He got a job. For almost two years he looked after me. He was always vigilant, steering me past the snares and pitfalls that are always in the path of a growing boy. This hobo, Tom Casey, who never talked much about himself or his experiences except as a warning illustration of “What not to do,” made me start a bank account and keep it growing. It is to him I owe the fact that I didn’t become a “road kid,” that I never became a hobo. Came a day when he left me. The road was calling him, he explained, although that never seemed to me to be the reason. I never saw Tom Casey again, but from this man I received my first lesson in the guiding and compelling principle of the Good Life. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
I was city-wise by this time, uncontaminated to be sure, thanks to my friend. No longer a “boy rube in the big town,” I found a job quickly enough but I missed Tom. I began to hang around pool rooms and it was inevitable that I soon learned to handle a schooner of beer and an occasional “shot.” Jobs were plentiful. If I didn’t feel right in the morning after a night with the “corner gang” I didn’t go to work. I lost jobs. My bank account dwindled, disappeared entirely. My new barroom friends were little help. I was broke.
It was summer and the park benches, hard and uncomfortable as they were, appealed to me more than the squalid “flops” of the city’s slums. So I slept out a few nights. Young and full of energy, I hunted for work. The war was on and work was easy to get. I became a machine-shop hand, progressing rapidly from drillpress to milling machine to lathe. I could quit a job one day and have a new one the next with more money. Soon I again had a good boardinghouse, clothes and money. But I never started another bank account. “Plenty of time for that,” I thought. My weekends were spent in my conception of “a good time,” finally becoming regular carousals and debauches over Saturday and Sunday. I had the usual experiences of being slipped a “Mickey Finn” and getting slugged and rolled for my money. These had no deterrent effect. I could always get jobs and live comfortably again in a few weeks. Soon, however, I tired of the weary routine of working and drinking. I began to dislike the city. Somehow my boyhood days on the farm didn’t seem so bad at a distance.
No, I didn’t go home, but found work not too far away. I still drank. I soon got restless and took a freight for a Michigan city, arriving there broke late at night. I set out to look for friends. They helped me find work. Slowly, I began to climb the industrial ladder once more and eventually achieved a responsible position as a machine setter in a large plant. I was sitting on top of the world again. The sense of accomplishment I had now told me that I had earned the right to have enjoyable weekends once more. The weekends began to extend to Tuesday and Wednesday until I frequently worked only from Thursday to Saturday with the bottle always in my mind. In a vague sort of way I had set a time to quit drinking but that was at least fifteen years away and “What the hell!” I said to myself. “I’m going to have a good time while I’m young.”
Then I was fired. Piqued, I drank up my last paycheck and when I got sober found another job—then another—and another in quick succession. I was soon back on the park benches. And once more I got a break when everything seemed dark. An old friend volunteered to get me a job driving a bus. He said he would buy me a uniform and give me the hospitality of his home if I would promise to quit drinking. Of course I promised. I had been working about three days when the bus line superintendent called me into his office.
“Young fellow,” he said, “in your application you state that you don’t use alcoholic liquors. Now, we always check a man’s references and three of the firms you have worked for say you’re a highly capable man, but you have the drink habit.”
I looked at him. It was all true, I admitted, but I had been out of work such a long time that I welcomed this job as an opportunity to redeem myself. I told him what I had promised my friend, that I was sincerely doing my best and not drinking a drop. I asked him to give me a chance.
“Somehow I think you are in earnest,” he said. “I believe you mean it. I’ll give you a chance and help you to make good.”
He shook my hand in friendship and encouragement. I strode from his office with high hope. “John Barleycorn will never make a bum out of me again,” I told myself with determination.
For three months I drove my route steadily with never a hitch. My employers were satisfied. I felt pretty good. I was really on the wagon this time, wasn’t I?
Yes indeed, I was on the wagon for good.
I soon repaid my debt to my friend for his stake in me and even saved a little money. The feeling of security increased. It was summer and, hot and tired at the end of the day, I began to stop at a speakeasy on my way home. Detroit beer was good then, almost like old-time pre-Prohibition stuff. “This is the way to do it,” I would say to myself. “Stick to beer. After all, it’s really a food and it sure hits the spot after a trick of wheeling that job around in this man’s town. It’s that hard liquor that gets a man down. Beer for mine.”
Even with all the hard lessons of bitter experience behind me I did not realize that thinking along that line was a definite red light on my road in life—a real danger signal.
The evening glass of beer led, as usual, to the night when I didn’t get away from the bar until midnight. I began to need a bracer in the morning. Beer, I knew from experience, was simply no good as a bracer—all right as a thirst quencher perhaps, but lacking action and authority the next morning. I needed a jolt.
The morning jolt became a habit. Then it got to be several jolts until I was generally pretty well organized when I started to work. Spacing my drinks over the day I managed not to appear drunk, just comfortable as I drove along the crowded thoroughfares of the city. Then came the accident.
On one of the avenues a man darted from between parked cars right in my path. I swung the bus sharply over to keep from hitting him but couldn’t quite make it. He died in the hospital. Passenger and sidewalk witnesses absolved me completely. Even if I had been completely sober I couldn’t have cleared him. The company investigation immediately after the accident showed me blameless but my superiors knew I had been drinking. They fired me—not for the accident—but for drinking on the job.
Well, once more I felt I had enough of city life and found a job on an upstate farm. While there I met a young schoolteacher, fell in love with her and she with me. We were married. Farm work was not very remunerative for a young couple so we went successively to Pontiac, Michigan, and later to an industrial city in Ohio. For economy’s sake we had been living with my wife’s people, but somehow we never seemed to be able to get ahead. I was still drinking but not so much as formerly, or so it seemed to me.
The new location seemed ideal—no acquaintances, no entanglements, no boon companions to entice me. I made up my mind to leave liquor alone and get ahead. But I forgot one boon companion, one who was always at my elbow, one who followed me from city to farm and back to city. I had forgotten about John Barleycorn.
Even so, the good resolutions held for a time—new job, comfortable home and understanding helpmate, they all helped. We had a son and soon came another. We began to make friends and moved in a small social circle of my fellow-workers and their wives and families. Those were still bootleg days. Drinks were always available but nobody seemed to get very drunk. We just had a good time, welcome surcease after a week of toil. Here were none of the rowdy debauches that I had known. I had discovered “social drinking,” how to “drink like a gentleman and hold my liquor.” There is no point in reiterating the recurrence of experience already described. The “social drinking” didn’t hold up. I became the bootlegger’s first morning customer. How I ever managed to hold the job I had now I don’t know. I began to receive the usual warnings from my superiors. They had no effect. I had now come to an ever-deepening realization that I was a drunkard, that there was no help for me.
