This physical loathing for alcohol I have never got over. But I have
conquered it. To this day I conquer it every time I take a drink. The
palate never ceases to rebel, and the palate can be trusted to know what
is good for the body. But men do not drink for the effect alcohol
produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it
must come through the body, so much the worse for the body.
And yet, despite my physical loathing for alcohol, the brightest spots in
my child life were the saloons. Sitting on the heavy potato wagons,
wrapped in fog, feet stinging from inactivity, the horses plodding slowly
along the deep road through the sandhills, one bright vision made the way
never too long. The bright vision was the saloon at Colma, where my
father, or whoever drove, always got out to get a drink. And I got out
to warm by the great stove and get a soda cracker. Just one soda
cracker, but a fabulous luxury. Saloons were good for something. Back
behind the plodding horses, I would take an hour in consuming that one
cracker. I took the smallest nibbles, never losing a crumb, and chewed
the nibble till it became the thinnest and most delectable of pastes. I
never voluntarily swallowed this paste. I just tasted it, and went on
tasting it, turning it over with my tongue, spreading it on the inside of
this cheek, then on the inside of the other cheek, until, at the end, it
eluded me and in tiny drops and oozelets, slipped and dribbled down my
throat. Horace Fletcher had nothing on me when it came to soda crackers.
I liked saloons. Especially I liked the San Francisco saloons. They had
the most delicious dainties for the taking--strange breads and crackers,
cheeses, sausages, sardines--wonderful foods that I never saw on our
meagre home-table. And once, I remember, a barkeeper mixed me a sweet
temperance drink of syrup and soda-water. My father did not pay for it.
It was the barkeeper's treat, and he became my ideal of a good, kind man.
I dreamed day-dreams of him for years. Although I was seven years old at
the time, I can see him now with undiminished clearness, though I never
laid eyes on him but that one time. The saloon was south of Market
Street in San Francisco. It stood on the west side of the street. As
you entered, the bar was on the left. On the right, against the wall,
was the free lunch counter. It was a long, narrow room, and at the rear,
beyond the beer kegs on tap, were small, round tables and chairs. The
barkeeper was blue-eyed, and had fair, silky hair peeping out from under
a black silk skull-cap. I remember he wore a brown Cardigan jacket, and
I know precisely the spot, in the midst of the array of bottles, from
which he took the bottle of red-coloured syrup. He and my father talked
long, and I sipped my sweet drink and worshipped him. And for years
afterward I worshipped the memory of him.
Despite my two disastrous experiences, here was John Barleycorn,
prevalent and accessible everywhere in the community, luring and drawing
me. Here were connotations of the saloon making deep indentations in a
child's mind. Here was a child, forming its first judgments of the
world, finding the saloon a delightful and desirable place. Stores, nor
public buildings, nor all the dwellings of men ever opened their doors to
me and let me warm by their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the
gods from narrow shelves against the wall. Their doors were ever closed
to me; the saloon's doors were ever open. And always and everywhere I
found saloons, on highway and byway, up narrow alleys and on busy
thoroughfares, bright-lighted and cheerful, warm in winter, and in summer
dark and cool. Yes, the saloon was a mighty fine place, and it was more
than that.
By the time I was ten years old, my family had abandoned ranching and
gone to live in the city. And here, at ten, I began on the streets as a
newsboy. One of the reasons for this was that we needed the money.
Another reason was that I needed the exercise. I had found my way to the
free public library, and was reading myself into nervous prostration. On
the poor ranches on which I had lived there had been no books. In ways
truly miraculous, I had been lent four books, marvellous books, and them
I had devoured. One was the life of Garfield; the second, Paul du
Chaillu's African travels; the third, a novel by Ouida with the last
forty pages missing; and the fourth, Irving's "Alhambra." This last had
been lent me by a school-teacher. I was not a forward child. Unlike
Oliver Twist, I was incapable of asking for more. When I returned the
"Alhambra" to the teacher I hoped she would lend me another book. And
because she did not--most likely she deemed me unappreciative--I cried
all the way home on the three-mile tramp from the school to the ranch. I
waited and yearned for her to lend me another book. Scores of times I
nerved myself almost to the point of asking her, but never quite reached
the necessary pitch of effrontery.
And then came the city of Oakland, and on the shelves of that free
library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline. Here were
thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books, and some were even
better. Libraries were not concerned with children in those days, and I
had strange adventures. I remember, in the catalogue, being impressed by
the title, "The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle." I filled an application
blank and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated
works of Smollett in one huge volume. I read everything, but principally
history and adventure, and all the old travels and voyages. I read
mornings, afternoons, and nights. I read in bed, I read at table, I read
as I walked to and from school, and I read at recess while the other boys
were playing. I began to get the "jerks." To everybody I replied: "Go
away. You make me nervous."
And so, at ten, I was out on the streets, a newsboy. I had no time to
read. I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight, busy
learning forwardness, and brass and bluff. I had an imagination and a
curiosity about all things that made me plastic. Not least among the
things I was curious about was the saloon. And I was in and out of many
a one. I remember, in those days, on the east side of Broadway, between
Sixth and Seventh, from corner to corner, there was a solid block of
saloons.
In the saloons life was different. Men talked with great voices, laughed
great laughs, and there was an atmosphere of greatness. Here was
something more than common every-day where nothing happened. Here life
was always very live, and, sometimes, even lurid, when blows were struck,
and blood was shed, and big policemen came shouldering in. Great
moments, these, for me, my head filled with all the wild and valiant
fighting of the gallant adventurers on sea and land. There were no big
moments when I trudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors.
But in the saloons, even the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables
or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.
And more, the saloons were right. The city fathers sanctioned them and
licensed them. They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them
who lacked my opportunities to know. Terrible they might be, but then
that only meant they were terribly wonderful, and it is the terribly
wonderful that a boy desires to know. In the same way pirates, and
shipwrecks, and battles were terrible; 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
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.