 CHAPTER 19 When I was with people who did not drink, I never thought of drinking. Lewis did not drink. Neither he nor I could afford it, but more significant than that, we had no desire to drink. We were healthy, normal, non-alcoholic. Had we been alcoholic, we would have drunk whether or not we could have afforded it. Each night, after the day's work, washed up, clothes changed, and supper eaten, we met on the street corner or in the little candy store. But the warm fall weather passed, and on bitter nights of frost or damp nights of drizzle, the street corner was not a comfortable meeting place. And the candy store was unheated. Nita, or whoever waited on the counter, between waitings, lurked in a back living room that was heated. We were not admitted to this room, and in the store it was as cold as out of doors. Lewis and I debated the situation. There was only one solution. The saloon, the congregating place of men, the place where men hobnobbed with John barley corn. Well do I remember the damp and draughty evening, shivering without overcoats, because we could not afford them, that Lewis and I started out to select our saloon. Saloons are always warm and comfortable. Now Lewis and I did not go into this saloon because we wanted a drink. Yet we knew that saloons were not charitable institutions. A man could not make a lounging place of a saloon without occasionally buying something over the bar. Our dimes and nickels were few. We could ill spare any of them when they were so potent in paying car fare for one's self and a girl. We never paid car fare when by ourselves, being content to walk. So in this saloon we desired to make the most of our expenditure. We called for a deck of cards, and sat down at a table and played yuker for an hour, in which time Lewis treated once, and I treated once, to beer, the cheapest drink, ten cents for two, prodigal, how we grudged it. We studied the men who came into the place. They seemed all middle-aged and elderly workmen, most of them German, who flocked by themselves in old acquaintance groups, and with whom we could have only the slightest contacts. We voted against that saloon and went out cast down with the knowledge that we had lost an evening and wanted twenty cents for beer that we didn't want. We made several more tries on succeeding nights, and at last found our way into the national, a saloon on Tenth and Franklin. Here was a more congenial crowd. Here Lewis met a fellow or two he knew, and here I met fellows I had gone to school with, when a little lad in knee pants. We talked of old days and of what had become of this fellow and what that fellow was doing now, and of course we talked it over drinks. They treated and we drank. Then, according to the code of drinking, we had to treat. It hurt, for it meant forty to fifty cents a clatter. We felt quite enlivened when the short evening was over, but at the same time we were bankrupt. Our weak spending money was gone. We decided that that was the saloon for us, and we agreed to be more circumspect there after in our drink buying. Also we had to economize for the rest of the week. We didn't even have car fare. We were compelled to break an engagement with two girls from West Oakland, with whom we were attempting to be in love. They were to meet us uptown the next evening, and we hadn't the car fare necessary to take them home. Like many others financially embarrassed, we had to disappear for a time from the gay world, at least until Saturday night payday. So Louis and I rendezvoused in a livery stable, and with coats buttoned and chattering teeth played yuker and casino until the time of our exile was over. Then we returned to the national saloon and spent no more than we could decently avoid spending for the comfort and warmth. Sometimes we had mishaps, as when one got stuck twice in succession in a five-handed game of Sancho Pedro for the drinks. Such a disaster meant anywhere between twenty-five to eighty cents, just according to how many of the players ordered ten-cent drinks. But we could temporarily escape the evil effects of such disaster by virtue of an account we ran behind the bar. Of course, this only set back the day of reckoning and seduced us into spending more than we could have spent on a cash basis. When I left Oakland suddenly for the adventure path the following spring, I well remember I owed that saloonkeeper one dollar and seventy cents. Long after when I returned, he was gone. I still owe him that dollar and seventy cents, and if he should chance to read these lines I want him to know that I'll pay on demand. The foregoing incident of the national saloon I have given in order again to show the lure, or draw, or compulsion toward John Barley Corn in society as at present organized with saloons on all the corners. Louis and I were too healthy youths. We didn't want to drink. We couldn't afford to drink, and yet we were driven by the circumstance of cold and rainy weather to seek refuge in a saloon where we had to spend part of our pitiful dole for drink. It will be urged by some critics that we might have gone to the YMCA, to night school and to the social circles and homes of young people. The only reply is that we didn't. That is the irrefragable fact. We didn't. And today, at this moment, there are hundreds of thousands of boys, like Louis and me, doing just what Louis and I did with John Barley Corn. Warm and comfortable, beckoning and welcoming, tucking their arms in his and beginning to teach them his mellow ways. Chapter 20 The jute mills failed of its agreement to increase my pay to a dollar in the quarter a day, and I, a freeborn American boy whose direct ancestors had fought in all the wars from the old pre-revolutionary Indian wars down, exercised my sovereign right of free contract by quitting the job. I was still resolved to settle down and I looked about me. One thing was clear. Unskilled labor didn't pay. I must learn a trade and I decided on electricity. The need for electricians was constantly growing. But how to become an electrician? I hadn't the money to go to a technical school or university. Besides, I didn't think much of schools. I was a practical man in a practical world. Also, I still believed in the old myths which were the heritage of the American boy when I was a boy. A canal boy could become a president. Any boy who took employment with any firm could, by thrift, energy and sobriety, learn the business and rise from position to position until he was taken in as a junior partner. After that the senior partnership was only a matter of time. Very often, so ran the myth, the boy, by reason of his steadiness and application, married his employer's daughter. By this time I had been encouraged to such faith in myself in the matter of girls that I was quite certain I would marry my employer's daughter. There wasn't a doubt of it. All the little boys in the myths did it as soon as they were old enough. So I bade farewell forever to the adventure path and went out to the power plant of one of our Oakland Street railways. I saw the superintendent himself in a private office so fine that it almost stunned me. But I talked straight up. I told him I wanted to become a practical electrician. That I was unafraid of work, that I was used to hard work, and that all he had to do was look at me to see I was fit and strong. I told him that I wanted to begin right at the bottom and work up, that I wanted to devote my life to this one occupation and this one employment. The superintendent beamed as he listened. He told me that I was the right stuff for success, and that he believed in encouraging American youth that wanted to rise. Why, employers were always on the lookout for young fellows like me, and alas, they found them all too rarely. My ambition was fine and worthy, and he would see to it that I got my chance. And as I listened with swelling heart, I wondered if it was his daughter I was to marry. Before you can go out on the road and learn the more complicated and higher details of the profession, he said, you will, of course, have to work in the car house with the men who install and repair the motors. By this time I was sure that it was his daughter, and I was wondering how much stock he might own in the company. But, he said, as you yourself so plainly see, you couldn't expect to begin as a helper to the car house electricians. That will come when you have worked up to it. You will really begin at the bottom. In the car house your first employment will be sweeping up, washing the windows, keeping things clean. And after you have shown yourself satisfactory at that, then you may become a helper to the car house electricians. I didn't see how sweeping and scrubbing a building was any preparation for the trade of electricians, but I did know that in the books all the boys started with the most menial tasks, and by making good ultimately one to the ownership of the whole concern. When shall I come to work? I asked, eager to launch on this dazzling career. But, said the superintendent, as you and I have already agreed, you must begin at the bottom. Not immediately can you in any capacity enter the car house. Before that you must pass through the engine room as an oiler. My heart went down slightly, and for the moment as I saw the road lengthen between his daughter and me, then it rose again. I would be a better electrician with knowledge of steam engines. As an oiler in the great engine room, I was confident that few things concerning steam would escape me. Heavens! My career shone more dazzling than ever. When shall I come to work? I asked gratefully. But, said the superintendent, you could not expect to enter immediately into the engine room. There must be preparation for that. And through the fire room, of course. Come, you see the matter clearly I know, and you will see that even the mere handling of coal it is a scientific matter and not to be sneered at. Do you know that we weigh every pound of coal we burn? Thus we learn the value of the coal we buy. We know to a tee the last penny of cost of every item of production, and we learn which firemen are the most wasteful, which firemen out of stupidity or carelessness get the least out of the coal they fire. The superintendent beamed again. You see how very important the little matter of coal is, and by as much as you learn of this little matter you will become that much better a workman. More valuable to us, more valuable to yourself. Now are you prepared to begin? Any time, I said valiantly, the sooner the better. Very well, he answered, you will come to moral mourning at seven o'clock. I was taken out and shown my duties. Also I was told the terms of my employment. A ten hour day, every day in the month including Sundays and holidays, with one day off each month, with a salary of thirty dollars a month. It wasn't exciting. Years before at the cannery I had earned a dollar a day for a ten hour day. I consoled myself with the thought that the reason my earning capacity had not increased with my years and strength was because I had remained an unskilled laborer. But it was different now. I was beginning to work for skill, for a trade, for career and fortune, and the superintendent's daughter. And I was beginning in the right way, right at the beginning. That was the thing. I was passing coal to the fireman, who shoveled it into the furnaces, where its energy was transformed into steam, which in the engine room was transformed into the electricity with which the electricians worked. This passing coal was purely the very beginning, unless the superintendent should take it into his head to send me to work in the mines from which the coal came in order to get a completeer understanding of the genesis of electricity for street railways. Work! I, who had worked with men, found that I didn't know the first thing about real work. A ten hour day. I had to pass coal for the day and night shifts. And despite working through the noon hour, I never finished my task before eight at night. I was working a twelve or thirteen hour day, and I wasn't being paid overtime as in the cannery. I might as well give the secret away right here. I was doing the work of two men. Before me, one mature, able-bodied laborer had done the day shift, and another equally mature, able-bodied laborer had done the night shift. They had received forty dollars a month each. The superintendent, bent on an economical administration, had persuaded me to do the work of both men for thirty dollars a month. I thought he was making an electrician of me. In truth and fact, he was saving fifty dollars a month operating expenses to the company. But I didn't know I was displacing two men. Nobody told me. On the contrary, the superintendent warned everybody not to tell me. How valiantly I went at it that first day. I worked at top speed, filling the iron wheel-barrel with coal, running it on the scales and weighing the load, then trundling it into the fire room and dumping it on the plates before the fires. Work! I did more than the two men whom I had displaced. They had merely wheeled in the coal and dumped it on the plates. But while I did this for the day coal, the night coal I had to pile against the wall of the fire room. Now the fire room was small. It had been planned for a night coal-passer. So I had to pile the night coal higher and higher, buttressing up the heap with stout planks. Toward the top of the heap, I had to handle the coal a second time, tossing it up with a shovel. I dripped with sweat. But I never ceased from my stride, though I could feel exhaustion coming on. By ten o'clock in the morning, so much of my body's energy had I consumed, I felt hungry and snatched a thick double slice of bread and butter from my dinner-pail. This I devoured, standing, grime'd with coal dust, my knees trembling under me. By eleven o'clock in this fashion I had consumed my whole lunch. But what of it? I realized that it would enable me to continue working through the noon hour. And I worked all the afternoon. Darkness came on, and I worked under the electric lights. The day fireman went off, and the night fireman came on. I plugged away. At half past eight, famished, tottering, I washed up, changed my clothes, and dragged my weary body to the car. It was three miles to where I lived, and I had received a pass with the stipulation that I could sit down as long as there were no paying passengers in need of a seat. As I sank into a corner outside seat, I prayed that no passenger might require my seat. But the car filled up, and halfway in, a woman came on board, and there was no seat for her. I started to get up, and to my astonishment found that I could not. With the chill wind blowing on me, my spent body had stiffened into the seat. It took me the rest of the run-in to unkink my complaining joints and muscles, and get into a standing position on the lower ramp. And when the car stopped at my corner, I nearly fell to the ground when I stepped off. I hobbled two blocks to the house, and limped into the kitchen. While my mother started to cook, I plunged into bread and butter. But before my appetite was appeased, or the steak fried, I was sound asleep. In vain my mother strove to shake me awake enough to eat the meat. Failing in this, with the assistance of my father, she managed to get me to my room, where I collapsed dead asleep on the bed. They undressed me and covered me up. In the morning came the agony of being awakened. I was terribly sore, and worst of all, my wrists were swelling. But I made up for my lost supper, eating an enormous breakfast, and when I hobbled to catch my car, I carried a lunch twice as big as the one the day before. Work! Let any youth just turned eighteen, try to out shovel two man-grown coal shovelers. Work! Long before midday, I had eaten the last scrap of my huge lunch. But I was resolved to show them what a husky young fellow determined to rise could do. The worst of it was that my wrists were swelling and going back on me. There are few who do not know the pain of walking on a sprained ankle. Then imagine the pain of shoveling coal and trundling a loaded wheelbarrow with two sprained wrists. Work! More than once I sank down on the coal, where no one could see me, and cried with rage, and mortification, and exhaustion, and despair. That second day was my hardest, and all that enabled me to survive it and get in the last of the night coal at the end of thirteen hours was the day fireman, who bound both my wrists with broad leather straps. So tightly were they buckled, that they were like slightly flexible plaster casts. They took the stresses and pressures which hitherto had been borne by my wrists, and they were so tight that there was no room for the inflammation to rise in the sprains. And in this fashion I continued to learn to be an electrician. Night after night I limped home, fell asleep before I could eat my supper, and was helped into bed and undressed. Morning after morning, always with hunger lunches in my dinner pail, I limped out of the house on my way to work. I no longer read my library books. I made no dates with the girls. I was a proper work beast. I worked, and ate, and slept, while my mind slept all the time. The whole thing was a nightmare. I worked every day, including Sunday, and I looked far ahead to my one day off at the end of a month, resolved to lie a bit all that day, and just sleep and rest up. The strangest part of this experience was that I never took a drink nor thought of taking a drink. Yet I knew that men under hard pressure almost invariably drank. I had seen them do it, and in the past had often done it myself. But so sheerly non-alcoholic was I, that it never entered my mind that a drink might be good for me. I instanced this to show how entirely lacking from my makeup was any predisposition toward alcohol. And the point of this instance is that later on, after more years had passed, contact with John Barleycorn at last did induce in me the alcoholic desire. I had often noticed the day fireman staring at me in a curious way. At last one day he spoke. He began by swearing me to secrecy. He had been warned by the superintendent not to tell me, and in telling me he was risking his job. He told me of the day coal-passer and the night coal-passer and of the wages they had received. I was doing for thirty dollars a month what they had received eighty dollars for doing. He would have told me sooner, the fireman said, had he not been so certain that I would break down under the work and quit. As it was, I was killing myself in all to no good purpose. I was merely cheapening the price of labor, he argued, and keeping two men out of a job. Being an American boy and a proud American boy, I did not immediately quit. This was foolish of me, I know. But I resolved to continue the work long enough to prove to the superintendent that I could do it without breaking down. Then I would quit, and he would realize what a fine young fellow he had lost. All of which I faithfully and foolishly did. I worked on until the time came when I got in the last of the night coal by six o'clock. Then I quit the job of learning electricity by doing more than two men's work for a boy's wages, went home, and proceeded to sleep the clock round. Fortunately, I had not stayed by the job long enough to injure myself, though I was compelled to wear straps on my wrists for a year afterward. But the effect of this work orgy in which I had indulged was to sicken me with work. I just wouldn't work. The thought of work was repulsive. I didn't care if I never settled down. Learning a trade could go hang. It was a whole lot better to roister and frolic over the world in the way I had previously done. So I headed out on the adventure path again, starting to tramp east by beating my way on the railroads. End of chapter 20. Chapters 21 and 22 of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 21. But behold! As soon as I went out on the adventure path, I met John Barleycorn again. I moved through a world of strangers, and the act of drinking together made one acquainted with men and opened the way to adventures. It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of algae stiffs in a hangout. Yes, and it might be in a prohibition state, such as Iowa was in 1894 when I wandered up the main street of Des Moines and was variously invited by strangers into various blind pigs. I remember drinking in barbershops, plumbing establishments, and furniture stores. Always it was John Barleycorn. Even a tramp in those Halcyon days could get most frequently drunk. I remember inside the prison at Buffalo how some of us got magnificently jingled, and how, on the streets of Buffalo after our release, another jingle was financed with pennies begged on the main drag. I had no call for alcohol, but when I was with those who drank, I drank with them. I insisted on traveling or loafing with the livest, keenest men, and it was just these live keen ones that did most of the drinking. They were the more comradely men, the more venturous, the more individual. Perhaps it was too much temperament that made them turn from the common place and hum drum to find relief in lying and fantastic surities of John Barleycorn. Be that as it may, the men I liked best, desired most to be with, were invariably to be found in John Barleycorn's company. In the course of my tramping over the United States, I achieved a new concept. As a tramp, I was behind the scenes of society, I and down in the cellar. I could watch the machinery work. I saw the wheels of the social machine go around, and I learned that the dignity of manual labor wasn't what I had been told it was by the teachers, preachers, and politicians. The men without trades were helpless cattle. If one learned a trade, he was compelled to belong to a union in order to work at his trade, and his union was compelled to bully and slug the employer's unions in order to hold up wages or hold down hours. The employer's unions likewise bullied and slugged. I couldn't see any dignity at all, and when a workman got old or had an accident, he was thrown into the scrap heap like any worn-out machine. I saw too many of this sort who were making anything but dignified ends of life. So my new concept was that manual labor was undignified and that it didn't pay. No trade for me was my decision, and no superintendent's daughters. And no criminality I also decided. That would be almost as disastrous as to be a laborer. Brains paid, not brawn, and I resolved never again to offer my muscles for sale in the brawn market. Brain and brain only would I sell. I returned to California with the firm intention of developing my brain. This meant school education. I had gone through the grammar school long ago, so I entered the Oakland High School. To pay my way, I worked as a janitor. My sister helped me too. And I was not above mowing anybody's lawn or taking up and beating carpets when I had half a day to spare. I was working to get away from work, and I buckled down to it with a grim realization of the paradox. Boy and girl love was left behind, and along with it Hady and Lewis Shattuck and the early evening strolls. I hadn't the time. I joined the Henry Clay Debating Society. I was received into the homes of some of the members where I met nice girls whose skirts reached the ground. I dallyed with little home clubs wherein we discussed poetry and art and the nuances of grammar. I joined the Socialist Local where we studied and orated political economy, philosophy, and politics. I kept half a dozen membership cards working in the free library and did an immense amount of collateral reading. And for a year and a half on end I never took a drink. Nor thought of taking a drink. I hadn't the time, and I certainly did not have the inclination. Between my janitor work, my studies, and innocent amusements such as chess, I hadn't a moment to spare. I was discovering a new world, and such was the passion of my exploration that the old world of John Barleycorn held no inducements for me. Come to think of it, I did enter a saloon. I went to see Johnny Heinhold in the last chance, and I went to borrow money. And right here is another phase of John Barleycorn. Saloonkeepers are notoriously good fellows. On an average they perform vastly greater generosity than do businessmen. When I simply had to have ten dollars desperate with no place to turn, I went to see Johnny Heinhold. Several years had passed since I had been in his place or spent a cent across his bar. And when I went to borrow the ten dollars, I didn't buy a drink either. And Johnny Heinhold let me have the ten dollars without security or interest. More than once, in the brief days of my struggle for an education, I went to see Johnny Heinhold to borrow money. When I entered the university, I borrowed forty dollars from him, without interest, without security, without buying a drink. And yet, and here is the point, the custom and the code, in the days of my prosperity, after the lapse of years, I have gone out of my way by many a long block to spend across Johnny Heinhold's bar deferred interest on the various loans. Not that Johnny Heinhold asked me to do it, or expected me to do it. I did it, as I have said, in obedience to the code I have learned, along with all the other things connected with John Barley-Corn. In distress, when a man has no other place to turn, when he hasn't the slightest bit of security which a savage-hearted pawnbroker would consider, he can go to some saloon keeper he knows. Gratitude is inherently human. When the man so helped has money again, depend upon it that a portion will be spent across the bar of the saloon keeper who befriended him. Why I recollect the early days of my writing career, when the small sums of money I earned from the magazines came with tragic irregularity, while at the same time I was staggering along with a growing family, a wife, children, a mother, a nephew, and my mammy Jenny and her old husband fallen on evil days. There were two places at which I could borrow money, a barbershop and a saloon. The barber charged me five percent per month in advance. That is to say, when I borrowed one hundred dollars, he handed me ninety-five, the other five dollars he retained as advance interest for the first month, and on the second month I paid him five dollars more, and continued to do so each month until I made a ten strike with the editors and lifted the loan. The other place to which I came in trouble was the saloon. The saloon keeper I had known by sight for a couple of years. I had never spent my money in his saloon, and even when I borrowed from him I didn't spend any money. Yet never did he refuse me any sum I asked of him. Unfortunately, before I became prosperous, he moved away to another city, and to this day I regret that he is gone. It is the code I have learned, the right thing to do and the right thing I do right now, did I know where he is, would be to drop in on occasion and spend a few dollars across his bar for old sakes sake and gratitude. This is not to exalt saloon keepers. I have written it to exalt the power of John Barleycorn, and to illustrate one more of the myriad ways by which a man is brought in contact with John Barleycorn until in the end he finds he cannot get along without him. But to return to the run of my narrative, away from the adventure path, up to my ears in study, every moment occupied, I lived oblivious to John Barleycorn's existence. Nobody about me drank. If any had drunk, and had they offered it to me, I surely would have drunk. As it was, when I had spare moments I spent them playing chess, or going with nice girls who were themselves students, or in riding a bicycle whenever I was fortunate enough to have it out of the pawnbroker's possession. What I am insisting upon all the time is this. In me was not the slightest trace of alcoholic desire, and this despite the long and severe apprenticeship I had served under John Barleycorn. I had come back from the other side of life to be delighted with this Arcadian simplicity of student use and student maidens. Also I had found my way into the realm of the mind, and I was intellectually intoxicated. Alas, as I was to learn at a later period, intellectual intoxication too has its catson jammer. Chapter 22. 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 shortcut. I borrowed the money and paid to enter the senior class of a cramming joint of 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 that 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 White Hall boat and set sail. Out of the Oakland estuary I drifted on the last of the 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 carquinas straits off the Selby smelter were smoking too, as I picked up ahead and left the stern the old landmarks. I had first learned with Nelson in the unreafed reindeer. Benicia showed before me. I opened the bite of Turner's shipyard, rounded the Solano Wharf, and surged along a breast of the patch of tools and the clustering fisherman's arcs, 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 favored, the wind was fair and howling, glorious sailing for a sailor. Bullhead and army points showed ahead, marking the entrance to Susan Bay, which I knew was smoking. And yet, when I laid eyes on those fishing arcs lying in the waterfront tools without debate, on the instance 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 Barley Corn's power. It was not a body need for alcohol. It was a mental desire. My overworked 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 comrade ship, 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 bullhead, and in the smoking white of Susan 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 along the arcs. Charlie Lagrant 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. Charlie seized the can, and started for Jorgensen's saloon across the railroad tracks. That meant beer. I wanted whiskey, 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 swill. I ran the liquor down, and joyed as the maggots in my brain. And clam came in. Nelson's partner before me, handsome as ever, but more reckless, half insane, burning himself out with whiskey. 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 whiskey. 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 went 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 book's nineteen hours a day for three solid months, Charlie Lagrant 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 Charlie 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 fierce wind, kicked up a stiff, upstanding sea. Sousin Bay was white with wrath and sealum, but a salmon boat can sail, and I knew how to sail a salmon boat. So I drove her into it, and threw it, and across, and maundered loud, 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 Barley-Corn 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 banks to be a pirate. Set songs as Black Lulu, flying cloud, treat my daughter kindily, the Boston burglar, come all you rambling, gambling men. I wished 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 mighty floods together, I took the New York cut-off, skimmed across the smooth, landlocked 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 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 soap, 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. End of Chapter 22 Chapters 23, 24, and 25 of John Barleycorn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 23 My cruise and the salmon boat lasted a week, and I returned ready to enter the university. During the week's cruise I did not drink again. To accomplish this I was compelled to avoid looking up old friends, for as ever the adventure path was beset with John Barleycorn. I had wanted to drink that first day, and in the days that followed I did not want it. My tired brain had recuperated. I had no moral struples in the matter. I was not ashamed nor sorry because of that first day's orgy at Benicia, and I thought no more about it, returning gladly to my books and studies. Long years were to pass ere I looked back upon that day and realized its significance. At the time and for a long time afterward I was to think of it only as a frolic, but still later in the slough of brain fag and intellectual weariness I was to remember and know the craving for the anodyne that resides in alcohol. In the meantime after this one relapse at Benicia I went on with my abstemiousness, primarily because I didn't want to drink. And next I was abstemious because my way led among books and students where no drinking was. Had I been out on the adventure path I should as a matter of course have been drinking. For that is the pity of the adventure path, which is one of John Barleycorn's favorite stamping grounds. I completed the first half of my freshman year and in January of 1897 took up my courses for the second half. But the pressure from lack of money plus a conviction that the university was not giving me all that I wanted in the time I could spare for it forced me to leave. I was not very disappointed. For two years I had studied and in those two years what was far more valuable I had done a prodigious amount of reading. Then, too, my grammar had improved. It is true I had not yet learned that I must say it is I, but I no longer was guilty of a double negative in writing though still prone to that error in excited speech. I decided immediately to embark on my career. I had four preferences. First music, second poetry, third the writing of philosophic, economic and political essays, and fourth and last and least fiction writing. I resolutely cut out music as impossible, settled down in my bedroom, and tackled my second, third, and fourth choices simultaneously. Heavens, how I wrote! Never was there a creative fever such as mine from which the patient escaped fatal results. The way I worked was enough to soften my brain and send me to a mad house. I wrote, I wrote everything, ponderous essays, scientific and sociological short stories, humorous verse, verse of all sorts from trealettes and sonnets to blank verse tragedy and elephantine epics in Spensarian stanzas. On occasion I composed steadily, day after day, for fifteen hours a day, at times I forgot to eat, or refused to tear myself away from my passionate outpouring in order to eat. And then there was the matter of type writing. My brother-in-law owned a machine which he used in the daytime. In the night I was free to use it. That machine was a wonder. I could weep now as I recollect my wrestling with it. It must have been a first model in the year one of the typewriter error. Its alphabet was all capitals. It was informed with an evil spirit. It obeyed no known laws of physics and overthrew the hoary axiom that like things perform to like things produce like results. I'll swear that machine never did the same thing in the same way twice. Again and again it demonstrated that unlike actions produce like results. How my back used to ache with it. Prior to that experience my back had been good for every violent strain put upon it in a none too gentle career. But that typewriter proved to me that I had a pipe stem for a back. Also it made me dull my shoulders. They ached as with rheumatism after every bout. The keys of that machine had to be hit so hard that to one outside the house it sounded like distant thunder or someone breaking up the furniture. I had to hit the keys so hard that I strained my first fingers to the elbows while the ends of my fingers were blisters burst and blistered again. Had it been my machine I'd have operated it with a carpenter's hammer. The worst of it was that I was actually typing my manuscripts at the same time I was trying to master that machine. It was a feat of physical endurance and a brainstorm combined to type a thousand words and I was composing thousands of words every day which just had to be typed for the waiting editors. Oh between the writing and the typewriting I was well a weary. I had brain and nerve fag and body fag as well. And yet the thought of drink never suggested itself. I was living too high to stand in need of an anodyne. All my waking hours except those with that infernal typewriter were spent in a creative heaven. And along with this I had no desire for drink because I still believed in many things in the love of all men and women in the matter of man and women love in fatherhood in human justice in art in the whole host of fond illusions that keep the world turning round. But the waiting editors elected to keep on waiting. My manuscripts made amazing round trip records between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It might have been the weirdness of the typewriting that prevented the editors from accepting at least one little offering of mine. I don't know and goodness knows the stuff I wrote was as weird as its typing. I sold my hardbought school books for ridiculous sums to second hand bookmen. I borrowed small sums of money wherever I could and suffered my old father to feed me with the meager returns of his failing strength. It didn't last long only a few weeks when I had to surrender and go to work. Yet I was unaware of any need for the drink anodyne. I was not disappointed. My career was retarded, that was all. Perhaps I did need further preparation. I had learned enough from the books to realize that I had only touched the hem of knowledge's garment. I still lived on the heights. My waking hours and most of the hours I should have used for sleep were spent with the books. Chapter 24 Out in the country at the Belmont academy, I went to work in a small, perfectly appointed steam laundry. Another fellow in myself did all the work from sorting and washing to ironing the white shirts, collars and cuffs, and the fancy starch of the wives of the professors. We work like tigers, especially as summer came on and the academy boys took to the wearing of duck trousers. It consumes a dreadful lot of time to iron one pair of duck trousers. And there were so many pairs of them. We sweated our way through long, sizzling weeks at a task that was never done. And many a night, while the students snored in bed, my partner and I'll toiled on under the electric light at steam, mangle, or ironing board. The hours were long, the work was arduous, despite the fact that we became past masters in the art of eliminating waste motion. And I was receiving thirty dollars a month and board, a slight increase over my cold shoveling and cannery days, at least to the extent of board, which cost my employer little, we ate in the kitchen, but which was to me the equivalent of twenty dollars a month. My robust restraint of added years, my increased skill, and all I had learned from the books, were responsible for this increase of twenty dollars. Judging by my rate of development, I might hope before I died to be a night watchman for sixty dollars a month, or a policeman actually receiving a hundred dollars with pickings. So relentlessly did my partner and I spring into our work throughout the week, that by Saturday night we were frazzled wrecks. I found myself in the old, familiar work-beast condition, toiling longer hours than the horses toiled, thinking scarcely more frequent thoughts than horses think. The books were closed to me. I had brought a trunkful to the laundry, but found myself unable to read them. I fell asleep the moment I tried to read, and if I did manage to keep my eyes open for several pages, I could not remember the contents of these pages. I gave over attempts on heavy study, such as jurisprudence, political economy, and biology, and tried lighter stuff, such as history. I fell asleep. I tried literature, and fell asleep. And finally, when I fell asleep over lively novels, I gave up. I never succeeded in reading one book in all the time I spent in the laundry. And when Saturday night came, and the week's work was over until Monday morning, I knew only one desire besides the desire to sleep, and that was to get drunk. This was the second time in my life that I had heard the unmistakable call of John Barleycorn. The first time it had been because of brain fag. But I had no overworked brain now. On the contrary, all I knew was the dull numbness of a brain that was not worked at all. That was the trouble. My brain had become so alert and eager, so quickened by the wonder of the new world the books had discovered to it, that it now suffered all the misery of stagnancy and inaction. And I, the long-time intimate of John Barleycorn, knew just what he promised me. Maggots of fancy, dreams of power, forgetfulness, anything and everything save whirling washers, revolving mangles, humming centrifugal ringers, and fancy starch and interminable processions of duck trousers moving in steam under my flying iron. And that's it. John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and failure, to weariness and exhaustion. He is the easy way out. And he is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things steam what they are not, and vastly fairer than what they are. But it must not be forgotten that John Barleycorn is protein. As well as to weakness and exhaustion, does he appeal to too much strength, to superabundant vitality, to the ah-wee of idleness. He can tuck in his arm the arm of any man in any mood. He can throw the net of his lure over all men. He exchanges new lamps for old, the spangles of illusion for the drabs of reality, and in the end cheats all who traffic with him. I didn't get drunk, however, for the simple reason that it was a mile and a half to the nearest saloon. And this, in turn, was because the call to get drunk was not very loud in my ears. Had it been loud, I would have traveled ten times the distance to win to the saloon. On the other hand, had the saloon been just around the corner, I should have got drunk. As it was, I would sprawl out in the shade on my one day of rest and dally with the Sunday papers. But I was too weary even for their froth. The comic supplement might bring a pallid smile to my face, and then I would fall asleep. Although I did not yield to John Barley-Corn while working in the laundry, a certain definite result was produced. I had heard the call, felt the gnaw of desire, yearned for the anodyne. I was being prepared for the stronger desire of later years. And the point is that this development of desire was entirely in my brain. My body did not cry out for alcohol. As always, alcohol was repulsive to my body. When I was bodily weary from shoveling coal, the thought of taking a drink had never flickered into my consciousness. When I was brain-wearyed, after taking the entrance examinations to the university, I promptly got drunk. At the laundry, I was suffering physical exhaustion again, and physical exhaustion that was not nearly so profound as that of the coal shoveling. But there was a difference. When I went coal shoveling, my mind had not yet awakened. Between that time and the laundry, my mind had found the kingdom of the mind. While shoveling coal, my mind was somnolent. While tolling in the laundry, my mind informed and eager to do and be was crucified. And whether I yielded to drink as at benesia, or whether I refrained as at the laundry, in my brain the seeds of desire for alcohol were germinating. Chapter 25 After the laundry, my sister and her husband grubstaked me into the Klondike. It was the first gold rush into that region, the early fall rush of 1897. I was 21 years old and in splendid physical condition. I remember at the end of the 28-mile portage across Chilkut from Daya Beach to Lake Lindermen, I was packing up with the Indians and outpacking many an Indian. The last pack into Lindermen was three miles. I back tripped it four times a day, and on each forward trip carried 150 pounds. This means that over the worst trails I daily traveled 24 miles, 12 of which were under a burden of 150 pounds. Yes, I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure path again in quest of fortune. And, of course, on the adventure path I met John Barleycorn. Here were their chesty men again, rovers and adventurers, and while they didn't mind a grub famine, whiskey they could not do without. Whiskey went over the trail while the flower lay cashed and untouched by the trailside. As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and disgracefully when with other men. In my personal medicine chest was a quart of whiskey. I never drew the quart till six months afterward, in a lonely camp where, without anesthetics, a doctor was compelled to operate on a man. The doctor and the patient emptied my bottle between them and then proceeded to the operation. Back in California a year later, recovering from scurvy, I found that my father was dead and that I was the head and the sole breadwinner of a household. When I state that I had passed coal on a steamship from Bering Sea to British Columbia and traveled in the steerage from there to San Francisco, it will be understood that I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy. Times were hard. Work of any sort was difficult to get, and work of any sort was what I had to take, for I was still an unskilled laborer. I had no thought of career. That was over and done with. I had to find food for two mouths besides my own and keep a roof over our heads. Yes, and buy a winter suit, my one suit being decidedly summery. I had to get some sort of work immediately. After that, when I had caught my breath, I might think about my future. Unskilled labor is the first to feel the slackness of hard times, and I had no trades save those of sailor and laundryman. With my new responsibilities I didn't care to go to sea, and I failed to find a job at laundering. I failed to find a job at anything. I had my name down in five employment bureau. I advertised in three newspapers. I sought out the few friends I knew who might be able to get me work, but they were either uninterested or unable to find anything for me. The situation was desperate. I pawned my watch, my bicycle, and a macintosh of which my father had been very proud and which he had left to me. It was and is my sole legacy in this world. It had cost fifteen dollars, and the pawnbroker let me have two dollars on it. And, oh yes, a waterfront comrade of earlier years drifted along one day with a dress suit wrapped in newspapers. He could give no adequate explanation of how he had come to possess it, nor did I press for an explanation. I wanted the suit myself. No, not to wear. I traded him a lot of rubbish, which, being unponible, was useless to me. He peddled the rubbish for several dollars while I pledged the dress suit with my pawnbroker for five dollars. And for all I knew the pawnbroker still has the suit. I had never intended to redeem it. But I couldn't get any work. Yet I was a bargain in the labor market. I was twenty-two years old, weighed one hundred and sixty-five pounds stripped, every pound of which was excellent for toil, and the last traces of my scurvy were vanishing before a treatment of potatoes chewed raw. I tackled every opening for employment. I tried to become a studio model, but there were too many fine-bodied young fellows out of jobs. I answered advertisements of elderly invalids in need of companions. And I almost became a sewing machine agent on commission without salary. But poor people don't buy sewing machines in hard times, so I was forced to forgo that employment. Of course, it must be remembered that along with such frivolous occupations I was trying to get work as wop, lumper, and roast about. But winter was coming on, and the surplus labor army was pouring into the cities. Also I, who had romped along carelessly through the countries of the world and the kingdom of the mind, was not a member of any union. I sought odd jobs. I worked days and half days at anything I could get. I mowed lawns, trimmed hedges, took up carpets, beat them, and laid them again. Further I took the civil service examinations for mail-carrier and passed first. But alas, there was no vacancy, and I must wait. And while I waited, and in between the odd jobs I managed to procure, I started to earn ten dollars by writing a newspaper account of a voyage I had made, in an open boat down the Yukon of nineteen hundred miles in nineteen days. I didn't know the first thing about the newspaper game, but I was confident I'd get ten dollars for my article. But I didn't. The first San Francisco newspaper, to which I mailed it, never acknowledged receipt of the manuscript, but held on to it. The longer it held on to it, the more certain I was that the thing was accepted. But here is the funny thing. Some are born to fortune, and some have fortune thrust upon them. But in my case I was clubbed into fortune, and bitter necessity wielded the club. I had long since abandoned all thought of writing as a career. My honest intention in writing that article was to earn ten dollars. And that was the limit of my intention. It would help to tide me along until I got steady employment. Had a vacancy occurred in the post office at that time, I should have jumped at it. But the vacancy did not occur, nor did a steady job. And I employed the time between odd jobs with writing a twenty-one thousand word serial for the youth's companion. I turned it out and typed it in seven days. I fancy that was what was the matter with it, for it came back. It took some time for it to go and come, and in the meantime I tried my hand at short stories. I sold one to the Overland Monthly for five dollars. The Black Cat gave me forty dollars for another. The Overland Monthly offered me seven dollars and a half, pay on publication for all the stories I should deliver. I got my bicycle, my watch, and my father's Macintosh out of pawn and rented a typewriter. Also I paid up the bills I owed to the several groceries that allowed me a small credit. I recall the Portuguese grocery man who never permitted my bill to go beyond four dollars. Hopkins and other grocer could not be budged beyond five dollars. And just then came the call from the post office to go to work. It placed me in a most trying predicament. The sixty-five dollars I could earn regularly every month was a terrible temptation. I couldn't decide what to do. And I'll never be able to forgive the postmaster of Oakland. I answered the call and I talked to him like a man. I frankly told him the situation. It looked as if I might win out at writing. The chance was good but not certain. Now if he would pass me by and select the next man on the eligible list and give me a call at the next vacancy, but he shut me off with, then you don't want the position? But I do, I protested. Don't you see if you will pass me over this time? If you want it, you will take it, he said coldly. Happily for me the cursed brutality of the man made me angry. Very well, I said, I won't take it.