But to return to my narrative.When I turned my back on Benicia,my way led through saloons.I had developed no moral theories against drinking,and I disliked as much as ever the taste of the stuff.But I had grown respectfully suspicious of John Barleycorn.I could not forget that trick he had played on me--on me who did not want to die.So I continued to drink,and to keep a sharp eye on John Barleycorn,resolved to resist all future suggestions of self-destruction.
In strange towns I made immediate acquaintances in the saloons.
When I hoboed,and hadn't the price of a bed,a saloon was the only place that would receive me and give me a chair by the fire.
I could go into a saloon and wash up,brush my clothes,and comb my hair.And saloons were always so damnably convenient.They were everywhere in my western country.
I couldn't go into the dwellings of strangers that way.Their doors were not open to me;no seats were there for me by their fires.Also,churches and preachers I had never known.And from what I didn't know I was not attracted toward them.Besides,there was no glamour about them,no haze of romance,no promise of adventure.They were the sort with whom things never happened.
They lived and remained always in the one place,creatures of order and system,narrow,limited,restrained.They were without greatness,without imagination,without camaraderie.It was the good fellows,easy and genial,daring,and,on occasion,mad,that I wanted to know--the fellows,generous-hearted and -handed,and not rabbit-hearted.
And here is another complaint I bring against John Barleycorn.It is these good fellows that he gets--the fellows with the fire and the go in them,who have bigness,and warmness,and the best of the human weaknesses.And John Barleycorn puts out the fire,and soddens the agility,and,when he does not more immediately kill them or make maniacs of them,he coarsens and grossens them,twists and malforms them out of the original goodness and fineness of their natures.
Oh!--and I speak out of later knowledge--Heaven forefend me from the most of the average run of male humans who are not good fellows,the ones cold of heart and cold of head who don't smoke,drink,or swear,or do much of anything else that is brase,and resentful,and stinging,because in their feeble fibres there has never been the stir and prod of life to well over its boundaries and be devilish and daring.One doesn't meet these in saloons,nor rallying to lost causes,nor flaming on the adventure-paths,nor loving as God's own mad lovers.They are too busy keeping their feet dry,conserving their heart-beats,and making unlovely life-successes of their spirit-mediocrity.
And so I draw the indictment home to John Barleycorn.It is just those,the good fellows,the worth while,the fellows with the weakness of too much strength,too much spirit,too much fire and flame of fine devilishness,that he solicits and ruins.Of course,he ruins weaklings;but with them,the worst we breed,Iam not here concerned.My concern is that it is so much of the best we breed whom John Barleycorn destroys.And the reason why these best are destroyed is because John Barleycorn stands on every highway and byway,accessible,law-protected,saluted by the policeman on the beat,speaking to them,leading them by the hand to the places where the good fellows and daring ones forgather and drink deep.With John Barleycorn out of the way,these daring ones would still be born,and they would do things instead of perishing.
Always I encountered the camaraderie of drink.I might be walking down the track to the water-tank to lie in wait for a passing freight-train,when I would chance upon a bunch of "alki-stiffs."An alki-stiff is a tramp who drinks druggist's alcohol.
Immediately,with greeting and salutation,I am taken into the fellowship.The alcohol,shrewdly blended with water,is handed to me,and soon I am caught up in the revelry,with maggots crawling in my brain and John Barleycorn whispering to me that life is big,and that we are all brave and fine--free spirits sprawling like careless gods upon the turf and telling the two-by-four,cut-and-dried,conventional world to go hang.
