“Go back to the hotel in the evening, tell the clerk you are called out of town and ask for your money back. He will usually give it to you.”
I bade Sanc good night and good-by, resolving to have something good located for him on his return from Salt Chunk Mary’s.
CHAPTER XII
During Sanc’s absence I worked industriously, bettering his instructions by renting two rooms a day and making the duplicate keys. In most instances the clerks returned my money when I told them I was called away and could not occupy the rooms. My days were well filled with work, renting two rooms, making two keys, trying to get my room money refunded and visiting the safety box twice a day, sometimes following a depositor out and around the streets to see what he did with his money.
My evenings were my own and I spent them on the Barbary Coast or the water front. With an old suit on and a dollar or two in silver I loved to go to the sailors’ boarding houses where seafaring men, brawny, brown, and tattooed, speaking all languages, ate, drank, fought, sang their strange sea songs, and told tales of hardship and adventure on all the seas. Here I learned to beware the crafty shanghaier with his knockout drops, lying in wait for strong young fellows from the country. The cowardly and unscrupulous thieves who later used chloral so indiscriminately and murderously learned its stupefying effects from the busy shanghaier on San Francisco’s water front.
The wine dumps, where wine bums or “winos” hung out, interested me. Long, dark, dirty rooms with rows of rickety tables and a long bar behind which were barrels of the deadly “foot juice” or “red ink,” as the winos called it. Sometimes the dump was equipped with a small lunch counter in the back where the winos could buy for a nickel a big plate of something that looked like stew, and a hunk of stale bread. The stew was served from a big pot that was always boiling. Several times a day the porter, who was also cook and waiter and wino as well, threw a box of mixed vegetables, discarded from the commission houses, unwashed and unpeeled, into the pot. Then followed a box of bones, pieces of tallow, scraps of meat trimmings, odds and ends of meat covered with sawdust from the floor of the market near by.
The patrons of the wine dumps were recruited from every walk of life. Scholars, quoting Greek and Latin poets, lawyers dissecting Blackstone, writers with greasy rolls of manuscript fraternized with broken bums from the road, sailors too old for the sea, and scrapped mechanics from the factories—all under the lash of alcohol. They sat in groups at the tables drinking the wine, alcohol in its cheapest and deadliest form, from every conceivable kind of vessel: tin cans, pewter mugs, beer glasses, steins, and cracked soup bowls—anything unbreakable that the boss could buy from a junkman. They talked volubly. They seldom laughed and never fought—too far gone for laughing or fighting. When they could drink no more or buy no more, they staggered or crawled to a bare space on the floor in the back of the room where they lay on their backs in a row with their heads to the wall, each with his hat over his hideous, bloated, purple face. The porter-cook-wino watched the sleepers carefully. When he thought they had “slept it off” enough to stand up, he roughly kicked them to their feet and herded them out into the streets to beg, borrow, or steal enough small silver for another bout. Too often they failed to respond to his kicks; he would lift the battered hat, take one look at the purple-blue face, and ring for the morgue wagon.
This pitiful crew, gathered from the four corners of the earth and from every stratum of society, whipped beyond resistance by that mysterious and irresistible craving for alcohol, drank themselves purple in the wine dumps and died on the floors or under the city sidewalks. The wine dumps are gone; can any man regret their passing? And so are the winos gone. In their places have appeared the Jamaica ginger fiend, the canned heat and wood alcohol drinker. It is difficult to study and classify them; their lives are too short.
The most disreputable wine dump in the city was in Clay Street, below Kearny, and I never failed to visit it when in the neighborhood. I had no more than stepped into the place one night when a wino at the door shouted, “Here comes the wagon,” and dashed out wildly. Some of the soberest ran out the back and disappeared. I started to the front door, but the cops were coming in. I was the first one they got, and as the cop threw me into the wagon, in the middle of my explanation, he said: “Oh, tell the judge about it, I’m no court. I’m a hundred-dollar-a-month cop, and it serves me right for being one if I get lousy throwing all you wine bums in and out of the wagon.” He seemed discouraged.
I had got calloused about getting locked up and didn’t worry, knowing they couldn’t do much to me. But going over in the wagon my mind turned to the burglary of the week before. I felt uncomfortable and thought of my room and was thankful that it was “clean,” and of the safety box and the keys I had made, and every other crooked transaction in my short life of outlawry. “No danger,” I thought as the wagon rattled over the blocks, “if I cover myself up. My name is William Brown, I am nineteen years old. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho. My parents died when I was fourteen. I have supported myself since, selling papers, washing dishes, and working on farms. I came to this city this morning and am going to get a job. I went into that place out of curiosity.”