avy drinking, drinking did not beget the desire.
Drinking was the way of the life I led, the way of the men with whom I
lived. While away on my cruises on the bay, I took no drink along; and
while out on the bay the thought of the desirableness of a drink never
crossed my mind. It was not until I tied the Razzle Dazzle up to the
wharf and got ashore in the congregating places of men, where drink
flowed, that the buying of drinks for other men, and the accepting of
drinks from other men, devolved upon me as a social duty and a manhood
rite.

Then, too, there were the times, lying at the city wharf or across the
estuary on the sand-spit, when the Queen, and her sister, and her brother
Pat, and Mrs. Hadley came aboard. It was my boat, I was host, and I
could only dispense hospitality in the terms of their understanding of
it. So I would rush Spider, or Irish, or Scotty, or whoever was my crew,
with the can for beer and the demijohn for red wine. And again, lying at
the wharf disposing of my oysters, there were dusky twilights when big
policemen and plain-clothes men stole on board. And because we lived in
the shadow of the police, we opened oysters and fed them to them with
squirts of pepper sauce, and rushed the growler or got stronger stuff in
bottles.

Drink as I would, I couldn't come to like John Barleycorn. I valued him
extremely well for his associations, but not for the taste of him. All
the time I was striving to be a man amongst men, and all the time I
nursed secret and shameful desires for candy. But I would have died
before I'd let anybody guess it. I used to indulge in lonely debauches,
on nights when I knew my crew was going to sleep ashore. I would go up
to the Free Library, exchange my books, buy a quarter's worth of all
sorts of candy that chewed and lasted, sneak aboard the Razzle Dazzle,
lock myself in the cabin, go to bed, and lie there long hours of bliss,
reading and chewing candy. And those were the only times I felt that I
got my real money's worth. Dollars and dollars, across the bar, couldn't
buy the satisfaction that twenty-five cents did in a candy store.

As my drinking grew heavier, I began to note more and more that it was in
the drinking bouts the purple passages occurred. Drunks were always
memorable. At such times things happened. Men like Joe Goose dated
existence from drunk to drunk. The longshoremen all looked forward to
their Saturday night drunk. We of the oyster b