The Tender Bar

by J.R. Moehringer

His smile was like the strobe from a lighthouse, making everyone feel a little safer.

“You must do everything that frightens you, JR. Everything. I’m not talking about risking your life, but everything else. Think about fear, decide right now how you’re going to deal with fear, because fear is going to be the great issue of your life, I promise you. Fear will be the fuel for all your success, and the root cause of all your failures, and the underlying dilemma in every story you tell yourself about yourself. And the only chance you’ll have against fear? Follow it. Steer by it. Don’t think of fear as the villain. Think of fear as your guide, your pathfinder—your Natty Bumppo.”

The two critical tests of a man’s mettle, Sheryl believed, were women and liquor. How you reacted to each, how you managed each, went a long way to determining your manliness quotient.

History, I said. He asked why. I told him one of my professors had said that history is the narrative of people searching for a place to go, and I liked that idea.

I remembered Professor Lucifer lecturing us about free will versus fate, the riddle that had vexed great minds through the ages, and I wished I’d paid more attention, because leaning against my lucky mailbox, dangling Sidney’s letter above the slot, I didn’t know why fate and free will needed to be mutually exclusive. Maybe, I thought, when we come to our crossroads, we choose freely, but the choice is between two fated lives.

As deftly as he mixed cocktails, Uncle Charlie mixed his customers. He had an uncanny knack for introducing people.

I felt a pang of envy, and a rush of pride, but mainly shame. Watching McGraw go through his repertoire of pitches, observing his seriousness and diligence, I understood that my cousin was more than a budding major leaguer. He was a dedicated craftsman, and the rewards he’d gained from hard work went far beyond mastering a slider and a change. He’d mastered himself. He didn’t work hard merely because he was talented, but because he knew that hard work was the right path for a man, the only path. He wasn’t paralyzed, as I was, by the fear of making a mistake. When he bounced a pitch in front of me, or threw it over my head, he didn’t care. He was experimenting, exploring, finding himself, and finding his way by trial and error to a kind of truth. No matter how foolish he looked on a pitch, no matter how badly he missed the target, with the next pitch he was focused, confident, relaxed. He never once that afternoon lost the look on his face that he’d worn when we were boys. He was working hard, but he’d never stopped playing.

The first step in learning, I decided, was unlearning, casting off old habits and false assumptions.

“I hate that question,” I said. “I hate when people ask what a book is about. People who read for plot, people who suck out the story like the cream filling in an Oreo, should stick to comic strips and soap operas. What’s it about? Every book worth a damn is about emotions and love and death and pain. It’s about words. It’s about a man dealing with life. Okay?”

All this searching and longing for the secret of being a good man, and all I needed to do was follow the example of one very good woman.