Three years was the time required to go through the high school. I grew
impatient. Also, my schooling was becoming financially impossible. At
such rate I could not last out, and I did greatly want to go to the state
university. When I had done a year of high school, I decided to attempt
a short cut. I borrowed the money and paid to enter the senior class of
a "cramming joint" or academy. I was scheduled to graduate right into
the university at the end of four months, thus saving two years.
And how I did cram! I had two years' new work to do in a third of a year.
For five weeks I crammed, until simultaneous quadratic equations and
chemical formulas fairly oozed from my ears. And then the master of the
academy took me aside. He was very sorry, but he was compelled to give
me back my tuition fee and to ask me to leave the school. It wasn't a
matter of scholarship. I stood well in my classes, and did he graduate
me into the university he was confident that in that institution I would
continue to stand well. The trouble was that tongues were gossiping
about my case. What! In four months accomplished two years' work! It
would be a scandal, and the universities were becoming severer in their
treatment of accredited prep schools. He couldn't afford such a scandal,
therefore I must gracefully depart.
I did. And I paid back the borrowed money, and gritted my teeth, and
started to cram by myself. There were three months yet before the
university entrance examinations. Without laboratories, without
coaching, sitting in my bedroom, I proceeded to compress that two years'
work into three months and to keep reviewed on the previous year's work.
Nineteen hours a day I studied. For three months I kept this pace, only
breaking it on several occasions. My body grew weary, my mind grew
weary, but I stayed with it. My eyes grew weary and began to twitch, but
they did not break down. Perhaps, toward the last, I got a bit dotty. I
know that at the time I was confident, I had discovered the formula for
squaring the circle; but I resolutely deferred the working of it out
until after the examinations. Then I would show them.
Came the several days of the examinations, during which time I scarcely
closed my eyes in sleep, devoting every moment to cramming and reviewing.
And when I turned in my last examination paper I was in full possession
of a splendid case of brain-fag. I didn't want to see a book. I didn't
want to think or to lay eyes on anybody who was liable to think.
There was but one prescription for such a condition, and I gave it to
myself--the adventure-path. I didn't wait to learn the result of my
examinations. I stowed a roll of blankets and some cold food into a
borrowed whitehall boat and set sail. Out of the Oakland Estuary I
drifted on the last of an early morning ebb, caught the first of the
flood up bay, and raced along with a spanking breeze. San Pablo Bay was
smoking, and the Carquinez Straits off the Selby Smelter were smoking, as
I picked up ahead and left astern the old landmarks I had first learned
with Nelson in the unreefer Reindeer.
Benicia showed before me. I opened the bight of Turner's Shipyard,
rounded the Solano wharf, and surged along abreast of the patch of tules
and the clustering fishermen's arks where in the old days I had lived and
drunk deep.
And right here something happened to me, the gravity of which I never
dreamed for many a long year to come. I had had no intention of stopping
at Benicia. The tide favoured, the wind was fair and howling--glorious
sailing for a sailor. Bull Head and Army Points showed ahead, marking
the entrance to Suisun Bay which I knew was smoking. And yet, when I
laid eyes on those fishing arks lying in the water-front tules, without
debate, on the instant, I put down my tiller, came in on the sheet, and
headed for the shore. On the instant, out of the profound of my
brain-fag, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to drink. I wanted to get
drunk.
The call was imperative. There was no uncertainty about it. More than
anything else in the world, my frayed and frazzled mind wanted surcease
from weariness in the way it knew surcease would come. And right here is
the point. For the first time in my life I consciously, deliberately,
desired to get drunk. It was a new, a totally different manifestation of
John Barleycorn's power. It was not a body need for alcohol. It was a
mental desire. My over-worked and jaded mind wanted to forget.
And here the point is drawn to its sharpest. Granted my prodigious
brain-fag, nevertheless, had I never drunk in the past, the thought would
never have entered my mind to get drunk now. Beginning with physical
intolerance for alcohol, for years drinking only for the sake of
comradeship and because alcohol was everywhere on the adventure-path, I
had now reached the stage where my brain cried out, not merely for a
drink, but for a drunk. And had I not been so long used to alcohol, my
brain would not have so cried out. I should have sailed on past Bull
Head, and in the smoking white of Suisun Bay, and in the wine of wind
that filled my sail and poured through me, I should have forgotten my
weary brain and rested and refreshed it.
So I sailed in to shore, made all fast, and hurried up among the arks.
Charley Le Grant fell on my neck. His wife, Lizzie, folded me to her
capacious breast. Billy Murphy, and Joe Lloyd, and all the survivors of
the old guard, got around me and their arms around me. Charley seized
the can and started for Jorgensen's saloon across the railroad tracks.
That meant beer. I wanted whisky, so I called after him to bring a flask.
Many times that flask journeyed across the railroad tracks and back.
More old friends of the old free and easy times dropped in, fishermen,
Greeks, and Russians, and French. They took turns in treating, and
treated all around in turn again. They came and went, but I stayed on
and drank with all. I guzzled. I swilled. I ran the liquor down and
joyed as the maggots mounted in my brain.
And Clam came in, Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever, but more
reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whisky. He had just had
a quarrel with his partner on the sloop Gazelle, and knives had been
drawn, and blows struck, and he was bent on maddening the fever of the
memory with more whisky. And while we downed it, we remembered Nelson
and that he had stretched out his great shoulders for the last long sleep
in this very town of Benicia; and we wept over the memory of him, and
remembered only the good things of him, and sent out the flask to be
filled and drank again.
They wanted me to stay over, but through the open door I could see the
brave wind on the water, and my ears were filled with the roar of it.
And while I forgot that I had plunged into the books nineteen hours a day
for three solid months, Charley Le Grant shifted my outfit into a big
Columbia River salmon boat. He added charcoal and a fisherman's brazier,
a coffee pot and frying pan, and the coffee and the meat, and a black
bass fresh from the water that day.
They had to help me down the rickety wharf and into the salmon boat.
Likewise they stretched my boom and sprit until the sail set like a
board. Some feared to set the sprit; but I insisted, and Charley had no
doubts. He knew me of old, and knew that I could sail as long as I could
see. They cast off my painter. I put the tiller up, filled away before
it, and with dizzy eyes checked and steadied the boat on her course and
waved farewell.
The tide had turned, and the fierce ebb, running in the teeth of a
fiercer wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Suisun Bay was white
with wrath and sea-lump. But a salmon boat can sail, and I knew how to
sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and through it, and across,
and maundered aloud and chanted my disdain for all the books and schools.
Cresting seas filled me a foot or so with water, but I laughed at it
sloshing about my feet, and chanted my disdain for the wind and the
water. I hailed myself a master of life, riding on the back of the
unleashed elements, and John Barleycorn rode with me. Amid dissertations
on mathematics and philosophy and spoutings and quotations, I sang all
the old songs learned in the days when I went from the cannery to the
oyster boats to be a pirate--such songs as: "Black Lulu," "Flying Cloud,"
"Treat my Daughter Kind-i-ly," "The Boston Burglar," "Come all you
Rambling, Gambling Men," "I Wisht I was a Little Bird," "Shenandoah," and
"Ranzo, Boys, Ranzo."
Hours afterward, in the fires of sunset, where the Sacramento and the San
Joaquin tumble their muddy floods together, I took the New York Cut-Off,
skimmed across the smooth land-locked water past Black Diamond, on into
the San Joaquin, and on to Antioch, where, somewhat sobered and
magnificently hungry, I laid alongside a big potato sloop that had a
familiar rig. Here were old friends aboard, who fried my black bass in
olive oil. Then, too, there was a meaty fisherman's stew, delicious with
garlic, and crusty Italian bread without butter, and all washed down with
pint mugs of thick and heady claret.
My salmon boat was a-soak, but in the snug cabin of the sloop dry
blankets and a dry bunk were mine; and we lay and smoked and yarned of
old days, while overhead the wind screamed through the rigging and taut
halyards drummed against the mast.