at the "Pig Palace" (1916) a few days before his death
from John Barleycorn: An Alcoholic memoir (1913)
I outlined my life to Charmian, and expounded the make-up of my constitution. I was no hereditary alcoholic. I had been born
with no organic, chemical predisposition toward alcohol. In this matter I was normal in my generation. Alcohol was an acquired taste. It had been painfully acquired. Alcohol had been a dreadfully repugnant thing--more nauseous than any physic. Even now I did not like the taste of it. I drank it only for its
"kick." And from the age of five to that of twenty-five I had not learned to care for its kick. Twenty years of unwilling apprenticeship had been required to make my system rebelliously tolerant of alcohol, to make me, in the heart and the deeps of me, desirous of alcohol.
I sketched my first contacts with alcohol, told of my first intoxications and revulsions, and pointed out always the one thing
that in the end had won me over--namely, the accessibility of alcohol. Not only had it always been accessible, but every
interest of my developing life had drawn me to it. A newsboy on the streets, a sailor, a miner, a wanderer in far lands, always
where men came together to exchange ideas, to laugh and boast and dare, to relax, to forget the dull toil of tiresome nights and
days, always they came together over alcohol. The saloon was the place of congregation. Men gathered to it as primitive men gathered about the fire of the squatting place or the fire at the mouth of the cave.
