Chapter 3

The Geek

Tom McAlear—San Francisco

San Francisco in 1849 was a rough-and-tumble town, carved out of the sand dunes that once surrounded it. The rapid growth and rising real estate demand of the city created some decrepit and dangerous neighborhoods, but no place in San Francisco, and maybe the United States, was more demented than the Sydney-Town/Barbary Coast area on the southeast side of Telegraph Hill.

British convicts who had escaped from Australia—then a penal colony for Great Britain—took the neighborhood by force from Chileans, who had set up a tent city on the southeast slope of Telegraph Hill. Soon, every possible vice could be found there: opium, booze, and prostitution. Some taverns had nude waitresses, live sex shows, and wild animals, which were tied up in front of the establishments. People literally took their lives into their own hands just by walking into one of these businesses. It was common to have one’s drink laced with a knockout drug, only to wake up far out to sea on a sailing ship. Once at sea, it was either work or be thrown overboard. The phrase “shanghaied” comes from this practice, because Shanghai, China, was the first place in which a sailor could catch a ship back to San Francisco.

The Barbary Coast had its share of revolting drunks, pimps, and whores; however, the most repulsive of the repulsive was Dirty Tom McAlear. Dirty Tom hung out at one of the lowest dives in Sydney-Town, the Goat and Compass, where he displayed his truly revolting personality. For a nickel, he would eat or drink anything handed to him: dirt, feces, body fluids, bugs, rodents, animal waste—nothing was too appalling or off-limits to the drunken British subject.

The Barbary Coast

San Francisco’s Barbary Coast existed as a neighborhood of debauchery for sixty-four years. From 1849 to 1913, the district was in essence a lawless area where bars, brothels and dope dens stayed open twenty-four hours a day. Many prostitutes were essentially slaves and never left the area once they entered. When the soiled doves were too sick to attract Johns, they were dosed with opium or alcohol and sent to the cribs in the basements of the bar. There, in dark four-by-six foot makeshift rooms, a customer could spend a quarter to have sex with an unconscious dying woman.

In 1852, after he was arrested for “making a beast of himself,” Dirty Tom told a court of law that he had taken his last bath when he lived in England, fifteen years before. He also testified that he had not been sober for at least seven years. Not much is known about what became of Tom McAlear after 1852, but it is fairly easy to guess that he did not live a long life.