor very good he
takes a jolt “just to get himself straightened around.”
Along about two in the morning a young chap about twenty was brought in
to the desk. While he was being searched the two hypos had their eyes
glued on him. “He ain’t got a dime,” said Georgie to his partner when
the searching was done. The desk man gave the young fellow his
cigarettes and he was locked in with us. He was neat, well dressed, and
very wise looking. He sniffed at the hypos, gave me half a glance,
adjusted his tie, and polished his shoes by rubbing each foot on the
back of the opposite leg. He hung a cigarette on his lower lip and felt
about for matches, but found none.
“Hey, you,” snapping his fingers at Georgie, “gimme a match.” Georgie
gave him a few. “I’ll be out of here in an hour,” said the newcomer,
inhaling his smoke. “I’ll send you in anything you want. I’m a quick
connector. I can get a ten-dollar piece before I get out of the
block—sucker born every minute, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” Georgie replied. “I’m sorry for them poor suckers.
They’re all asleep down in the Palace Hotel and you’re up here in the
can begging matches. There’s one born every minute, all right, but
there’s two wise guys going to jail every minute, an’ beggin’ matches.”
The wise guy said no more, but stood by the door waiting to go out. He
was standing there when I left in the morning.
Georgie turned to his companion. “That last shot didn’t hit me right;
we’d better cook up another an’ begin to get straightened up for court.”
Having bought the stuff for them, I took the liberty to sit by while
they took their shot, which they did without seeming to notice me. Their
bony arms were gray, like pieces of petrified wood. The skin was pocked
with marks, mottled and scarred from the repeated, hourly stabbing of
the needle. Their shirt sleeves were encrusted with dried blood from the
many punctures. And yet they appeared oblivious to it all.
“Have a little shot, young fellow?” Georgie asked cordially.
I declined. “What would happen to me if I did?” I asked.
“Why, nothing; you’d lie down on the bench and sleep like a baby till
time to go out in the morning, that’s all.”
“Yes! And what would happen to the balance of my silver while I am
sleeping like a baby?”
Georgie’s partner cut in like a flash: “This is what would happen. Me
and Georgie would stick right here by you and see that nobody frisked
you for it.”
I laughed so loud that the desk officer thinking some one had gone
hysterical, stood up sleepily and peered over his desk into the cell.
The other bums stirred uneasily in their sleep. Mine was the only laugh
there that night. I could laugh then; I didn’t know anything about hop.
My companions didn’t seem hurt or offended because of my intimation that
they had designs on my last four-bit piece. They fell to discussing
their case and preparing a talk for the judge in the morning. Georgie
was for pleading guilty, and his chum wanted to “talk the judge out of
it.” They couldn’t agree, and looked at me. I ventured to ask what they
had done.
“We’ve got two tough raps,” said Georgie. “In the first place a hypo
ain’t supposed to be found within a block of police headquarters, an’
we’re grabbed right alongside of the building. In the second place, a
hypo ain’t allowed to leave Chinatown. Of course the cops know we sneak
out. That ain’t so bad. Our racket is peddling kindling wood to the
Chinks an’ we’ve got to go out of Chinatown to get it. Last night we
ducks out and down Jackson Street to the commission houses and gather up
a couple of fine bindles of wood. They are pretty heavy and we’re on
short rations of gow and don’t feel any too strong, so we decide to dash
up Washington Street, the shortest route into Chinatown. We’re bang up
against the city prison when a big, flat-footed, harness bull steps out
an’ yaffles us—an’ here we are.”
Their case looked so tough that I could think of no solution. “I
wouldn’t plead guilty to anything if I were you,” I advised him.
“Me, neither,” said his partner. “If I get six months they’ll have to
hang them on me. I ain’t going to reach out an’ grab them.”
They fell into a fresh argument and their words became so personal and
threatening that I feared they would do each other some great violence.
I took a chance in the rôle of peacemaker and suggested that they take
another shot and talk it over peaceably and quietly. They quit their
wrangling instantly and in a minute they were on their knees in the
corner of the cell with their heads together, amicably preparing another
shot. Somewhere down the corridor I heard a clatter, and a singsong
voice droned, “Get ready for the broom. Get ready for the broom.”
I was going out. I went over to my friends in the corner with the
fifty-cent piece I had left. “Here,” I said, “take this.” One of them,
still on his knees waiting for his shot, held out his hand; his fingers
closed on the half dollar. He neither looked up nor spoke to me—his eyes
were on the little tin can where the morphine was dissolving in the
boiling water.
The door was opened and my name called.
I stood by the door till a trusty prisoner opened it and let me out. My
partner from the wine dump was also taken out and we joined four or five
others in the corridor. A trusty came with an armful of brooms and gave
each of us one. A husky young fellow, half awake, reached for one of the
newest brooms. “No, you don’t,” said the trusty, “the last time you
were here I gave you a good new broom and you beat it up to Chinktown
and peddled it for a dime. An old broom for you.”
We were detailed in pairs to sweep the sidewalks clean all around the
block the prison stood on. My space was from the prison door down to
Montgomery Street. An old man had the sidewalk across the street from
me. Two or three assistant trusties nosed around like bird dogs to see
that we swept clean and didn’t run away with the brooms. When my task
was done I helped the old man finish his, and he carried my broom back
to the prison. The trusty dismissed me with a wave of his arm and I went
up Montgomery Street in search of a restaurant where I could get some
coffee with a dime I had saved from the rapacious and cunning hypos in
the prison. I decided to keep away from the wine dumps in future, and
out of the hands of the police vag detail that rounded up the riffraff
when they got too numerous and pesty.
In a few days Sanc was back, quite satisfied with his trip to Salt Chunk
Mary’s. The money was split and put in our box in separate parcels. We
had more than $1,000 each now, but he had no notion of taking a rest or
vacation. He wanted to know right away what I had done in his absence. I
reported everything, including my night in jail. He asked me what I told
the police at the station. I told him. “Not bad,” he said, “but be
careful.”
I gave him the hotel room keys I had made, and he complimented me on my
work and put them away for future use.