And still there arose in me no desire for alcohol, no chemical demand.
In years and years of heavy drinking, drinking did not beget the desire.
Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way of the men with whom I
lived. While away on my cruises on the bay, I took no drink along; and
while out on the bay the thought of the desirableness of a drink never
crossed my mind. It was not until I tied the Razzle Dazzle up to the
wharf and got ashore in the congregating places of men, where drink
flowed, that the buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of
drinks from other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood
rite.
Then, too, there were the times, lying at the city wharf or across the
estuary on the sand-spit, when the Queen, and her sister, and her brother
Pat, and Mrs. Hadley came aboard. It was my boat, I was host, and I
could only dispense hospitality in the terms of their understanding of
it. So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or Scotty, or whoever was my crew,
with the can for beer and the demijohn for red wine. And again, lying at
the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big
policemen and plain-clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in
the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with
squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in
bottles.
Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn. I valued him
extremely well for his associations, but not for the taste of him. All
the time I was striving to be a man amongst men, and all the time I
nursed secret and shameful desires for candy. But I would have died
before I'd let anybody guess it. I used to indulge in lonely debauches,
on nights when I knew my crew was going to sleep ashore. I would go up
to the Free Library, exchange my books, buy a quarter's worth of all
sorts of candy that chewed and lasted, sneak aboard the Razzle Dazzle,
lock myself in the cabin, go to bed, and lie there long hours of bliss,
reading and chewing candy. And those were the only times I felt that I
got my real money's worth. Dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't
buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store.
As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in
the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. Drunks were always
memorable. At such times things happened. Men like Joe Goose dated
existence from drunk to drunk. The longshoremen all looked forward to
their Saturday night drunk. We of the oyster boats waited until we had
disposed of our cargoes before we got really started, though a scattering
of drinks and a meeting of a chance friend sometimes precipitated an
accidental drunk.
In ways, the accidental drunks were the best. Stranger and more exciting
things happened at such times. As, for instance, the Sunday when Nelson
and French Frank and Captain Spink stole the stolen salmon boat from
Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek. Changes had taken place in the personnel
of the oyster boats. Nelson had got into a fight with Bill Kelley on the
Annie and was carrying a bullet-hole through his left hand. Also, having
quarrelled with Clam and broken partnership, Nelson had sailed the
Reindeer, his arm in a sling, with a crew of two deep-water sailors, and
he had sailed so madly as to frighten them ashore. Such was the tale of
his recklessness they spread, that no one on the water-front would go out
with Nelson. So the Reindeer, crewless, lay across the estuary at the
sandspit. Beside her lay the Razzle Dazzle with a burned mainsail and
Scotty and me on board. Whisky Bob had fallen out with French Frank and
gone on a raid "up river" with Nicky the Greek.
The result of this raid was a brand-new Columbia River salmon boat,
stolen from an Italian fisherman. We oyster pirates were all visited by
the searching Italian, and we were convinced, from what we knew of their
movements, that Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek were the guilty parties.
But where was the salmon boat? Hundreds of Greek and Italian fishermen,
up river and down bay, had searched every slough and tule patch for it.
When the owner despairingly offered a reward of fifty dollars, our
interest increased and the mystery deepened.
One Sunday morning old Captain Spink paid me a visit. The conversation
was confidential. He had just been fishing in his skiff in the old
Alameda ferry slip. As the tide went down, he had noticed a rope tied to
a pile under water and leading downward. In vain he had tried to heave
up what was fast on the other end. Farther along, to another pile, was a
similar rope, leading downward and unheavable. Without doubt, it was the
missing salmon boat. If we restored it to its rightful owner there was
fifty dollars in it for us. But I had queer ethical notions about honour
amongst thieves, and declined to have anything to do with the affair.
But French Frank had quarrelled with Whisky Bob, and Nelson was also an
enemy. (Poor Whisky Bob!--without viciousness, good-natured, generous,
born weak, raised poorly, with an irresistible chemical demand for
alcohol, still prosecuting his vocation of bay pirate, his body was
picked up, not long afterward, beside a dock where it had sunk full of
gunshot wounds.) Within an hour after I had rejected Captain Spink's
proposal, I saw him sail down the estuary on board the Reindeer with
Nelson. Also, French Frank went by on his schooner.
It was not long ere they sailed back up the estuary, curiously side by
side. As they headed in for the sandspit, the submerged salmon boat
could be seen, gunwales awash and held up from sinking by ropes fast to
the schooner and the sloop. The tide was half out, and they sailed
squarely in on the sand, grounding in a row, with the salmon boat in the
middle.
Immediately Hans, one of French Frank's sailors, was into a skiff and
pulling rapidly for the north shore. The big demijohn in the
stern-sheets told his errand. They couldn't wait a moment to celebrate
the fifty dollars they had so easily earned. It is the way of the
devotees of John Barleycorn. When good fortune comes, they drink. When
they have no fortune, they drink to the hope of good fortune. If fortune
be ill, they drink to forget it. If they meet a friend, they drink. If
they quarrel with a friend and lose him, they drink. If their
love-making be crowned with success, they are so happy they needs must
drink. If they be jilted, they drink for the contrary reason. And if
they haven't anything to do at all, why, they take a drink, secure in the
knowledge that when they have taken a sufficient number of drinks the
maggots will start crawling in their brains and they will have their
hands full with things to do. When they are sober they want to drink;
and when they have drunk they want to drink more.
Of course, as fellow comrades, Scotty and I were called in for the
drinking. We helped to make a hole in that fifty dollars not yet
received. The afternoon, from just an ordinary common summer Sunday
afternoon, became a gorgeous, purple afternoon. We all talked and sang
and ranted and bragged, and ever French Frank and Nelson sent more drinks
around. We lay in full sight of the Oakland water-front, and the noise
of our revels attracted friends. Skiff after skiff crossed the estuary
and hauled up on the sandspit, while Hans' work was cut out for him--ever
to row back and forth for more supplies of booze.
Then Whisky Bob and Nicky the Greek arrived, sober, indignant, outraged
in that their fellow pirates had raised their plant. French Frank, aided
by John Barleycorn, orated hypocritically about virtue and honesty, and,
despite his fifty years, got Whisky Bob out on the sand and proceeded to
lick him. When Nicky the Greek jumped in with a short-handled shovel to
Whisky Bob's assistance, short work was made of him by Hans. And of
course, when the bleeding remnants of Bob and Nicky were sent packing in
their skiff, the event must needs be celebrated in further carousal.
By this time, our visitors being numerous, we were a large crowd
compounded of many nationalities and diverse temperaments, all aroused by
John Barleycorn, all restraints cast off. Old quarrels revived, ancient
hates flared up. Fight was in the air. And whenever a longshoreman
remembered something against a scow-schooner sailor, or vice versa, or an
oyster pirate remembered or was remembered, a fist shot out and another
fight was on. And every fight was made up in more rounds of drinks,
wherein the combatants, aided and abetted by the rest of us, embraced
each other and pledged undying friendship.
And, of all times, Soup Kennedy selected this time to come and retrieve
an old shirt of his, left aboard the Reindeer from the trip he sailed
with Clam. He had espoused Clam's side of the quarrel with Nelson.
Also, he had been drinking in the St. Louis House, so that it was John
Barleycorn who led him to the sandspit in quest of his old shirt. Few
words started the fray. He locked with Nelson in the cockpit of the
Reindeer, and in the mix-up barely escaped being brained by an iron bar
wielded by irate French Frank--irate because a two-handed man had
attacked a one-handed man. (If the Reindeer still floats, the dent of
the iron bar remains in the hard-wood rail of her cockpit.)
But Nelson pulled his bandaged hand, bullet-perforated, out of its sling,
and, held by us, wept and roared his Berserker belief that he could lick
Soup Kennedy one-handed. And we let them loose on the sand. Once, when
it looked as if Nelson were getting the worst of it, French Frank and
John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into the fight. Scotty protested and
reached for French Frank, who whirled upon him and fell on top of him in
a pummelling clinch after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In
the course of separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst
the rest of us. These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we
separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup Kennedy
fought on. Occasionally we returned to them and gave advice, such as,
when they lay exhausted in the sand, unable to strike a blow, "Throw sand
in his eyes." And they threw sand in each other's eyes, recuperated, and
fought on to successive exhaustions.
And now, of all this that is squalid, and ridiculous, and bestial, try to
think what it meant to me, a youth not yet sixteen, burning with the
spirit of adventure, fancy-filled with tales of buccaneers and
sea-rovers, sacks of cities and conflicts of armed men, and
imagination-maddened by the stuff I had drunk. It was life raw and
naked, wild and free--the only life of that sort which my birth in time
and space permitted me to attain. And more than that. It carried a
promise. It was the beginning. From the sandspit the way led out
through the Golden Gate to the vastness of adventure of all the world,
where battles would be fought, not for old shirts and over stolen salmon
boats, but for high purposes and romantic ends.
And because I told Scotty what I thought of his letting an old man like
French Frank get away with him, we, too, brawled and added to the
festivity of the sandspit. And Scotty threw up his job as crew, and
departed in the night with a pair of blankets belonging to me. During
the night, while the oyster pirates lay stupefied in their bunks, the
schooner and the Reindeer floated on the high water and swung about to
their anchors. The salmon boat, still filled with rocks and water,
rested on the bottom.
In the morning, early, I heard wild cries from the Reindeer, and tumbled
out in the chill grey to see a spectacle that made the water-front laugh
for days. The beautiful salmon boat lay on the hard sand, squashed flat
as a pancake, while on it were perched French Frank's schooner and the
Reindeer. Unfortunately two of the Reindeer's planks had been crushed in
by the stout oak stem of the salmon boat. The rising tide had flowed
through the hole, and just awakened Nelson by getting into his bunk with
him. I lent a hand, and we pumped the Reindeer out and repaired the
damage.
Then Nelson cooked breakfast, and while we ate we considered the
situation. He was broke. So was I. The fifty dollars reward would
never be paid for that pitiful mess of splinters on the sand beneath us.
He had a wounded hand and no crew. I had a burned main sail and no crew.
"What d'ye say, you and me?" Nelson queried. "I'll go you," was my
answer. And thus I became partners with "Young Scratch" Nelson, the
wildest, maddest of them all. We borrowed the money for an outfit of
grub from Johnny Heinhold, filled our water-barrels, and sailed away that
day for the oyster-beds.