You Can't Win

I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. 'If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl.

There were times when I thought I got a bit more punishment than was coming to me, but I don't regret a minute of it now. Each of us must be tempered in some fire. Nobody had more to do with choosing the fire that tempered me than myself, and instead of finding fault with the fire I give thanks that I had the metal to take the temper and hold it.

Even at that age I had stumbled upon one truth, and that is, the best way to get misinformed is to ask a lot of questions.

There was a legend on the road that the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City was a veritable storehouse of gold, silver, and precious stones and it was this that lured Smiler back to that city. At that time a high adobe wall surrounded the block on which stood the Tabernacle and the then unfinished Mormon Temple. We looked it over for several days and nights but could get nothing tangible to work on. Sunday we attended services and the plate was to be seen, silver and gold; more than we could carry away if we got it. At last we decided to go over the wall and give the place a good reconnaissance. If it looked feasible we could get a couple of other idle burglars and give it a thorough looting. On top of the wall we pulled up our light ladder and placed it inside. Smiler went down first. I barely had my feet off the ladder when a dozen men rose up out of the shrubbery armed with shotguns, and surrounded us. We stood still by the wall. One of them spoke, sternly, evenly: “Go back over that wall.” Little we knew the Mormons. We went up the ladder, pulled it up, and went down and away. When Smiler’s good humor returned he held up his hand. “Kid, I’ll never try to rob another Mormon. I’ll go to work first.

The books so fired me with the desire for travel, adventure, romance, that I was miserable most of the time.

Instead of finding fault with the fire, I gave thanks for the metal to take the temper and hold it.

The whipping post is a strange place to gather fresh confidence and courage, yet that's what it gave me, and in that dark cell I left behind many fears and misgivings.

My experience with short rations in many places has convinced me that we would all be healthier and better nourished if we ate half as much food and chewed it twice as long.

Every time I stole a dollar I knew I was breaking a law and working a hardship on the loser. Yet for years I kept on doing it. I wonder how many of us quit wronging others for the best reason of all — because it is wrong, and we know it.

I'm going to write about them as I took them -- with a smile.

Looking back at it, it seems to me that I was blown here and there like a dead leaf whipped about by the autumn winds till at last it finds lodgment in some cozy fence corner. When I left school at fourteen I was as unsophisticated as a boy could be; I knew no more of the world and its strange ways than the gentle, saintly woman who taught me my prayers in the convent. Before me twentieth birthday I was on the docket of criminal court, on trial for burglary.

I say they had character because, while they did wrong things, they always tried to do them in the right way and at the right time.

In great crises the written law has always gone down before the unwritten.

The “Johnson family” became so numerous that a “convention” must be held. In any well-ordered convention all persons of suspicious or doubtful intentions are thrown out at the start. When a bums’ “convention” is to be held, the jungle is first cleared of all outsiders such as “gay cats,” “dingbats,” “whangs,” “bindle stiffs,” “jungle buzzards,” and “scissors bills.” Conventions are not so popular in these droughty days. Formerly kegs of beer were rolled into the jungle and the “punks,” young bums, were sent for “mickies,” bottles of alcohol. “Mulligans” of chicken or beef were put to cooking on big fires. There was a general boiling up of clothes and there was shaving and sometimes haircutting.

The stool pigeon is the coming race.

An old chinaman - he must have been sixty - shuffled by me hastily with a hop layout and spread it out in a nearby bunk. He was shaking with the yen-yen, the hop habit. His withered, claw-like hands trembled as he feverishly rolled the first pill, a large one. His burning eyes devoured it. Half-cooked, he stuck the pill in its place, and turning his pipe to the lamp, greedily sucked the smoke into his lungs. Now, with a long grateful exhalation, the smoke is discharged. The cramped limbs relax and straighten out. The smoker heaves a sigh of satisfaction, and the hands, no longer shaking, turn with surer touch to another pill. This is smaller, rolled and shaped with more care, better cooked and inhaled with a long, slaw draw. Each succeeding pill is smaller, more carefully browned over the lamp and smoked with increasing pleasure.

Kid,” said George, when I asked him about the cook. “He’s crazy as a bedbug and the best ‘mulligan’ maker on the road. ‘Montana Blacky’ is welcome at any bum camp anywhere, and he spends his life going from jungle to jungle.

found him on his bench, sober and sorry for it.

If I could wish for anything else, it would be a little more moderation, a little more tolerance, and a little more of the trustful innocence of that boy who learned his prayers at the knee of the gentle, kindly old priest at the Sisters' Convent school.

This gambling habit is the curse of a thief’s life.