Gradual as was my development as a heavy drinker among the oyster
pirates, the real heavy drinking came suddenly, and was the result, not
of desire for alcohol, but of an intellectual conviction.
The more I saw of the life, the more I was enamoured of it. I can never
forget my thrills the first night I took part in a concerted raid, when
we assembled on board the Annie--rough men, big and unafraid, and
weazened wharf-rats, some of them ex-convicts, all of them enemies of the
law and meriting jail, in sea-boots and sea-gear, talking in gruff low
voices, and "Big" George with revolvers strapped about his waist to show
that he meant business.
Oh, I know, looking back, that the whole thing was sordid and silly. But
I was not looking back in those days when I was rubbing shoulders with
John Barleycorn and beginning to accept him. The life was brave and
wild, and I was living the adventure I had read so much about.
Nelson, "Young Scratch" they called him, to distinguish him from "Old
Scratch," his father, sailed in the sloop Reindeer, partners with one
"Clam." Clam was a dare-devil, but Nelson was a reckless maniac. He was
twenty years old, with the body of a Hercules. When he was shot in
Benicia, a couple of years later, the coroner said he was the
greatest-shouldered man he had ever seen laid on a slab.
Nelson could not read or write. He had been "dragged" up by his father
on San Francisco Bay, and boats were second nature with him. His
strength was prodigious, and his reputation along the water-front for
violence was anything but savoury. He had Berserker rages and did mad,
terrible things. I made his acquaintance the first cruise of the Razzle
Dazzle, and saw him sail the Reindeer in a blow and dredge oysters all
around the rest of us as we lay at two anchors, troubled with fear of
going ashore.
He was some man, this Nelson; and when, passing by the Last Chance
saloon, he spoke to me, I felt very proud. But try to imagine my pride
when he promptly asked me in to have a drink. I stood at the bar and
drank a glass of beer with him, and talked manfully of oysters, and
boats, and of the mystery of who had put the load of buckshot through the
Annie's mainsail.
We talked and lingered at the bar. It seemed to me strange that we
lingered. We had had our beer. But who was I to lead the way outside
when great Nelson chose to lean against the bar? After a few minutes, to
my surprise, he asked me to have another drink, which I did. And still
we talked, and Nelson evinced no intention of leaving the bar.
Bear with me while I explain the way of my reasoning and of my innocence.
First of all, I was very proud to be in the company of Nelson, who was
the most heroic figure among the oyster pirates and bay adventurers.
Unfortunately for my stomach and mucous membranes, Nelson had a strange
quirk of nature that made him find happiness in treating me to beer. I
had no moral disinclination for beer, and just because I didn't like the
taste of it and the weight of it was no reason I should forgo the honour
of his company. It was his whim to drink beer, and to have me drink beer
with him. Very well, I would put up with the passing discomfort.
So we continued to talk at the bar, and to drink beer ordered and paid
for by Nelson. I think, now, when I look back upon it, that Nelson was
curious. He wanted to find out just what kind of a gink I was. He
wanted to see how many times I'd let him treat without offering to treat
in return.
After I had drunk half a dozen glasses, my policy of temperateness in
mind, I decided that I had had enough for that time. So I mentioned that
I was going aboard the Razzle Dazzle, then lying at the city wharf, a
hundred yards away.
I said good-bye to Nelson, and went on down the wharf. But, John
Barleycorn, to the extent of six glasses, went with me. My brain tingled
and was very much alive. I was uplifted by my sense of manhood. I, a
truly-true oyster pirate, was going aboard my own boat after hob-nobbing
in the Last Chance with Nelson, the greatest oyster pirate of us all.
Strong in my brain was the vision of us leaning against the bar and
drinking beer. And curious it was, I decided, this whim of nature that
made men happy in spending good money for beer for a fellow like me who
didn't want it.
As I pondered this, I recollected that several times other men, in
couples, had entered the Last Chance, and first one, then the other, had
treated to drinks. I remembered, on the drunk on the Idler, how Scotty
and the harpooner and myself had raked and scraped dimes and nickels with
which to buy the whisky. Then came my boy code: when on a day a fellow
gave another a "cannon-ball" or a chunk of taffy, on some other day he
would expect to receive back a cannon-ball or a chunk of taffy.
That was why Nelson had lingered at the bar. Having bought a drink, he
had waited for me to buy one. I HAD LET HIM BUY SIX DRINKS AND NEVER
ONCE OFFERED TO TREAT. And he was the great Nelson! I could feel myself
blushing with shame. I sat down on the stringer-piece of the wharf and
buried my face in my hands. And the heat of my shame burned up my neck
and into my cheeks and forehead. I have blushed many times in my life,
but never have I experienced so terrible a blush as that one.
And sitting there on the stringer-piece in my shame, I did a great deal
of thinking and transvaluing of values. I had been born poor. Poor I
had lived. I had gone hungry on occasion. I had never had toys nor
playthings like other children. My first memories of life were pinched
by poverty. The pinch of poverty had been chronic. I was eight years
old when I wore my first little undershirt actually sold in a store
across the counter. And then it had been only one little undershirt.
When it was soiled I had to return to the awful home-made things until it
was washed. I had been so proud of it that I insisted on wearing it
without any outer garment. For the first time I mutinied against my
mother--mutinied myself into hysteria, until she let me wear the store
undershirt so all the world could see.
Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors
and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child,
with a child's imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has
been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have
were those I got for myself. My meagre childhood developed meagreness.
The first things I had been able to get for myself had been cigarette
pictures, cigarette posters, and cigarette albums. I had not had the
spending of the money I earned, so I traded "extra" newspapers for these
treasures. I traded duplicates with the other boys, and circulating, as
I did, all about town, I had greater opportunities for trading and
acquiring.
It was not long before I had complete every series issued by every
cigarette manufacturer--such as the Great Race Horses, Parisian Beauties,
Women of All Nations, Flags of All Nations, Noted Actors, Champion Prize
Fighters, etc. And each series I had three different ways: in the card
from the cigarette package, in the poster, and in the album.
Then I began to accumulate duplicate sets, duplicate albums. I traded
for other things that boys valued and which they usually bought with
money given them by their parents. Naturally, they did not have the keen
sense of values that I had, who was never given money to buy anything. I
traded for postage-stamps, for minerals, for curios, for birds' eggs, for
marbles (I had a more magnificent collection of agates than I have ever
seen any boy possess--and the nucleus of the collection was a handful
worth at least three dollars, which I had kept as security for twenty
cents I loaned to a messenger-boy who was sent to reform school before he
could redeem them).
I'd trade anything and everything for anything else, and turn it over in
a dozen more trades until it was transmuted into something that was worth
something. I was famous as a trader. I was notorious as a miser. I
could even make a junkman weep when I had dealings with him. Other boys
called me in to sell for them their collections of bottles, rags, old
iron, grain, and gunny-sacks, and five-gallon oil-cans--aye, and gave me
a commission for doing it.
And this was the thrifty, close-fisted boy, accustomed to slave at a
machine for ten cents an hour, who sat on the stringer-piece and
considered the matter of beer at five cents a glass and gone in a moment
with nothing to show for it. I was now with men I admired. I was proud
to be with them. Had all my pinching and saving brought me the
equivalent of one of the many thrills which had been mine since I came
among the oyster pirates? Then what was worth while--money or thrills?
These men had no horror of squandering a nickel, or many nickels. They
were magnificently careless of money, calling up eight men to drink
whisky at ten cents a glass, as French Frank had done. Why, Nelson had
just spent sixty cents on beer for the two of us.
Which was it to be? I was aware that I was making a grave decision. I
was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance.
Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it
as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my
comradeship with these men whose peculiar quirks made them like strong
drink.
I retraced my steps up the wharf to the Last Chance, where Nelson still
stood outside. "Come on and have a beer," I invited. Again we stood at
the bar and drank and talked, but this time it was I who paid ten cents!
a whole hour of my labour at a machine for a drink of something I didn't
want and which tasted rotten. But it wasn't difficult. I had achieved a
concept. Money no longer counted. It was comradeship that counted.
"Have another?" I said. And we had another, and I paid for it. Nelson,
with the wisdom of the skilled drinker, said to the barkeeper, "Make mine
a small one, Johnny." Johnny nodded and gave him a glass that contained
only a third as much as the glasses we had been drinking. Yet the charge
was the same--five cents.
By this time I was getting nicely jingled, so such extravagance didn't
hurt me much. Besides, I was learning. There was more in this buying of
drinks than mere quantity. I got my finger on it. There was a stage
when the beer didn't count at all, but just the spirit of comradeship of
drinking together. And, ha!--another thing! I, too, could call for small
beers and minimise by two-thirds the detestable freightage with which
comradeship burdened one.
"I had to go aboard to get some money," I remarked casually, as we drank,
in the hope Nelson would take it as an explanation of why I had let him
treat six consecutive times.
"Oh, well, you didn't have to do that," he answered. "Johnny'll trust a
fellow like you--won't you, Johnny!"
"Sure," Johnny agreed, with a smile.
"How much you got down against me?" Nelson queried.
Johnny pulled out the book he kept behind the bar, found Nelson's page,
and added up the account of several dollars. At once I became possessed
with a desire to have a page in that book. Almost it seemed the final
badge of manhood.
After a couple more drinks, for which I insisted on paying, Nelson
decided to go. We parted true comradely, and I wandered down the wharf
to the Razzle Dazzle. Spider was just building the fire for supper.
"Where'd you get it?" he grinned up at me through the open companion.
"Oh, I've been with Nelson," I said carelessly, trying to hide my pride.
Then an idea came to me. Here was another one of them. Now that I had
achieved my concept, I might as well practise it thoroughly. "Come on,"
I said, "up to Johnny's and have a drink."
Going up the wharf, we met Clam coming down. Clam was Nelson's partner,
and he was a fine, brave, handsome, moustached man of thirty--everything,
in short, that his nickname did not connote. "Come on," I said, "and
have a drink." He came. As we turned into the Last Chance, there was
Pat, the Queen's brother, coming out.
"What's your hurry?" I greeted him. "We're having a drink. Come on
along." "I've just had one," he demurred. "What of it?--we're having one
now," I retorted. And Pat consented to join us, and I melted my way into
his good graces with a couple of glasses of beer. Oh! I was learning
things that afternoon about John Barleycorn. There was more in him than
the bad taste when you swallowed him. Here, at the absurd cost of ten
cents, a gloomy, grouchy individual, who threatened to become an enemy,
was made into a good friend. He became even genial, his looks were
kindly, and our voices mellowed together as we talked water-front and
oyster-bed gossip.
"Small beer for me, Johnny," I said, when the others had ordered
schooners. Yes, and I said it like the accustomed drinker, carelessly,
casually, as a sort of spontaneous thought that had just occurred to me.
Looking back, I am confident that the only one there who guessed I was a
tyro at bar-drinking was Johnny Heinhold.
"Where'd he get it?" I overheard Spider confidentially ask Johnny.
"Oh, he's been sousin' here with Nelson all afternoon," was Johnny's
answer.
I never let on that I'd heard, but PROUD? Aye, even the barkeeper was
giving me a recommendation as a man. "HE'S BEEN SOUSIN' HERE WITH NELSON
ALL AFTERNOON." Magic words! The accolade delivered by a barkeeper with a
beer glass!
I remembered that French Frank had treated Johnny the day I bought the
Razzle Dazzle. The glasses were filled and we were ready to drink.
"Have something yourself, Johnny," I said, with an air of having intended
to say it all the time, but of having been a trifle remiss because of the
interesting conversation I had been holding with Clam and Pat.
Johnny looked at me with quick sharpness, divining, I am positive, the
strides I was making in my education, and poured himself whisky from his
private bottle. This hit me for a moment on my thrifty side. He had
taken a ten-cent drink when the rest of us were drinking five-cent
drinks! But the hurt was only for a moment. I dismissed it as ignoble,
remembered my concept, and did not give myself away.
"You'd better put me down in the book for this," I said, when we had
finished the drink. And I had the satisfaction of seeing a fresh page
devoted to my name and a charge pencilled for a round of drinks amounting
to thirty cents. And I glimpsed, as through a golden haze, a future
wherein that page would be much charged, and crossed off, and charged
again.
I treated a second time around, and then, to my amazement, Johnny
redeemed himself in that matter of the ten-cent drink. He treated us
around from behind the bar, and I decided that he had arithmetically
evened things up handsomely.
"Let's go around to the St. Louis House," Spider suggested when we got
outside. Pat, who had been shovelling coal all day, had gone home, and
Clam had gone upon the Reindeer to cook supper.
So around Spider and I went to the St. Louis House--my first visit--a
huge bar-room, where perhaps fifty men, mostly longshoremen, were
congregated. And there I met Soup Kennedy for the second time, and Bill
Kelley. And Smith, of the Annie, drifted in--he of the belt-buckled
revolvers. And Nelson showed up. And I met others, including the Vigy
brothers, who ran the place, and, chiefest of all, Joe Goose, with the
wicked eyes, the twisted nose, and the flowered vest, who played the
harmonica like a roystering angel and went on the most atrocious tears
that even the Oakland water-front could conceive of and admire.
As I bought drinks--others treated as well--the thought flickered across
my mind that Mammy Jennie wasn't going to be repaid much on her loan out
of that week's earnings of the Razzle Dazzle. "But what of it?" I
thought, or rather, John Barleycorn thought it for me. "You're a man and
you're getting acquainted with men. Mammy Jennie doesn't need the money
as promptly as all that. She isn't starving. You know that. She's got
other money in the bank. Let her wait, and pay her back gradually."
And thus it was I learned another trait of John Barleycorn. He inhibits
morality. Wrong conduct that it is impossible for one to do sober, is
done quite easily when one is not sober. In fact, it is the only thing
one can do, for John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between
one's immediate desires and long-learned morality.
I dismissed my thought of debt to Mammy Jennie and proceeded to get
acquainted at the trifling expense of some trifling money and a jingle
that was growing unpleasant. Who took me on board and put me to bed that
night I do not know, but I imagine it must have been Spider.