My infatuation for the Oakland water-front was quite dead.Ididn't like the looks of it,nor the life.I didn't care for the drinking,nor the vagrancy of it,and I wandered back to the Oakland Free Library and read the books with greater understanding.Then,too,my mother said I had sown my wild oats and it was time I settled down to a regular job.Also,the family needed the money.So I got a job at the jute mills--a ten-hour day at ten cents an hour.Despite my increase in strength and general efficiency,I was receiving no more than when I worked in the cannery several years before.But,then,there was a promise of a rise to a dollar and a quarter a day after a few months.And here,so far as John Barleycorn is concerned,began a period of innocence.I did not know what it was to take a drink from month end to month end.Not yet eighteen years old,healthy and with labour-hardened but unhurt muscles,like any young animal I needed diversion,excitement,something beyond the books and the mechanical toil.
I strayed into Young Men's Christian Associations.The life there was healthful and athletic,but too juvenile.For me it was too late.I was not boy,nor youth,despite my paucity of years.Ihad bucked big with men.I knew mysterious and violent things.Iwas from the other side of life so far as concerned the young men I encountered in the Y.M.C.A.I spoke another language,possessed a sadder and more terrible wisdom.(When I come to think it over,I realise now that I have never had a boyhood.)At any rate,the Y.M.C.A.young men were too juvenile for me,too unsophisticated.
This I would not have minded,could they have met me and helped me mentally.But I had got more out of the books than they.Their meagre physical experiences,plus their meagre intellectual experiences,made a negative sum so vast that it overbalanced their wholesome morality and healthful sports.
In short,I couldn't play with the pupils of a lower grade.All the clean splendid young life that was theirs was denied me--thanks to my earlier tutelage under John Barleycorn.I knew too much too young.And yet,in the good time coming when alcohol is eliminated from the needs and the institutions of men,it will be the Y.M.C.A.and similar unthinkably better and wiser and more virile congregating-places,that will receive the men who now go to saloons to find themselves and one another.In the meantime,we live to-day,here and now,and we discuss to-day,here and now.
I was working ten hours a day in the jute mills.It was hum-drum machine toil.I wanted life.I wanted to realise myself in other ways than at a machine for ten cents an hour.And yet I had had my fill of saloons.I wanted something new.I was growing up.Iwas developing unguessed and troubling potencies and proclivities.
And at this very stage,fortunately,I met Louis Shattuck and we became chums.
Louis Shattuck,without one vicious trait,was a real innocently devilish young fellow,who was quite convinced that he was a sophisticated town boy.And I wasn't a town boy at all.Louis was handsome,and graceful,and filled with love for the girls.
With him it was an exciting and all-absorbing pursuit.I didn't know anything about girls.I had been too busy being a man.This was an entirely new phase of existence which had escaped me.And when I saw Louis say good-bye to me,raise his hat to a girl of his acquaintance,and walk on with her side by side down the sidewalk,I was made excited and envious.I,too,wanted to play this game.
"Well,there's only one thing to do,"said Louis,"and that is,you must get a girl."Which is more difficult than it sounds.Let me show you,at the expense of a slight going aside.Louis did not know girls in their home life.He had the entree to no girl's home.And of course,I,a stranger in this new world,was similarly circumstanced.But,further,Louis and I were unable to go to dancing-schools,or to public dances,which were very good places for getting acquainted.We didn't have the money.He was a blacksmith's apprentice,and was earning but slightly more than I.
We both lived at home and paid our way.When we had done this,and bought our cigarettes,and the inevitable clothes and shoes,there remained to each of us,for personal spending,a sum that varied between seventy cents and a dollar for the week.We whacked this up,shared it,and sometimes loaned all of what was left of it when one of us needed it for some more gorgeous girl-adventure,such as car-fare out to Blair's Park and back--twenty cents,bang,just like that;and ice-cream for two--thirty cents;or tamales in a tamale-parlour,which came cheaper and which for two cost only twenty cents.
I did not mind this money meagreness.The disdain I had learned for money from the oyster pirates had never left me.I didn't care over-weeningly for it for personal gratification;and in my philosophy I completed the circle,finding myself as equable with the lack of a ten-cent piece as I was with the squandering of scores of dollars in calling all men and hangers-on up to the bar to drink with me.
But how to get a girl?There was no girl's home to which Louis could take me and where I might be introduced to girls.I knew none.And Louis'several girls he wanted for himself;and anyway,in the very human nature of boys'and girls'ways,he couldn't turn any of them over to me.He did persuade them to bring girl-friends for me;but I found them weak sisters,pale and ineffectual alongside the choice specimens he had.
