Sex, sin and the gangs of San Francisco

Asbury himself could be described as the most sublime kind of slummer -- and we his readers as his slumming accomplices. Asbury's understated, refined, martini-dry prose style (not surprisingly, he wrote for the New Yorker for a number of years), when applied to the gross, brutal and lascivious events that are his metier, creates an almost imperceptible but distinctly droll effect, vaguely reminiscent of a straight-faced P.G. Wodehouse. Take this passage, in which he judiciously compares and contrasts the methods used by various female "crimps," or boarding-house masters, in carrying out their typical day's work (mainly knocking out dim-witted sailors for the purpose of shanghaiing them).

"Miss Piggott and Mother Bronson were their own bouncers and chief bar-tenders, but neither enforced her edicts with a bludgeon or a slung shot, as did Sal and the Cow. Miss Piggott remained faithful to the bung-starter, and in the use of this implement as a weapon she developed amazing skill. On the other hand, Mother Bronson, who was nearly six feet tall and broad in proportion, scorned to use any other than Mother Nature's weapons. She possessed a fine and strong set of sharp teeth, which she was delighted to sink into the anatomy of an obstreperous customer; her enormous feet were encased in No. 12 brogans, and her fist was as hard as a rock and in size resembled a small ham. With the toe of her boot she once hoisted a Chinaman from the floor of her saloon to the top of the bar, and she often boasted that she could fell an ox with one blow of her fist, although no one ever saw her do it. Nor did anyone dispute the statement."

For her part, Miss Piggott favored a combination of techniques in her quest to make foreign cruises available to sailors on an involuntary basis. Having maneuvered the mark onto a trapdoor built into the floor, she then offered him a drink known as a "Miss Piggott Special," made of "equal parts of whisky, brandy and gin, with a goodly lacing of laudanum or opium. While the victim was shivering under the terrific impact of this beverage, Miss Piggott leaned across the bar and tapped him on the head with the bung-stopper, while Nikko [a Laplander confederate] made things certain with a blow from a slung shot. As the prospect began to crumple to the floor, Miss Piggott operated a lever behind the bar and dumped him into the basement, where he fell upon a mattress which Miss Piggott had thoughtfully provided, realizing that the man might receive an injury which would lessen his value. When the object of all these attentions awoke, he was usually in a ship bound for foreign climes, with no very clear idea as to how he got there."

Asbury adds that regular customers avoided standing on the trapdoor, since it was "an unwritten rule of the establishment that any man who stood upon the fatal spot was fair game." Nor, according to Asbury, did the abrupt disappearance of a customer down the trapdoor excite much notice or comment from the regulars, who must have been a stoic, unfeeling or perhaps insentient lot indeed.

Asbury's elegant prose simultaneously reassures the reader that he is not merely leering at tawdry tales and that those tales are 100 percent true. In fact, there is reason to question both of these beliefs. Asbury's tour of old San Francisco's sin spots offers many edifying pieces of information, but if we are honest we must confess our motives in taking it may not be entirely different from the suburbanites who took those see-the-hippies bus tours so popular during the Summer of Love.

As for the accuracy of Asbury's history, it too leaves something to be desired. As a historian, Asbury must be taken with more than a few grains of laudanum: He relies heavily on the daily papers of the time, and "the merry gentlemen of the Western press" (as an East Coast writer called Twain, Harte and their ilk) were known to distribute large quantities of taffy to their readers on a regular basis. Asbury cites some correspondence with figures who had contemporaneous knowledge of the events in the book, but his books are mainly, as Gopnik says, "glorified clip jobs."

Asbury may be more evocative than literally accurate, but in histories of this nature evocation is the most important thing. The narrowness of his subject helps: A history of San Francisco written by Asbury would probably be an unreliable (if highly readable) text, but grasping the Barbary Coast is well within his purview. It is difficult not to feel that his portrait, despite its exaggerations, excesses and inaccuracies -- or perhaps in part because of them -- captures the true spirit of that roisterous era and the mad neighborhood that was its counterfeit, glittering crown jewel. Asbury's vision of old, wicked San Francisco may in part be a dream, a feverish phantasm, but when the fog blows down Varennes Alley and the lights begin to twinkle on one of the town's dark and storied hills, you don't even have to close your eyes to see again the wild city he dreamed of, and know it once was real.

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