Better be merry with the fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.
Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Promise go,
Nor heed the music of a distant Drum!
And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die
Lift not your hands to It for help—for It
As impotently rolls as you or I.
There was at this period in my life a maiden who pleaded with me to give up drink. “You can’t go on, drinking every day from morning to night that way.”
She was a girl of seventeen or so who worked in a little tobacco shop across the way from the bar. Yoshiko—that was her name—was a pale girl with crooked teeth. Whenever I went to buy cigarettes she would smile and repeat her advice.
“What’s wrong with drinking? Why is it bad? ‘Better be merry with the fruitful Grape than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.’ Many years ago there was a Persian . . . no, let’s skip it. ‘Oh, plagued no more with Human or Divine, To-morrow’s tangle to itself resign: And lose your fingers in the tresses of The Cypress-slender Minister of Wine.’ Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.”
“What a stupid little girl you are. I’m going to kiss you.”
“Go ahead.” She pouted out her lower lip, not in the least abashed.
“You silly fool. You and your ideas of chastity . . .”
There was something unmistakable in Yoshiko’s expression which marked her as a virgin who had never been defiled.
Soon after New Year, one night in the dead of winter, I drunkenly staggered out in the cold to buy some cigarettes and fell into a manhole in front of her shop. I shouted for Yoshiko to come save me. She hauled me out and bandaged my bruised right arm. Yoshiko, earnest and unsmiling, said, “You drink too much.”
The thought of dying has never bothered me, but getting hurt, losing blood, becoming crippled and the like—no thanks. I thought as I watched Yoshiko bandage my hand that I might cut down on my drinking.
“I’m giving it up. From tomorrow on I won’t touch a drop.”
“Do you mean it?”
“There’s no doubt about it. I’ll give it up. If I give it up, will you marry me, Yoshiko?”
Asking her to marry me was, however, intended only as a joke.
“Natch.”
(“Natch” for “naturally” was popular at the time.)
“Right. Let’s hook fingers on that. I promise I’ll give it up.”
The next day, as might have been expected, I spent drinking.
Towards evening I made my way to Yoshiko’s shop on shaking legs and called to her. “Yoshiko, I’m sorry. I got drunk.”
“Oh, you’re awful. Trying to fool me by pretending to be drunk.”