Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  As soon as the California disgorged its passengers, San Francisco’s population had increased by a fifth. And the very horde made Ben and Polly taste their sweet luck. Every man Polly saw seemed underripe or overripe or in any case overwrought, which made her appreciate the sober, faithful, slightly Whiggish Englishman she had—Ben was a llano, as Duff put it. And for Ben, the sight of the same mob of men, all lonely and longing and panting (the true state of males everywhere, but permitted such brazen expression only here), reminded him of his own exceptional good fortune in finding and then refinding Polly. They were both lucky as any miner yelling about a nugget as big as a cannonball.

  Just before they left their room at the St. Francis Hotel to meet Skaggs for a walk through the plaza and an expedition to the beach before dinner, he grabbed her and kissed her on the lips. “You are my great bonanza,” he said, which made her laugh. Perhaps he had been cured of his Whiggishness.

  The largest and liveliest saloon in San Francisco was the El Dorado, a canvas cube so packed with men most of the day and night that its milling crowd extended permanently out into the streets. There were as many men sharing bottles and betting in the mud of Washington and Kearny streets—on the roll of a die, the flip of a coin, the speed of a bug across a puddle, the number of teeth in a randomly chosen stranger’s mouth—as there were inside the tent.

  A new El Dorado, its two stories already framed and half joined, was under construction next door. And on the opposite side of the tent, just down Kearny Street, was another big half-finished saloon and hotel, the Parker House, and next to it another, the Bella Union. Even now, after sundown, dozens of carpenters were cutting and nailing, working by the light of candles and lamps scattered high and low inside all three of the open timber superstructures. The unmuffled roar of a thousand boozy voices in the tent of the El Dorado, punctuated by solos—cries of pleasure or anger, yelps of triumph or defeat at the gaming tables, occasionally even a few bars of some song—was mingled with the racket of fifty saws and hammers.

  Ben and Polly and Skaggs stood on a warehouse dock across Washington Street, surveying the scene.

  “The music of our new American democracy,” Skaggs said, “ugly and beautiful both, unaware that it is either.”

  They had seen but three females tonight—two they recognized from the California gangway, and one of the two women who worked in the El Dorado as card dealers. Polly’s thoughts inevitably turned to one of her former professions. Where, she wondered, are the brothels? Her curiosity made her slightly anxious.

  “And Young America,” Ben added. “I have seen hardly a man older than…well, Skaggs, than you.”

  They watched as one of the oldest and most distinguished-looking fellows politely edged his way to a clearing in the mob, placed his hands on his knees, and vomited, then vomited again, stood upright, nodded politely to his several onlookers, replaced his hat, and walked back to his dice game. The men standing near his puddle of spew took not even one step away.

  Barely half the crowd had buttoned collars, and all of the hats—lumpy felt slouches with enormous brims, glazed leather caps with no brims at all—were those of drovers and butchers. Not that there weren’t fops. One man wore a coonskin with the tail dyed a bright blue, and others had decorative beards—tied into pigtails, braided into pretzels, festooned with feathers. In lieu of cravats, some of the men had big red or orange bandannas wrapped around their necks. A couple wore good coats and waistcoats over red flannel undershirts. Another wore a huge silver necklace. Several of the Mexicans had velvet tunics and baggy trousers that hung so low at the waist that the white tops of their drawers and an inch of their belly flesh showed. Two young men from Ohio whose only Spanish was vamoose and desperado and fiesta were draped in woolen serapes striped blue and pink and yellow. Mexicans chatted and gambled and laughed and argued with Yankees, Peruvians with Frenchmen, Virginians with Polynesians.

  “Jiminy cricket,” came a shout from the left, “I’ll be blowed if it ain’t my old boy Tim Skaggs!” A grinning young man in stiff, dirty jeans and knee-high boots was stomping through the slop up Kearny, obviously drunk. He climbed up to join them on the warehouse dock.

  “Noah,” said the boy as he stuck out his hand, “from back in Illinois?” a little chagrined at Skaggs’s failure to recognize him.

  Noah James was Billy Herndon’s nephew from Springfield, whom Skaggs would see loitering around his uncle’s law office. He occasionally provided bits of unflattering gossip about Lincoln to Skaggs in exchange for drinks of whiskey. When Skaggs had seen him last, before the boy had hired on as a teamster with his neighbor George Donner’s train of emigrants for California, he’d been a fourteen-year-old debauchee in the making.

  The boy’s woozy good humor returned when Skaggs introduced him to the lady and English gentleman as “the celebrated Mr. James, one of the bold young survivors of the celebrated Donner party.” Noah informed them he had “given up prospecting for the wintertime, at least,” since he was now paid a couple of ounces a week by Mr. McCabe, the owner of the El Dorado, simply to “hobnob with the customers.”

  “Why is that?” Polly asked. “Why does he pay you?”

  “Because I survived—proved I’m lucky.” He winked his left eye, but his right one half shut along with it. “And Mr. McCabe says I give gamblers the idea they can be lucky too, so they gamble more.”

  “It is the same reason,” Skaggs said, “prizefighters operate saloons on the Bowery—because Noah is a celebrity. Drunkards (and, for that matter, the muddled in general) are reassured by proximity to the well-known.”

  “A ‘celebrity’?” Noah repeated happily. “A celebrity! Strap my hide and call me Charlie, that’s a new one on me, Tim. You still a scribbler?” Almost no one in California considered “miner” his official occupation, although it was the way nine out of ten earned a living.

  “Mr. Skaggs is an astronomical photographer,” Ben said.

  James, having no idea what that meant, ignored it, and suggested to Skaggs that he would be happy to “introduce you to Kemble.” Edward Kemble was a former New Yorker, he said, now editor and publisher of the Alta California. “He mustered out of Frémont’s army spring before last, around the same time I nicked in here—finally, you know, after my misfortune,” he added with a smirk. “Him and I are the same age, just about.”

  “I think you must be confused, Noah,” Skaggs replied.

  “No, sir—Kemble turned twenty November last, and I’m nineteen now.”

  “And he owns the newspaper?”

  “They call this a country where the youth prospers best.” The boy winked again. “Say, do you rich miners care to buy me dinner? I could eat a damned horse I’m so hungry! I could eat the tail off a rat.”

  They looked at him agape. He seemed oblivious to the fact that his fame derived from having spent Christmas of 1846 and New Year’s of 1847 at a cannibal feast.

  Finally Ben broke the silence. “We have dined already, thank you.” That was a fib. “We are off now to go beachcombing.” He held up his lantern and two small baskets.

  “OK, then, but while you’re in town, if any—hey, damn, there’s McCabe already,” said Noah. He pointed at a man in a striped suit and high hat parting the crowd as he made his way into the glow of the El Dorado. “With the Countess McCready.”

  The countess was on McCabe’s arm. She wore a glossy pleated purple silk dress with a bodice that barely clung to her shoulders. To Polly it looked vulgar—she had never been one for décolletage—but fashionable. Indeed, she wondered if it might be a new 1849 style. She wondered too how the countess had come to be among the dozen white women in San Francisco. And then she learned the answer.

  Noah leaned close to Skaggs, as if he were going to whisper a secret. But instead he confided in a shout. “They say that the Countess McCready’s girls, when they arrive—white girls, French girls—will charge twenty ounces a man. Twenty.” He grinned and shook his head. “I better get on in the crib now or
he’ll dock me.” He jumped off the platform with a loud squish. “I’ll be seeing you, Tim, and miss, and Mr. John Bull, sir.”

  They watched him trudge away, arms flying, mud up to his shins.

  “Nasty little skellum,” said Skaggs. He was enjoying this visit to the city, but at that moment he realized, to his everlasting surprise, that he was not a bit tempted to live in San Francisco. He would be happy to visit regularly, but for now he was through with his urban existence. A life of solitude in his little cabin on the river among the pines and redwoods and deer had become a happy prospect, as long as newspapers and books and the odd aguardiente with a convivial stranger were no more than a few hours’ drive away. He was an astronomer now.

  The sound of the city faded as the three continued their constitutional along the waterfront, crossed California Street, passed a neat bed of mint, and finally stepped onto the sandy shore itself at Yerba Buena Cove, continuing toward the tent neighborhood called Happy Valley. The tide was low. Ben lit the lantern and took out Duff ’s jackknife, and with Skaggs began to examine certain boulders.

  While the men worked and talked, Polly wandered along the beach by herself, staying just a foot or two from the surf ’s edge, looking out at the hundred reflected editions of the moon on the waves. Relieved of Ben’s shaming presence and of any obligation to listen or talk, she surrendered to her uninvited thoughts.

  Twenty ounces. On their very best days at the placers these days, the four of them, working tediously from seven to four, washed out twelve or thirteen ounces, and on most days no more than ten. Polly was never very skilled at multiplication, and like everyone else she had abandoned the habit of converting ounces to their dollar equivalents. But now, gazing over San Francisco Bay in the darkness, she worked out that twenty ounces was worth…three hundred dollars in cash. In New York City, there had been rumors of $20 Gramercy Park strumpets, but the $10 Polly earned in Mercer Street was the top price any woman could ordinarily demand. Three hundred for a fuck!

  And so while Ben and Skaggs carefully scraped and picked at the rocks up the beach, she imagined how such an occupation might be conducted in California. It was only an idle conjecture, she assured herself, just to satisfy her curiosity—“a purely speculative computation,” as Ben called his elaborate penciled sums concerning the new flume he proposed to build at Ashbyville. She figured that $300, one customer each day, would amount to…$2,000 a week, and thus…$8,000 a month. Life in San Francisco was expensive, but one could still live comfortably for a month on $500. Leaving a profit of…$7,500. A very rich man’s annual income for a woman working an hour or two each day for one month each year. Such a woman might live, for instance, in a large house built of redwood, say, on a high hill with a garden overlooking the ocean…down the coast past San Jose, for instance, which was said to be warmer and much drier…and then decamp to the city for that mere one month of unrespectable work each winter. Or she might, if she wished, designate a part of her large income as capital to underwrite a theater in which professional productions of Shakespeare and Molière and Dickens might be mounted in California for the first time, together with premieres by new playwrights such as Mr. Benjamin Knowles of London and Mr. Timothy Skaggs, the New York novelist…

  “Polly?” Ben called. “I believe we are finished.”

  She felt her face and neck flush, and turned to rejoin the men.

  The two baskets were each half filled with a particular species of barnacle. Skaggs delightedly summarized for Polly the science he had learned from Ben’s correspondence with “his scientific pornographer friend”—that barnacles possessed, in relation to their size, the longest penises of any creature on earth, “long enough to extend over six of his adjacent fellows in order to inseminate the distant object of his hermaphroditic affections. And an individual may copulate ten times in a day.”

  Ben held the lantern near the baskets and handed Polly the drawings he had received from England. She peered at each.

  “My God,” Skaggs said as he saw her face in the light, “my little venereal lecture has caused Polly Lucking to blush!”

  “You are mistaken about that, my vain friend,” she replied evenly, and after a minute of scrutinizing the creatures, Polly agreed that, yes, each type seemed to match its respective pen-and-ink depiction. Before they returned to Ashbyville, Ben would pack up the barnacles and ship them to Professor Darwin at Down House in Kent.

  63

  March 11, 1849

  Coloma, California

  THE SACRAMENTO WAS flooded to twice its width of the week before. Spring was arriving.

  After disembarking at the Embarcadero—in SACRAMENTO CITY, as the Sutters’ large new municipal signs grandly declared the empty grid of streets and thirty cabins-to-be—they boarded the new stage line that ran for fifty miles along the Coloma road. Skaggs rode on top of the coach with his telescope all the way into Coloma.

  They found the New York Hotel, and Polly retired directly to the room. To be outdoors on a Sunday in a camp town was, for any woman, to draw a crowd. Ben and Skaggs strolled. They waited for almost an hour at a tiny tent to see, as its sign promised, EXTRA-ORDINARY SPECTACLES FROM PARIS. In the queue they chatted with a German portrait painter who had just arrived in California, and agreed to meet him later, with Polly, for dinner. Inside the tent they paid a French Canadian a pinch of dust to peer inside a wooden chest for one minute at five candlelit photographs mounted on each side of a pentagonal plinth. The pictures were indeed extraordinary. An absolutely naked black woman reclined on a couch, staring dreamily at the camera, legs spread wide, one hand wedged lazily behind her head, the other resting on her crotch with its forefinger pointing at her pudendum. An absolutely naked white woman seated upright on a bed, in profile, one foot on the mattress and the other on the floor, her face turned away but her large, pretty left breast and pubic fur both fully exposed. Notre-Dame Cathedral and the river Seine, an astounding 150-degree panorama made with a newfangled camera using a rotating lens and a semicylindrical plate. And two views from a rooftop of a half mile of the barricaded Rue Saint-Maur in the Faubourg du Temple neighborhood of Paris—the first picture made last June 25, on the final Sunday of the red radicals’ uprising, and the second on the next day, after the army and Garde Mobile had pushed through the barricades and slaughtered the insurgents. During his night in the streets of Paris last year, Ben Knowles had made his way around rubble and fires on those very blocks.

  THE MAIN SALOON of their hotel had been hired that night for a ball. Two fiddlers and a trumpeter were playing polkas and mazurkas, and at least a hundred miners were in attendance. As Polly and Ben and Skaggs prepared to leave for dinner, they glanced inside—and it was not the Chopin that made them pause to watch from the shadows. A score of the men on the floor wore dresses, and had stuffed the bodices to overflowing. Some had rouged their faces and tinted their lips.

  “On this occasion,” Ben said softly, “one does understand the utility of corsets.”

  Polly wrinkled her nose in reply. A moment later, she pointed out that among every dancing couple in which both partners were dressed in customary shirts and trousers, the trousers of one had a small square of canvas stitched onto the hip.

  “Designated girls,” Skaggs said. “The patch betokens femininity, yet without the expense and bother of a gown and cotton bosoms.”

  The dancers with the patches were just as likely as those without to be bearded. The visitors from Ashbyville silently wondered for how many of these men the charade extended beyond the dance floor.

  Finally Polly tugged on Ben’s arm to go to dinner.

  “We were informed earlier by the chatter in the street,” Skaggs told Polly as they stepped into the night, “that it is now certainly all over.”

  “What is over?” she asked.

  “The gold,” Ben explained. “The easy gold is finished, they say. The northern mines all ‘petering out.’”

  “If the good old days have indeed ended,” Skaggs said
, nodding in the direction of the river and Sutter’s Mill, “they numbered precisely…four hundred. And I am not fazed.” He was happy in California. The sooner the gold was gone, perhaps, the better.

  “But that was the same talk in San Francisco the first day we arrived,” said Polly. “Do you not remember? ‘All dug out along the South Fork, every damned ounce.’ ‘This is the end of it.’ Well, I say, look around us.” Coloma’s Main Street was filled with spiffy miners chattering and sauntering. “I’d wager most of these have a few ounces in their pockets. Look at them.”

  “Look at him, do you mean?” Skaggs asked of a man a few yards to their right. “That is an 1849 miner for you.”

  The man stood in the shadows of an alley at the side of the hotel with his face turned away from the street, crying and shaking. He was simply the latest evidence for Skaggs’s new view of California brainsickness. One Saturday some weeks earlier, a downpour had forced him to remain at Old Dry Diggings overnight. And as enthusiastically dissipated as he had been for much of the preceding two decades, as familiar as he was with every sort of saloon and dive from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania, he had been shocked by the scope and extremity of the drunkenness in the camp that night. He had seen nobody—not one man—who was unquestionably sober. By nine o’clock, several score men lay scattered and motionless in the dirt and grass, as if some bloodless massacre had occurred, and before midnight the count of unconscious bodies was over a hundred. And he could not sleep for the noise that arose from the tents until dawn—whinnies, whimpers, howls, croaks, groans (of agony more than ecstasy), and the unending sobs of hundreds of boys and men. Such an experience might have amused Skaggs in the past, but instead it had rattled him.