Black Fire (36 page)

On May 16, he and Rice moved out of the Occidental a block up Montgomery into a newer, more sumptuous hotel. The palatial Lick House at the corner of Sutter Street had flagged marble floors and a banquet hall that is a perfect replica of the Palace of Versailles. At the Lick House he “lived like a lord” in room number 165, “a pleasant room at the head of a long hall.” He wrote his mother and sister that “the Unreliable and myself are still here and still enjoying ourselves. We go to sleep without rocking, every night. We dine out, and we lunch out, and we eat, drink and are happy—as it were … I am going the Dickens mighty fast.” His only exercise was sleeping and resting, generally waking at 11:00
A.M.
because he was “naturally lazy.” When the proprietors sent him and Rice bottles of champagne and claret at dinner, they put on “the most disgusting airs.” Twain bought two new suits, put $1,200 in his bank account, attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, and simpered and displayed his “graces like a born beau.” After breakfast, he often did not see the hotel again until after midnight. He took trips across the bay to Oakland, up to Benicia, and down to Alameda and out to the Willows and Fort Point. He and Rice sailed on the fastest yacht on the Pacific coast.

Twain took a carriage out to the Ocean House, south of the Cliff House, to hear the surf crash and sea lions roar. Standing ankle deep in the surf, he studied the wide expanse of the bay. In the distance
fleecy white clouds massed and a flock of gulls blackened the mudflats to the north. Returning to Montgomery Street, he realized that the old-fashioned architecture that appeared so stately and handsome from a distance was really made up of “decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses.” He temporarily left his good life and went back to Virginia City. He had mined a few months in Washoe, the popular name for Nevada, and on the Stanislaus River across the California border, and served a venue as a wandering printer before becoming a Virginia City reporter. He made plans to return to San Francisco in June and wrote Sawyer.

“When I had come back from a trip,” Sawyer said, “Sam wrote, asking me to pay him a visit. Well, I was pretty well-heeled—had eight hundred dollars in my inside pocket and since there was nothing much doing in Frisco, I went.” Sawyer rocked on the rugged stagecoach ride there, jolting over the mountain roads and feeling sick to his stomach. Warily he studied the chasms on both sides. San Francisco considered Virginia City its lucrative mining suburb, though it presented a tiresome and dangerous mountainous commute of two hundred miles across the Sierra. Wells Fargo’s express stage rode with the stages of the Pioneer Stage Line from San Francisco to Virginia City. On Sawyer’s journey to visit Twain, Hank Monk, “the Prince of Stage Divers,” laid down a blue streak of profanity and “gid-daps” as he lashed his six-horse team through the Sierras. Monk wore the same battered hat and brown corduroy suit he had mended with copper rivets. He handled the ribbons over his teams’ backs expertly, though to Sawyer it seemed in slow motion. The trip came complete with road agents. “No driver ever gave a stage robber away,” Monk said with a shake of his shoulder-length hair. “He’d get shot if he even showed he recognized the bandit. Later, they would even introduce themselves and have a drink together.” When Sawyer reached the silver town after a breakneck descent and put his feet on solid ground, he was glad he had accepted Twain’s invitation. During his visit Sawyer provided the most popular origin of Sam’s pen name: “It happened at Tom Peasley’s Saloon near morning in Nevada City,” he said. “Larry Ryan was tending bar.”

“Give us two cocktails, Larry, and such cocktails as them were!” Twain sang out. “Twain used to take two horns, one right after the other, and take them on tick,” Sawyer said, smacking his lips. “Um, I can taste them yet. Larry mixed ’em and handed ’em over the bar expecting Sam to ante up. Instead, he stood there, held up two fingers
and, pointing to the slate, sang out: ‘Larry, mark twain.’ Larry, who carried a lump of chalk in his weskit pocket to keep score, added two drinks to Sam’s account. The barkeep told Peasley of it in the morning, and Peasley thought it such a good joke that he told all the boys. And so it was, d’ye see, that he come to be called Twain.” Twain continued the same practice at Johnny Doyle’s, but this was one of Sawyer’s stories that did not hold water. Twain had used the pen name nearly five months earlier and would use the signature “Mark” in a letter to his mother and sister on July 18.

Sawyer had an exciting few nights with his pal Sam and his friends. He drank and gambled with him and high rollers like Pat Lynch, Sam Davis, Holland of the
Enterprise
, Tom Fox, and Doc Cole. “In four days I found myself busted, without a cent,” Sawyer said later. “Where under the sun he got it has always been a mystery, but that morning Sam walked in with two hundred dollars in his pocket, gave me fifty, and put me on the stage for California, saying that he guessed his Virginia City friends was too speedy for me.”

After Sawyer left, Twain’s luck went bad. He moved into a suite of rooms in the new White House Hotel on North B Street. When it caught fire on July 26, most of his possessions and all his mining stocks were burned to ash. In print, he fictionalized the reason for his sudden poverty. “All of sudden,” he lamented, “out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away.” The swagger had gone out of his step. In early September 1863, he dragged himself back to San Francisco and retired to the Lick House to nurse his wounds. He rallied his flagging spirits by submitting his first article to Colonel Lawrence’s weekly
Golden Era
at 723 Montgomery Street. The proximity to 722 Montgomery put him back at the steam baths when he most needed them to ease a troublesome cold. He had not felt this poorly since July. Usually he was writing intently, legs tucked up to his chin, fitted into the window of his room. He had all kinds of vivid dreams but suffered most from recurrent nightmares of his brother’s corpse. Some cards, some stories, some beer, good company—that was the thing. By the time he sought Sawyer out at the Bank Exchange saloon, he was ashen faced and trembling, having fallen into a bleak, almost suicidal depression, the one constant about his life. He saw the round-faced young man across the room and
hailed him. Twain brightened immediately, sat down, and began to hold court.

“Sam was a dandy, he was,” Sawyer said later. “He could drink more and talk more than any feller I ever seen. He’d set down and take a drink and then he’d begin to tell us some joke or another. And then when somebody’d buy him another drink, he’d keep her up all day. Once he got started he’d set there till morning telling yarns, provided someone would throw a bowl at him every few minutes.”

Sawyer, a fair amateur psychologist, had recognized Twain’s competitive nature from the first. After all, he had the same qualities in himself. Sawyer was almost his equal in talking but often had to throw in the towel. “He beat the record for lyin’—nobody was in the race with him there,” Sawyer said, “though I myself was considered a pretty good disciple of Ananias [an early Christian who lied to God and died on the spot]. He never had a cent. His clothes were always ragged and he never had his hair cut or a shave in them days. I should say he hasn’t had his hair cut since ’60. I used to give him half my wages and then he’d borrow from the other half, but a jollier companion and better mate I would never want. He was a prince among men, you can bet, though I’ll allow he was the darndest homeliest man I ever set eyes on, Sam was.”

The next day Sawyer was fighting fire and Twain had to content himself with exchanging stories with Stahle in the basement cloud land. He left within the hour. He saw Sawyer the next time. It was a stormy day. Rain beat against the Montgomery Block, especially loud in the basement steam room. Nostalgically, Twain recalled for Sawyer and Stahle his own boyhood. “I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights,” he said, leaning back contentedly in the waves of steam and feeling the sweat drip off his arms, “and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder.” There was rarely thunder or lightning in San Francisco.

On January 31, 1864, Volunteer Billy Mulligan—angry, afraid, trigger finger itching, and a little insane—returned to San Francisco. Haunted by the fear that the vigilantes, who had sworn his death years earlier, were coming for him, he lost himself in extended drinking sprees. After the vigilantes deported him and the rest of Broderick’s men during the San Francisco insurrection in 1856, he settled in New York City, where a newspaper described him as a “refined savage” and “a pugilist of the lowest sort.” Within a year, he attempted to shoot the owner of
a Manhattan gambling house, and after refusing to participate in a forgery conspiracy of his friend Senator Broderick’s will, was sentenced to two years in Sing Sing Prison. Pardoned after three months, he returned to California. One night a saloonkeeper bludgeoned him with a champagne bottle and left him delusional. He recovered from his concussion and for several years was a familiar figure drinking brandy in the saloons and gambling dens of San Francisco. The
Sacramento Union
said of him, “No man was big enough to make him tamely submit to an insult offered either to himself, a friend or even a defenseless stranger. He was an active politician and trained with a class of men who in more recent years have been known as ‘Stalwarts’ or ‘machine men’—those who pat up conventions and manipulate primary elections, but he was gentlemanly in his intercourse with his fellow men, exquisite in the matter of dress, and as brave a little man as ever walked. Those who knew him best have only good words to say of Billy Mulligan.” The
Alta
said, “Mulligan was one of the best of his kind. Though considered a ‘roach’ he was never a robber.” Yet Mulligan had grafted a fortune as tax collector for the San Francisco County treasurer.

On April 20, 1864, he challenged Tom Coleman to a duel for six o’clock the next morning. Their first shots fell short. With his second shot Mulligan broke the second finger of Coleman’s right hand. Coleman’s fourth shot went off prematurely. Mulligan’s fifth shot hit the fleshy part of Coleman’s thigh. Six days later, he was wounded again, this time as a bystander. Once, in less than a week, Mulligan was shot five times by three different men.

Meanwhile, Twain briefly returned to Nevada City, where he was warned he was liable to arrest for demanding a duel with rival reporter and editor James L. Laird. This news sent him rumbling back to San Francisco by a fast stage on May 29. “I left Nevada in 1864 to avoid a term penitentiary,” Twain said proudly. Steve Gillis, news editor of the
Enterprise
and a close friend, and Joseph T. Goodman, proprietor of the paper, accompanied him. According to the
Gold Hill Evening News
, Nevada City was delighted to see Twain depart and mentioned his “idiosyncratic eccentricities of an erratic mind.… His face is black before the people of Washoe. The indignation aroused by his enormities has been too crushing to be borne by living man … in short he has vamoosed.” Twain had no overcoat and huddled morose and shivering behind the stage driver during the long ride over the mountains from Virginia City
to Carson. Carpenter & Hoog’s stage was “a cradle on wheels.” Twain advised an outside seat if you prepared for it “with two days sleep so you would not fall asleep on the box.” He would have gone to sleep and plunged overboard if the driver of the Concord-type coach had not “enlivened the dreary hours with his conversation.” Whenever Twain got to pitching in his direction, the cigar-chomping driver asked if he was asleep. Upon receiving a negative grunt, the driver related cheerful stories of passengers who had got to nodding by his side and fallen off and broken their necks on the narrow winding road. Cracking his whip over the lead horses, he said he could see those fellows now, “all jammed, bloody and quivering in death’s agony,” and urged his team at a furious speed into deep bends in the black road. Twain knew of a driver sound asleep on the box whose mules galloped unchecked at their usual breakneck speed along the dangerous route and arrived unharmed at the lower elevation. “I intended to go only a little way out on the Geiger Grade,” Goodman said cheerfully, “but the company was too good and I kept clear on to San Francisco.” The trio went the rest of the way by the Pioneer Line to Folsom and Sacramento. In San Francisco, Twain and Gillis settled into the Occidental Hotel. Twain had fallen in love with “the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me … the liveliest, heartiest community on our continent.”

Around June 6, the two flat-busted writers began working on the
Morning Call
, a newspaper known as “the washerwoman’s paper.” Housed in a new brick building at 612 Commercial, the
Call
, a single sheet folded in half to create four printed pages, sold for a “bit” (twelve and a half cents) every day but Monday. Gillis labored during the day as a printing room compositor, while Twain, an unreliable and generally untruthful reporter, wore all the other hats for forty dollars per week. By ten o’clock each morning, the paper’s sole reporter was at his desk gathering local gossip, and in his silk hat and frock-coated black suit, doing general assignment, rewriting and scanning the blotter at police court before moving on to the higher courts. Twain spent all his evenings at the six theaters where he stayed just long enough to gather enough information to write a review of the rapid-fire plays being produced every day. Coroner Sheldon held his inquests at night. He had to attend those. Afterward he returned to the
Call
to write up his copy for the 2:00
A.M.
deadline, put the paper to bed, and then turned in. Every
day Twain craved at least twenty-five licorice-flavored cigars, an amalgam of firecracker paper, sawdust, and “who knew what else,” selling in bundles of one hundred for two dollars.