And then came the city of Oakland,and on the shelves of that free library I discovered all the great world beyond the skyline.Here were thousands of books as good as my four wonder-books,and some were even better.Libraries were not concerned with children in those days,and I had strange adventures.I remember,in the catalogue,being impressed by the title,"The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle."I filled an application blank and the librarian handed me the collected and entirely unexpurgated works of Smollett in one huge volume.I read everything,but principally history and adventure,and all the old travels and voyages.Iread mornings,afternoons,and nights.I read in bed,I read at table,I read as I walked to and from school,and I read at recess while the other boys were playing.I began to get the "jerks."To everybody I replied:"Go away.You make me nervous."And so,at ten,I was out on the streets,a newsboy.I had no time to read.I was busy getting exercise and learning how to fight,busy learning forwardness,and brass and bluff.I had an imagination and a curiosity about all things that made me plastic.
Not least among the things I was curious about was the saloon.
And I was in and out of many a one.I remember,in those days,on the east side of Broadway,between Sixth and Seventh,from corner to corner,there was a solid block of saloons.
In the saloons life was different.Men talked with great voices,laughed great laughs,and there was an atmosphere of greatness.
Here was something more than common every-day where nothing happened.Here life was always very live,and,sometimes,even lurid,when blows were struck,and blood was shed,and big policemen came shouldering in.Great moments,these,for me,my head filled with all the wild and valiant fighting of the gallant adventurers on sea and land.There were no big moments when Itrudged along the street throwing my papers in at doors.But in the saloons,even the sots,stupefied,sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust,were objects of mystery and wonder.
And more,the saloons were right.The city fathers sanctioned them and licensed them.They were not the terrible places I heard boys deem them who lacked my opportunities to know.Terrible they might be,but then that only meant they were terribly wonderful,and it is the terribly wonderful that a boy desires to know.In the same way pirates,and shipwrecks,and battles were terrible;and what healthy boy wouldn't give his immortal soul to participate in such affairs?
Besides,in saloons I saw reporters,editors,lawyers,judges,whose names and faces I knew.They put the seal of social approval on the saloon.They verified my own feeling of fascination in the saloon.They,too,must have found there that something different,that something beyond,which I sensed and groped after.What it was,I did not know;yet there it must be,for there men focused like buzzing flies about a honey pot.I had no sorrows,and the world was very bright,so I could not guess that what these men sought was forgetfulness of jaded toil and stale grief.
Not that I drank at that time.From ten to fifteen I rarely tasted liquor,but I was intimately in contact with drinkers and drinking places.The only reason I did not drink was because Ididn't like the stuff.As the time passed,I worked as boy-helper on an ice-wagon,set up pins in a bowling alley with a saloon attached,and swept out saloons at Sunday picnic grounds.
Big jovial Josie Harper ran a road house at Telegraph Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street.Here for a year I delivered an evening paper,until my route was changed to the water-front and tenderloin of Oakland.The first month,when I collected Josie Harper's bill,she poured me a glass of wine.I was ashamed to refuse,so I drank it.But after that I watched the chance when she wasn't around so as to collect from her barkeeper.
The first day I worked in the bowling alley,the barkeeper,according to custom,called us boys up to have a drink after we had been setting up pins for several hours.The others asked for beer.I said I'd take ginger ale.The boys snickered,and Inoticed the barkeeper favoured me with a strange,searching scrutiny.Nevertheless,he opened a bottle of ginger ale.
Afterward,back in the alleys,in the pauses between games,the boys enlightened me.I had offended the barkeeper.A bottle of ginger ale cost the saloon ever so much more than a glass of steam beer;and it was up to me,if I wanted to hold my job,to drink beer.Besides,beer was food.I could work better on it.There was no food in ginger ale.After that,when I couldn't sneak out of it,I drank beer and wondered what men found in it that was so good.I was always aware that I was missing something.
What I really liked in those days was candy.For five cents Icould buy five "cannon-balls"--big lumps of the most delicious lastingness.I could chew and worry a single one for an hour.
Then there was a Mexican who sold big slabs of brown chewing taffy for five cents each.It required a quarter of a day properly to absorb one of them.And many a day I made my entire lunch off one of those slabs.In truth,I found food there,but not in beer.