Nor have I ever regretted those months of mad devilry I put in with
Nelson. He COULD sail, even if he did frighten every man that sailed
with him. To steer to miss destruction by an inch or an instant was his
joy. To do what everybody else did not dare attempt to do, was his
pride. Never to reef down was his mania, and in all the time I spent
with him, blow high or low, the Reindeer was never reefed. Nor was she
ever dry. We strained her open and sailed her open and sailed her open
continually. And we abandoned the Oakland water-front and went wider
afield for our adventures.
And all this glorious passage in my life was made possible for me by John
Barleycorn. And this is my complaint against John Barleycorn. Here I
was, thirsting for the wild life of adventure, and the only way for me to
win to it was through John Barleycorn's mediation. It was the way of the
men who lived the life. Did I wish to live the life, I must live it the
way they did. It was by virtue of drinking that I gained that
partnership and comradeship with Nelson. Had I drunk only the beer he
paid for, or had I declined to drink at all, I should never have been
selected by him as a partner. He wanted a partner who would meet him on
the social side, as well as the work side of life.
I abandoned myself to the life, and developed the misconception that the
secret of John Barleycorn lay in going on mad drunks, rising through the
successive stages that only an iron constitution could endure to final
stupefaction and swinish unconsciousness. I did not like the taste, so I
drank for the sole purpose of getting drunk, of getting hopelessly,
helplessly drunk. And I, who had saved and scraped, traded like a
Shylock and made junkmen weep; I, who had stood aghast when French Frank,
at a single stroke, spent eighty cents for whisky for eight men, I turned
myself loose with a more lavish disregard for money than any of them.
I remember going ashore one night with Nelson. In my pocket were one
hundred and eighty dollars. It was my intention, first, to buy me some
clothes, after that, some drinks. I needed the clothes. All I possessed
were on me, and they were as follows: a pair of sea-boots that
providentially leaked the water out as fast as it ran in, a pair of
fifty-cent overalls, a forty-cent cotton shirt, and a sou'wester. I had
no hat, so I had to wear the sou'wester, and it will be noted that I have
listed neither underclothes nor socks. I didn't own any.
To reach the stores where clothes could be bought, we had to pass a dozen
saloons. So I bought me the drinks first. I never got to the clothing
stores. In the morning, broke, poisoned, but contented, I came back on
board, and we set sail. I possessed only the clothes I had gone ashore
in, and not a cent remained of the one hundred and eighty dollars. It
might well be deemed impossible, by those who have never tried it, that
in twelve hours a lad can spend all of one hundred and eighty dollars for
drinks. I know otherwise.
And I had no regrets. I was proud. I had shown them I could spend with
the best of them. Amongst strong men I had proved myself strong. I had
clinched again, as I had often clinched, my right to the title of
"Prince." Also, my attitude may be considered, in part, as a reaction
from my childhood's meagreness and my childhood's excessive toil.
Possibly my inchoate thought was: Better to reign among booze-fighters a
prince than to toil twelve hours a day at a machine for ten cents an
hour. There are no purple passages in machine toil. But if the spending
of one hundred and eighty dollars in twelve hours isn't a purple passage,
then I'd like to know what is.
Oh, I skip much of the details of my trafficking with John Barleycorn
during this period, and shall only mention events that will throw light
on John Barleycorn's ways. There were three things that enabled me to
pursue this heavy drinking: first, a magnificent constitution far better
than the average; second, the healthy open-air life on the water; and
third, the fact that I drank irregularly. While out on the water, we
never carried any drink along.
The world was opening up to me. Already I knew several hundred miles of
the water-ways of it, and of the towns and cities and fishing hamlets on
the shores. Came the whisper to range farther. I had not found it yet.
There was more behind. But even this much of the world was too wide for
Nelson. He wearied for his beloved Oakland water-front, and when he
elected to return to it we separated in all friendliness.
I now made the old town of Benicia, on the Carquinez Straits, my
headquarters. In a cluster of fishermen's arks, moored in the tules on
the water-front, dwelt a congenial crowd of drinkers and vagabonds, and I
joined them. I had longer spells ashore, between fooling with salmon
fishing and making raids up and down bay and rivers as a deputy fish
patrolman, and I drank more and learned more about drinking. I held my
own with any one, drink for drink; and often drank more than my share to
show the strength of my manhood. When, on a morning, my unconscious
carcass was disentangled from the nets on the drying-frames, whither I
had stupidly, blindly crawled the night before; and when the water-front
talked it over with many a giggle and laugh and another drink, I was
proud indeed. It was an exploit.
And when I never drew a sober breath, on one stretch, for three solid
weeks, I was certain I had reached the top. Surely, in that direction,
one could go no farther. It was time for me to move on. For always,
drunk or sober, at the back of my consciousness something whispered that
this carousing and bay-adventuring was not all of life. This whisper was
my good fortune. I happened to be so made that I could hear it calling,
always calling, out and away over the world. It was not canniness on my
part. It was curiosity, desire to know, an unrest and a seeking for
things wonderful that I seemed somehow to have glimpsed or guessed. What
was this life for, I demanded, if this were all? No; there was something
more, away and beyond. (And, in relation to my much later development as
a drinker, this whisper, this promise of the things at the back of life,
must be noted, for it was destined to play a dire part in my more recent
wrestlings with John Barleycorn.)
But what gave immediacy to my decision to move on was a trick John
Barleycorn played me--a monstrous, incredible trick that showed abysses
of intoxication hitherto undreamed. At one o'clock in the morning, after
a prodigious drunk, I was tottering aboard a sloop at the end of the
wharf, intending to go to sleep. The tides sweep through Carquinez
Straits as in a mill-race, and the full ebb was on when I stumbled
overboard. There was nobody on the wharf, nobody on the sloop. I was
borne away by the current. I was not startled. I thought the
misadventure delightful. I was a good swimmer, and in my inflamed
condition the contact of the water with my skin soothed me like cool
linen.
And then John Barleycorn played me his maniacal trick. Some maundering
fancy of going out with the tide suddenly obsessed me. I had never been
morbid. Thoughts of suicide had never entered my head. And now that
they entered, I thought it fine, a splendid culminating, a perfect
rounding off of my short but exciting career. I, who had never known
girl's love, nor woman's love, nor the love of children; who had never
played in the wide joy-fields of art, nor climbed the star-cool heights
of philosophy, nor seen with my eyes more than a pin-point's surface of
the gorgeous world; I decided that this was all, that I had seen all,
lived all, been all, that was worth while, and that now was the time to
cease. This was the trick of John Barleycorn, laying me by the heels of
my imagination and in a drug-dream dragging me to death.
Oh, he was convincing. I had really experienced all of life, and it
didn't amount to much. The swinish drunkenness in which I had lived for
months (this was accompanied by the sense of degradation and the old
feeling of conviction of sin) was the last and best, and I could see for
myself what it was worth. There were all the broken-down old bums and
loafers I had bought drinks for. That was what remained of life. Did I
want to become like them? A thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet
sadness over my glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not
seen the weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in
all the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their
sorrows to the barkeeper, who is paid to listen.)
The water was delicious. It was a man's way to die. John Barleycorn
changed the tune he played in my drink-maddened brain. Away with tears
and regret. It was a hero's death, and by the hero's own hand and will.
So I struck up my death-chant and was singing it lustily, when the gurgle
and splash of the current-riffles in my ears reminded me of my more
immediate situation.
Below the town of Benicia, where the Solano wharf projects, the Straits
widen out into what bay-farers call the "Bight of Turner's Shipyard." I
was in the shore-tide that swept under the Solano wharf and on into the
bight. I knew of old the power of the suck which developed when the tide
swung around the end of Dead Man's Island and drove straight for the
wharf. I didn't want to go through those piles. It wouldn't be nice,
and I might lose an hour in the bight on my way out with the tide.
I undressed in the water and struck out with a strong, single-overhand
stroke, crossing the current at right-angles. Nor did I cease until, by
the wharf lights, I knew I was safe to sweep by the end. Then I turned
over and rested. The stroke had been a telling one, and I was a little
time in recovering my breath.
I was elated, for I had succeeded in avoiding the suck. I started to
raise my death-chant again--a purely extemporised farrago of a
drug-crazed youth. "Don't sing--yet," whispered John Barleycorn. "The
Solano runs all night. There are railroad men on the wharf. They will
hear you, and come out in a boat and rescue you, and you don't want to be
rescued." I certainly didn't. What? Be robbed of my hero's death?
Never. And I lay on my back in the starlight, watching the familiar
wharf-lights go by, red and green and white, and bidding sad sentimental
farewell to them, each and all.
When I was well clear, in mid-channel, I sang again. Sometimes I swam a
few strokes, but in the main I contented myself with floating and
dreaming long drunken dreams. Before daylight, the chill of the water
and the passage of the hours had sobered me sufficiently to make me
wonder what portion of the Straits I was in, and also to wonder if the
turn of the tide wouldn't catch me and take me back ere I had drifted out
into San Pablo Bay.
Next I discovered that I was very weary and very cold, and quite sober,
and that I didn't in the least want to be drowned. I could make out the
Selby Smelter on the Contra Costa shore and the Mare Island lighthouse.
I started to swim for the Solano shore, but was too weak and chilled, and
made so little headway, and at the cost of such painful effort, that I
gave it up and contented myself with floating, now and then giving a
stroke to keep my balance in the tide-rips which were increasing their
commotion on the surface of the water. And I knew fear. I was sober
now, and I didn't want to die. I discovered scores of reasons for
living. And the more reasons I discovered, the more liable it seemed
that I was going to drown anyway.
Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a parlous
condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where the swift ebbs
from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were fighting with each other,
and where, at that particular moment, they were fighting the flood tide
setting up against them from San Pablo Bay. A stiff breeze had sprung
up, and the crisp little waves were persistently lapping into my mouth,
and I was beginning to swallow salt water. With my swimmer's knowledge,
I knew the end was near. And then the boat came--a Greek fisherman
running in for Vallejo; and again I had been saved from John Barleycorn
by my constitution and physical vigour.
And, in passing, let me note that this maniacal trick John Barleycorn
played me is nothing uncommon. An absolute statistic of the percentage
of suicides due to John Barleycorn would be appalling. In my case,
healthy, normal, young, full of the joy of life, the suggestion to kill
myself was unusual; but it must be taken into account that it came on the
heels of a long carouse, when my nerves and brain were fearfully
poisoned, and that the dramatic, romantic side of my imagination,
drink-maddened to lunacy, was delighted with the suggestion. And yet,
the older, more morbid drinkers, more jaded with life and more
disillusioned, who kill themselves, do so usually after a long debauch,
when their nerves and brains are thoroughly poison-soaked.