Chapter 39: Entering the Modern World

I DIDN’T MEAN to get all involved in talking about Peninnah. It just happened that she walked through the room stark naked and I forgot about everything else. The story, however, was a good segue into how well and how quickly I adapted to the modern world.

Humans have it easy. They live through a period of change over seventy or eighty years and then they die. I lived through four thousand years and am constantly reminded of how easy something used to be that is now very difficult and how irritated I get at things that are simple now that used to take hours. When I have to wait for a porn movie to download for thirty seconds instead of getting to see pussy instantly, I get furious. There was once a time when I had to wait until it was safe to go into the infinity room and call a concubine to me in order to see a pussy. What a life!

When I settled on Goat Island—remember the island in San Francisco Bay where I dismantled my boat and set up a trading post?—I hoped to have a few hundred years without contact with so-called western civilization. I was not there long before the Spaniards showed up and claimed everything. That wasn’t really a long-term ownership in the greater scheme of things. Maybe a century or a little more. Nonetheless, they built a fort and then they built a mission. Then they introduced smallpox, measles, the flu, syphilis, and a dozen other ailments that will kill you—if you’re human.

But after the United States won its independence from England, there was a steady push of settlers westward. The English were no better than the Spaniards, but they did buy the Louisiana territory from the French instead of just fighting them for it. Regardless, the Americans tended to be fiercely independent and adventurous. They didn’t care who ‘owned’ the land, any more than the Spaniards did. They didn’t care about the Spaniards’ claims either.

I impersonated the head of a wealthy Californio family and received a large land grant from the crown. From this large grant, I willed Goat Island to my grandson and conveniently ‘died.’ I inherited the island and continued to trade there for another fifty or seventy-five years, until Mexico ceded California and Texas to the US after the Mexican-American War.

Not the least of my trade was in the ‘Yerba Buena’ so plentiful on my island. In fact, the entire area took its name from the plant: Yerba Buena or ‘Good Weed.’ The natives had been coming to the island for centuries to harvest the happy herb. The Spaniards thought they had found a new type of tobacco and prepared to harvest and ship it back to Europe. That had some unexpected results. But you see, that area was known for its good marijuana plants long before I moved to Haight-Ashbury.

The city of San Francisco grew rapidly and became a popular port of call for both American and Spanish ships going to and from Asia. The city established a very independent presence, even while ostensibly being ruled over by Mexico. Ha! It was just more Spaniards who declared themselves independent of Spain but did nothing to improve the conditions of the natives, either in Mexico or California, aside from raping and impregnating them with half-Spanish bastards.

Don’t think by this that I have anything particularly against Spain or the Spanish. All Europeans were pretty much the same. They were God’s people and therefore had a right to despoil all of God’s creation. When the US won the Mexican-American War in 1848, Mexico was forced to cede California to the US. The only difference locals saw was that the English settlers cared no more for the rights of the Spanish and Mexicans than they did for the natives.

And then someone found gold!

I’d seen booms before. Mention gold or silver and Europeans go crazy. The boom in San Francisco was pretty mild compared to what we’d seen in Peru. I’d managed to stay hidden in Machu Picchu when Potosi became a silver boomtown overnight. It went from a vacant plateau to a city of 120,000 in a year! The gold rush was minor by comparison. But to us who lived there peacefully, 30,000 new residents of San Francisco in two years was a shock. Especially since these were seekers of fortune from the American East and from Asia. The Chinese population increased almost as rapidly as the English population.

For my part, I bought a bunch of goats and set them loose on the island. They were very happy goats, cleaning out the weed on the island. We gradually started to be called Goat Island again and attracted relatively little interest from the mainland because there was nothing valuable there.

We survived, even though I eventually lost control of the island. It was a Spanish land grant, after all, and the American Navy didn’t much care about that. They started surveying the island for a fort that would protect the inner harbor. My little trading post was condemned and demolished to make room.

I moved out to the north side of the bay and found a patch of land I could acquire that had no gold on it. I started growing grapes.

I’d really enjoyed my time in Italy making wine. I still had the old family recipes and we’d been growing grapes and making wine in the infinity room for a couple hundred years. I started a big winery in the valley and began producing wine almost as fast as San Francisco could consume it.

And that’s how I met Maureen.

“Don’t you come back in here if you’ve no money to buy your beer!” the redhead yelled as she pitched a big man through the door of her pub to land in the mud in front of me. She wore a dress with the sleeves rolled up showing her well-muscled arms, and was nearly as tall as I was. The fellow in the street got up and turned as if to object, but once he took a look at the redhead standing in the doorway, he grunted and turned away. The woman cast her eyes on me. “Is that my beer? I’m nearly out and I have thirsty men in here.”

“Sorry, Miss. I’m a wine peddler,” I said. “Fine wine if you’d care to sample some.” I had a wagonload of casks of wine that I was selling at any bar or restaurant I could make a sale to. Usually, if they got a taste of what I had to offer, they were happy to buy a cask or two at $50 each.

“What would I do with wine in an Irish pub? Don’t you have any good beer? I’d buy anything better than the whale piss they’ve been selling me.” She turned to go back into the pub, but simply grabbed a glass off one of her tables and handed it to me. “Draw me a tipple and I’ll tell you if it is any good.”

I grinned at her and turned to the spigot on the cask I’d tapped. I looked hard at the glass to make sure it was clean and paused to wipe it out with my towel. I drew the wine and handed it to her. Her tasting was not what I expected from a bar owner. She rolled the wine around the glass and held it up to the light to peer through it. Then she cupped it in both hands and inhaled the aromas from the glass. Finally, she sipped the liquid and washed her mouth with it before spitting it into the street.

“You’re a Ginney? This wine was made in the Tuscan fashion. A good wine for that region. You came from Chianti?” she said.

I was stunned. Yes, I had learned winemaking near Firenze in the Chianti fashion. How this Irish barmaid could identify that from washing her mouth out with it was beyond me.

“That’s where I learned the art. It was a long time ago,” I said.

“Ten dollars for a cask. Bring it into the bar.”

“Fifty,” I said automatically.

“And what? Think this is Nob Hill? Bring your cask in and collect an eagle for it. Otherwise, climb the hill and see if they’ll pay you for your labor.” She turned and went into the pub. I motioned to Zhi and Pari to guard the wagon before I hoisted a cask on my shoulder and followed her in.

“Hmm. Strong,” she said as I set the cask where she pointed. A barrel of wine weighs about 2,000 pounds, but I lightened them with a spell when I carried them. She didn’t need to know that. She looked me up and down in the light of the pub. “And tall. Is everything in proportion, or do you pack like a Chinaman? I swear, the first time I had one of them, I thought I was with a woman!”

I gave her a fully assessing once over. She was tall, broad in the shoulders, and busty enough to overflow the top of her corset. I pulled her to me for a kiss and pressed her against my sudden erection.

“Proportional enough for you?” I asked, releasing her. I thought for a moment she was going to swing at me, but she pulled two large glasses from behind the bar and handed them to me to fill.

“Listen here, boys!” she called to the room. “Bring your glass to the barrel here and let this mountain pour you a pint of red. I guarantee you’ll be drunk on your ass before you get to a second pint. A dollar a pull. You put the money on the bar before you get the mug.”

She was going to charge a dollar a pint and had paid me only ten dollars for sixty gallons? I frowned at her, but the first mug was in my hand and I started pouring as the money hit the counter. I saw people pushing their way into the pub as others hailed them from the doorway. Maureen, as she told me to call her, examined each coin and dropped it into a box next to her. Occasionally, she stopped to examine a coin and push it back to the customer.

“American dollars only. None of this old Spanish stuff.” She kept the line flowing. The coins stacked up on the bar. Maureen would turn a handsome profit from this night.

“You know I won’t be selling the next keg for an eagle,” I said. “Just so you know.”

“Bob, do me just a little favor and when the press gang makes a grab for you, keep the damage in the pub to a minimum. I don’t care what you do to them in the street.” I nodded and saw the group of rough men in the corner slowly sipping from their mugs rather than guzzling the wine down like most of the clientele.

“Nothing legal about pressing men these days,” I said as I continued filling mugs.

“They don’t take you into the legal navy, neither,” she said. “A privateer or merchantman who needs more bodies sends his own men out to get them. There’s nothing legal about it, but a hundred miles out at sea there’s no one to complain to, either.”

The moment came when the line had died down that the six roughs approached as if they wanted another pint. Instead, one swung his mug and broke it over my head. The others made to grab me and were surprised I didn’t crumble under the force of the blow. I turned and walked out of the pub with the six men hanging off me. I grabbed them and threw them one at a time into the muddy street.

They got themselves up and made to come at me again, when they saw the two slight men at my side. Zhi and Pari were set to guard the wagon and I noticed a row of sleeping men leaned up against the wall on the other side. One of the roughs laughed.